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Public Schools Tightening Their Grip as They Sense Themselves Losing It
School districts across the country are facing an exodus of students to private schools opening for in-person learning and homeschooling. Corey DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice for the Reason Foundation, has been following the data and it doesn’t look good for public schools. Over the weekend he reported that homeschool filings are up 129% from last year in Loudoun County in Virginia and 128% in the state of Wisconsin. This exodus in students is also an exodus in dollars for a lot of school districts that have their funding directly tied to their enrollment numbers (which is why I suggested pulling out of public schools as a protest if you didn’t like their reopening plan for the Washington Examiner). A little too late in the game, public schools are realizing that their captive audience isn’t so captive when they don’t, you know, actually teach.
Falls Church City Public Schools:
"[We] receive funding based on the numbers of students we have enrolled. If there is an exodus of students from FCCPS, the funding for our schools will decrease"
They're worried that families will find alternatives that actually open this fall.
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) August 16, 2020
Which is what makes the following two stories so nuts. These parents are being told by countless districts (like mine here in Montgomery County, MD) that they can pay to send their kids to “distance learning” programs taking place inside public schools for an additional fee (here it’s about $180 per kid, per week I believe). But even though it’s not safe to have students return to school, somehow magically it is safe if they have a private company facilitating the learning instead of public school union employees. One would think school districts would realize they’re on thin ice with parents, but apparently not:
Where we are at with remote learning: well-off families planning pods, low-income families having child-neglect cases opened against them for kids' failure to log on for virtual classes. https://t.co/vfnQbctRpv pic.twitter.com/lbHTEZflmm
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) August 16, 2020
Submit your children to this unreasonable situation, locked in place on Zoom according to someone else’s schedule, try to keep your job so that you can keep a roof over your heads. And if you don’t, we’re going to report you. I’m going to say it louder for everybody in the back: pull your kids out of public school. Do it now.
And even when you are logged in, that still isn’t enough control for some of these people. The New York Times reports,
Students in the capital of Illinois are not allowed to wear hats, bandannas, sunglasses, pajama pants or slippers in school buildings. And that dress code now extends to their bedrooms and kitchen tables.
“We don’t need students in pajamas and all those other things while on their Zoom conferences,” Jason Wind, the district’s director of student support, explained during an online board meeting of Springfield Public Schools this week.
Along with the clothing requirements, the district’s remote learning guidelines mandate that students be “sitting up out of bed, preferably at a desk or table.”
The sheer chutzpah to think that they have the right to dictate what children wear in their own homes or where they log in from is out of this world. They won’t come to work and do their jobs, but they’ll come into your own home (virtually, of course, because they won’t leave their own) and tell you how your child should dress and where they should sit.
I’m going to say it again for those of you in the back: Pull your children out of public school. Do it now.
If this is their move in August, imagine what they’ll be trying to pull in January.
Published in General
I don’t have school age children, but I’m paying a LOT of property taxes to support a district that has gone online-only, at least for the fall. Don’t me get me started on the bond issues to support lovely new buildings which have sat empty for months now.
I want a substantial refund on my property taxes. If they’re not going to provide the same level of education, then I see no reason to keep paying to support the public schools.
Me, too. Everett just approved a huge new bond issue for school buildings that will sit empty.
I think God is delivering a divine enema to America’s entire stablished order, not just public school unions and bureaucrats:
1. Instead of immanentizing the eschaton, the glorious Obama turned out to be a visionless dud.
2.Trump.
3. COVID and the incredibly ineffectual, self-serving performance by the political, media and bureaucratic classes.
4. Antifa/BLM unmasking the elected cowards and collaborators who then betrayed the cops, the people and entire cities.
5. Biden. The bizarre joke of a nominating mentally impaired spokesman who even in his prime was at best a malignant buffoon.
Are there some plagues left? Hope not. This should do it. Although, come to think of it, pharaoh and his elites were also slow learners as I recall. Maybe there are more on the way.
I have been so torn here in Ontario. Our government wants to force the schools to reopen, guided by this weird thing called science.
Meanwhile all the teachers want to stay home and not go to work.
Since I believe that schools are nothing more than abuse factories that wreck childrens lives. I dont know what to do.
OK. What do we do about situations like this?
https://www.ajc.com/education/cherokee-closes-3rd-high-school-as-500-students-quarantined-for-covid/IKEQXFEL6ZA7VEXXGCO4C3TVRU/
Would like to have your thoughts, Bethany. Although maybe you aren’t arguing for in-person learning—upon reviewing your post, I can’t tell.
My high schooler is starting out with Mondays, Tuesdays and every other Friday in building. And he got his physical form from the Ohio High School Athletic Association – asking him his sex assignment at birth and his present “gender identity.”
He has a penis that was standard issue. It wasn’t assigned to him by any office. Daddy identifies as “pissed.”
My son is playing Apocalypse bingo. :-) And everybody always forget the locusts in Africa. :-)
Are there pacs or super pac focused on school vouchers?
The reason the teachers unions have power is that poor families lack the financial resources for private school.
School choice advocates should start a fund to help poor families opt out of public schools.
Private charitable activity will break the traditional public school systems.
https://www.federationforchildren.org/national-coalition-of-more-than-550-faith-based-leaders-urge-congress-to-support-families-with-educational-options-and-relief/
I’m with you except for the dress code. Support of dress codes is generally a conservative position, but more importantly, kids in bed or in pajamas are unlikely to be fully engaged. Moreover, they can see each other and their sleepwear choices might be even more inappropriate and skanky than the clothes they tend to wear to school.
Hi, Bethany!
I graduated from a Montgomery County HS (Go Barons!) in the very early 1980s – maybe right behind Tracy Chevalier… What the hell is up with the MC schools these days? MC was, for a long, long time, one of the country’s, if not the world’s, best. Awaiting your opinionated take, thank you.
Where I used to work (Dept. of Energy) , one of the things I had to do was fill out a “work-at-home” agreement to support the government’s Continuity of Operations program. In the fine print, it said I was giving permission for Uncle Sam to make unannounced inspections for security or safety reasons (primarily because I would have a work computer at home). In spite of house-building codes, I doubt there are many homes that would survive commercial level scrutiny when it comes to safety, maybe even security. After a long discussion of my conerns with my supervisor, I reluctantly signed the thing.
But yes, the left is all about the micromanagement of people, and people don’t like it. None of us is perfect, but the leftists believe they are more perfect than the masses, so they are best in a position to mold us into their image of Utopian citizens . . .
I’m thinking the silver lining in all this is that all the indoctrination taking place in the public school system and has been for years, with the social justice, one size fits all curriculum to the liberal teachers instructing it, is being curtailed for a time, and forcing parents to get more involved in what their kids are being fed.
Lefty drift eventually destroys everything. MoCo voted twice for Reagan but has trended steadily left ever since, over 70% Dem last three Presidential elections. The County Council is turning into Seattle/Portland wannabes and the virtue-signalling zombie majority will keep re-electing them.
As long as the top-tier high schools keep high SAT scores or otherwise do well on college admission results, nobody will rock the boat.
I guess I would have generally agreed with you in the past. Having done a few months of remote learning with my kids my opinion has changed a little. I found remote learning to be a complete joke. It simply did not matter what my kids were wearing they were not going to be fully engaged. My kids are Honors students so I can only imaging how bad it would be if the kid was struggling in academics before this.
So yeah I agree with no “skanky” clothes. But beyond that it just doesn’t matter.
I said it from the beginning of this teacher-refusal business. Behind every teacher is 50 teacher wanna-bes, just waiting for a position to open up.
Do a Reagan and fire everybody. Announce that there are now positions open for teachers in all subjects, who want to work in a non-union, non-tenure position.
It may take a few years for everything to settle down to a good routine, but even the adjustment years can’t be worse than what we have now.
Our local City School system is public and we are happy with it. The whole system is a Charter School systems. My kids have the opportunity for a IB degree for free. For their whole school career, we have felt that things are not that different from private school.
I am not thrilled they are doing virtual, but that is in large part due to community pressure. The school is responding to the community. For my kids in highschool, distance learning is great for one, not so great for the other. We are working to cope. The system has continued its school meals program for those in need, and distributed hundreds of laptops with cell connections for those families that need it.
Not all public schools are horrible, I guess is my point.
Amen! My district just spent a bundle this summer installing new lighting in the Football and Soccer fields, repairing an elementary school gym and completely refurbishing a middle school….all for naught. Worse, they said the reason they aren’t re-opening is that they need to ‘remediate’ the district’s HVAC systems to accept MERV13 filters. That’ll be another pile of money, no doubt, to hire someone’s brother-in-law who‘s company, conveniently, does HVAC work.
They haven’t run the heat or lights or AC in any district building since March. No buses. No cafeteria. No library. No school nurses. No Coaches for Spring or now Fall sports. Where is that money going?
We are being played for fools.
I suspect that all of the employees are still being paid. Surely the teachers are.
Good way to put it . . .
And the other teachers are too.
I really can’t judge how distance learning becomes a joke. There are simply too many variables. As Bethany keeps saying, homeschooling is the way to go if at all possible. But how distance learning aligns with regular homeschooling depends so much on what form the distance learning takes, as well as the parents’ ability, time-wise, to do it. I can say this – forget “distance learning,” or any other connection with the public schools in your area, even if the public schools around you are top-notch. Homeschooling is hard work, and worth every minute of it.
I view the dress code thing for distance learning to be just silly, and unjustifiable intrusion into your home. But I have seen too many situations where people are never taught or equipped to dress appropriately for any situation, especially job interviews. I’ve commented before on the appalling way so many people appear in court.
I think this is why much of the distance learning for public schools has been a disaster. There has to be someone present to enforce academic discipline. If that person is also the teacher, then you will likely have a successful homeschooling. If it’s a parent at home with a teacher online, simply making the kid pay attention instead of goofing off could be enough . . .
I was helping out with a young woman – a kind of joint mentorship – and she was babysitting for me.
One time, her supervisor at work was complaining to me that sometimes, she’d come to work without a bra. I asked if she had said anything to the girl and she looked shocked. Of course not!
I wanted to /facepalm so bad. While it is her parents’ job to teach her how to properly dress, it is a boss’s job to clearly communicate when you are not meeting business expectations. Of course, the supervisor was young and new to authority, so learning curves all around.
I know they are in my district, including the unionized school bus drivers who are getting paid to do no work.