Laptops also end up at the pawn shop, and there isn’t anything the schools can do.
Several years ago I was considering buying a used laptop. Researching I learned that pawn shops in the X, Y and Z areas had super cheap laptops. A large quantity of the same model from schoolkids. These were areas where 99% of the parents could have paid for the laptops.
I taught in an extremely poor High School school, and I was assigned to teach an elective that was way outside my knowledge and I didn’t even have a textbook. I had to fight to get some. I was told that I was responsible if any books were lost. So, when I needed to use them, I handed them out in class.
Completely online has always been available. I know in our state it is free and a public school. It isn’t done by the local public school but by K-12, which is national. We homeschool but if DD was in public school I’d had switched her to K-12 for a year, since they already know what they are doing with online schooling. Unlike the local schools that were really just spinning their wheels.
I loved online schooling the few times I was able to do it. I am old enough that my first experience was watching lectures on VHS in the college media room. It was a 5 hour Calculus class and I’d spend all Saturday watching a lecture, during the homework until I’d had all 5 classes finished.
A lot of internet connections favor download bandwidth over upload. Normally this is fine, but not when you start doing video conferencing. My kids school has had the most trouble with teachers at their houses, probably because we’re fairly rural and upload speeds often are no better than 1Mbps. When they let the teachers go to the classroom to teach it’s okay.
Breaks have been a back breaker for us. Every break means we will be quarantining 4-5 Classrooms a day starting about a week after return.
Parents that are positive have come to our elementary schools, unmasked (masks are required everywhere) to pick up their positive children after trips.
I completely understand colleges trying to minimize these issues.
Anyone that has read anything, anywhere regarding this “fake disease” should understand .
“Wow,” is a far more gentle comment than the one that came into my head.
But punishing kids so they don’t travel will hopefully not be a motivator for years to come.
My son dropped a class he really wanted bc it was in person and he’d have to agree to spontaneous testing. He swapped it to a less interesting one (an elective) so he could do it remotely and not have random testing.
He graduates community college in May and has no idea what he’ll do in the fall.
Isn’t it actually structured that there is enough time to travel and quarantine at other times so that other people (especially older staff) are not impacted by the travel?
You mean it was structured that way so people could travel over the winter break and have time to quarantine after? I don’t think that many have travel TBH. Maybe?
I think it’s to just have a full on push without a chance to get germs and bring them back. But I think it’s miserable to think these students have to go 16 weeks straight without a break. And the profs for that matter. Maybe they could’ve made a spring break where you don’t leave campus? Just give these kids some time off!
I know we spent a lot of time and money ensuring the ventilation systems and filters are addressing the air and extra cleaning around the clockkeeps all surfaces germ free. Our fear, our reality is that our environment is not what has put us in danger. It has been the choices others make.
You might not agree with how we try to control the uncontrollable, but it might feel like the only solution at the time.
I totally get the colleges since students are coming from all over, but our district seems to have cleared out cases over Christmas break. We didn’t have a single case the first week back and we ended up with just 2 (1 at 2 different schools) last week. The number quarantined went down as well, compared to November and most of December.
There is a database our district put on their website to show current cases and number quarantined for each school.
Can you tell me what the population of your city/town in? Do they report how many school age cases there are in the city?
We have quarantined about 14 classes in the last week (4 this weekend). Only 1/3 of our students are in school currently (including those quarantined in these numbers). Some of our classes have quarantined multiple times. There are over 70 school age students currently with Covid. These are the same numbers after Thanksgiving. It might not be true for all states, all schools but everyone should know- schools almost always do what they think is best for the students and staff.
There are around 440,000 people that live in our county. We are in a school district just outside of the city schools in our county, a mostly urban and suburban area. It looks like between the borough and township that encompasses our district it’s between 23,000 and 25,000 for total population.
We have a lot of school districts in our county, which I understand is rather unusual.
I haven’t found any school age reports for our area. I’ve only seen a report for the state of PA.
I think colleges are different than K-12 schools. The kids on campuses here have an abundance of rules and regulations, and all-in-all, I hope most of them go by the wayside in the future. It’s fine to live in the controlling environment for an extreme and distinct situation, but for that to be the wave of the future seems wholly unattractive.
Well, the rules I am referring to are born of the pandemic, as is the new schedule.
I remember as a nursing student feeling like I was drowning, and regarding spring break as a life preserver where I could come up for air, catch up on sleep, and just go home and be fortified by a week with my parents.
My daughter’s college started a little later specifically to increase the distance from the holidays and any infections caused by the increased socializing. They are not having spring break because they don’t want kids to leave and come back whether they go home or on a pleasure trip. Instead they’ve built in a long weekend with study days. I think it’s a four day weekend. In regular times, their fall semester does not have a break - just the study weekend - so it’s not without precedent.
As a parent with an incredibly inflexible work schedule, the opportunity to do virtual schooling without absences would be amazing. I have almost zero ability to take time off on traditional school breaks. I would absolutely love to take my kids and travel at an off time while also schooling my child virtually.
We’ve been lucky that my kindergartener’s virtual school is asynchronous which has made it much easier for me to work with her in the evenings to complete work. It’s been a great bonding time!
I do not think a compacted schedule is here to stay and too many teachers unions would have a lot to say about making any permanent changes to schedules. Renegotiating contracts is lengthy and politically fraught. Is it worth the effort? I doubt it.
As a parent, I detest virtual learning and my middle schooler desperately needs to be back in the classroom and on a regular schedule again. Whatever that schedule may be, we will work around it.
My DS (Grade 11) was used to doing semesters - 4 classes in 5 months. This year, since we went to hybrid (part time online and part time in class), they decided to minimize exposure to kids/teachers by limiting movement in the school. We went from 2 semesters a year to 4 quadmesters. One class (in school) per day, alternating with only 2 classes every 10 weeks. My son loves it. He says he can concentrate (he has ADHD Inattentive) much better on two classes than on 4. So even though it’s more work compressed, he was able to delve in to do it without all the other classes as distractions.
