WTF. I had multiple students who did literally no work after school was shut down and all they got was more time to play video games.
Updates on my employer school and my kids’ school:
At work, my university continues to plan a mix of in-person, hybrid, and entirely online classes. But we recently got a last-minute email saying, “Hey guys, remember how we asked everyone for their preferred mode so that we could plan logistics? It turns out that we way overestimated the # of students we’d able to safely hold in a classroom. So we need an updated preference mode, and if you’re waffling between in-person and online, go online.” So it seems like the university is realizing that classrooms are realistically only going to be able to hold about 20% of “normal” capacity, rather than the 30-50% or whatever they were previously planning.
Also, spoiler, the in-person thing is going to be over by mid-October at the latest because Ohio is on fire and starting to look like Florida. (That’s my prediction, not a university statement.)
As for my kids’ schools, I sat on a parents’ committee that met (remotely) with district administrators to talk about how to safely return to in-person school for K-12. My takeaway from these meetings is that the district is completely unprepared for dealing with this. They can’t even decide whether or not to mandate mask wearing. And they seemed surprised that state of Ohio guidelines would mean that anyone exposed to a COVID positive or presumed positive individual would need to quarantine for 14 days. Which means, as I understand it, that if a student or teacher tests positive, the entire class would have to quarantine for 14 days. And, even worse, a single high school student/teacher testing positive could result in 7 classrooms worth of students/teachers quarantining because of the way that high school students move from class to class, rather than spending all day with a common cohort.
So basically, 3-5 students or teachers testing positive could decimiate a school population for weeks.
We haven’t formally decided yet, but I’m pretty sure that if masks are not mandated, we will keep our kids remote. There’s a good chance we keep them remote even if masks are mandated.
This is an oncoming train and DeVos and company not only don’t have a contingency plan, they don’t even have a primary plan. Just open the schools and pray.
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Someone tell me how Trump can still pull this one out.
lol at Trump ever willingly pulling out
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So my kids’ school district posted their plans for a “Responsible Return” to in-person classes.
Despite the fact that it’s 60-some pages long, it manages to be enormously uninformative about what it’s going to look like. It’s so depressing.
For any self-hating individuals who want to read through it:
My county has been pretty good overall only 250 cases so far. But living in a college town and working there I’m not sure it’s going to hold and getting a little nervous after reading their plan.
Lot of wishful thinking that the kids are going to play by some pretty strict rules. Like stay in these small groups they call pods who will live eat and rec together.
Not sure the on campus ones will follow them let alone the off campus ones. Think fraternity and sorority houses are going to be a mess. And bars…oh boy…Guess will see and hope they behave themselves and hope for luck.
Our school district released a new sample schedule for remote learning. It’s kind of interesting.
For middle school, classes are on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday is set aside for kids to work on assignments and for teachers to work with individual students and small groups.
On class days the entire morning is independent work. On Monday, there are three regular academic classes in the afternoon and one “connections” class, which is like band, art, etc… On Tuesday, there are two academic classes, one connection, and an “intervention/acceleration block,” which I’m guessing is a period where kids can do extra work if they are doing well and kids who need help can work with the teacher. Not sure about that.
Thursday/Friday mirrors Monday/Tuesday.
Of course, some parents are freaking out about this. ONLY TWO OR THREE CLASSES PER DAY? NO CLASS UNTIL THE AFTERNOON? One other parent and I have tried to calm people down. One parent, who was initially upset, made the good point that the elementary school schedule is the inverse of middle school, with classes in the morning and independent work in the afternoon, which is probably to help households with kids in each school who might have to share computers.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and this is not a particularly good plan from the start. These schools that are shooting for 100pct in person instruction with community spread are dreaming.
lol this one mom is just so upset about her kids possibly not having every single subject taught every single day. She NEEDS them to go back to school! They NEED to have the subject matter reinforced every day!
I basically told her yeah, no shit, we all want our kids to go back to school, but that ain’t happening so fucking deal with it.
Our district is just in magical thinking land that classrooms can maintain 6-feet distancing at 50% capacity.
This whole thing is going to flop once a single classroom is sent home en masse.
Last night, the superintendent was scheduled to host a video discussing our plans for returning to school. All signs pointed towards a hybrid return with 50% of students in school at a time. However, the Franklin County Board of Health (basically the city of Columbus, OH) announced a recommendation that schools open 100% remotely, and Columbus City Schools (the biggest school district) announced they were doing so.
As a result, last night’s video for us (a suburb of Columbus) was basically the superintendent saying “Hey, there was a last minute recommendation by the Franklin County Board of Health and now we’re not sure what we’re going to do, but maybe 100% remote to start. OKBYETHANKS.” And many of the parents went absolutely batshit. I am surrounded by so many entitled and uninformed people it’s not funny. (This is where @Riverman would insert more colorful, but equally accurate, descriptions.)
So school is scheduled to start in 3 weeks, we still don’t know what form it’s going to take, and teachers don’t yet know what to plan for. Such good times.
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My co-worker said Upper Arlington had a district zoom meeting where the same thing happened, with parents just going completely off the rails, personally insulting school board members and screaming about the virus being a hoax, the whole deal.
It is impossible for me to witness this stuff and retain any hope for this country. America’s white upper middle class is just too far gone. These people are so entitled and awful. Any sacrifice or unpleasant experience results in a psychotic response, it has to be seen to be believed.
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I like how incompetent failsons with no leadership skills seem to be in every role that governs how we live. Can’t make a decision? Just don’t do anything and let everyone spend months not being able to plan anything because they don’t know any part of what the future will look like.
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Discovering that you’re wrong about everything is traumatic.
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The Minister of Education is pushing for schools to open on time this year with few restrictions. He’s stated that there’ll be some required hand washing and ventilation which of course is completely meaningless bullshit that will do nothing. Social distancing wasn’t even mentioned. He even said that an outbreak may not necessarily justify closing down the school.
It really seems like a political move. Opening the schools is now popular among the population and symbolic of the country overcoming covid19. It’s why I hate ANO. I fucking hate them. They went from doing a great job with this to now doing a shitty job. Now it’s about politics, not health.
The over/under for the first school breakout is a week. And if there’s any positive for me, it’s that my summer job stretches into the first week of September, meaning that I won’t be going to school until September 7th. By then, there might already be a breakout.
Last night, the Board of Education met to discuss plans, and it’s clear that the BoE wants to overall the Franklin County Board of Health recommendation. The president of the BoE is basically going to try to insist that we stay with the current plans to return to school under a hybrid system. This followed a large parent rally outside the BoE to protest the county Board of Health recommendation that we go fully remote. So I live in some moronic area where entitled parents won’t comply with Board of Health recommendations. What makes it even better is that last night’s Board of Education meeting was in person (for the board members) and streamed publicly - for most of the meeting the board president was sitting there with his mask under his chin.
Basically, Dublin OH is just doing exactly what the state of Ohio did when it pressured Amy Acton to step down. I am unbelievably disappointed in this area, and there’s a real chance that this episode is going to prompt me to move.
I moved to the deep south and people here are far less idiotic than my former Columbus suburb. These people are entitled scum and I’m sorry you have to deal with this crap.
Welp, now it looks like parents in several school districts surrounding Columbus, OH are going to sue their school boards to force them to ignore the Board of Health recommendations and send the kids back to school.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic about what will happen.
Oh, what’s that?
Gwinnett County Public School teachers began in-person pre-planning Wednesday at the 141 facilities throughout the county. By the next day, approximately 260 employees had been excluded from work due to a positive case or contact with a case.
Very cool. I’m sure that Ohio is immune, though.
Brutal but unsurprising.
Here in the deep south there has been zero pushback to starting the year remote. LOL Ohio.
