Tag: public schools

School Threatens 12-Year-Old With Arrest for Allegedly Missing 90 Minutes of Zoom Class

The parents of a seventh-grade boy received a letter from his school in Lafayette, California, warning of possible truancy charges if he missed any more virtual class sessions.

“Out of the blue, we got this letter,” Mark Mastrov, the boy’s father, told the East Bay Times. “It said my son had missed classes and at the bottom, it referenced a state law which said truants can go to jail for missing 90 minutes of class.”

Mastrov assumed the school had been sent in error, so he called the school. He was shocked to learn that the authorities meant business: The law says any kid who misses three full days of school or is tardy for a 30-minute class period on three separate occasions can face jail time.

The policy was obviously intended to cover unexcused absences for in-person education, but the district apparently intends to apply it to virtual education as well.

Mastrov contends that his son didn’t miss his classes but simply logged on after his teacher had already taken attendance.

“Who passed this law in their infinite wisdom?” he wonders. “Who in their right mind could do that?”

Virtual learning is a deeply frustrating experience for many families, and schools should be maximally patient with students and their parents. Unfortunately, education officials around the country have been making life unnecessarily difficult for students who don’t sign in to their classes on time. Some places have even required teachers to perform virtual wellness checks, and to call the cops on parents if their kids seem checked-out during class. One kid got in trouble because his camera caught a glimpse of a toy gun, as though that’s comparable to bringing an actual weapon to a physical school.

This pandemic has caused enough problems on its own. Parents don’t need to be threatened with jail time for failing to master a hopelessly frustrating—and temporary—new system.

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San Diego Public Schools Will Overhaul Its Grading System To Achieve ‘Anti-Racism’

San Diego’s public schools want to be anti-racist, so they’re…abolishing the traditional grading system?

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera told a local NBC affiliate. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

District officials evidently believe that the practice of grading students based on their average score is racist, and that an active effort to dismantle racism necessitates a learning environment free of the pressure to turn in assignments on time. As evidence for the urgency of these changes, the district released data showing that minority students received more Ds and Fs than white students: Just 7 percent of whites received failing grades, as opposed to 23 percent of Native Americans, 23 percent of Hispanics, and 20 percent of black students.

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San Francisco Won’t Reopen Schools. But It Will Rename Them.

The officials in charge of San Francisco’s public schools are hard at work—not coming up with a plan to quickly reopen the schools, but to rename as many as 44 of them.

As parents, teachers, and principals deal with the frustrations of distance learning, the San Francisco Unified School District recently asked them to brainstorm replacements for schools that are “inappropriately” named after problematic historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.).

“I don’t think there is ever going to be a time when people are ready for this,” Mark Sanchez, president of the school board and a member of the committee that proposed the changes, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Predictably people are going to be upset no matter when we do this.”

Maybe. But people are more upset right now, because San Francisco’s public schools aren’t even open and have no plans to reopen until probably January.

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Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders

In early august, the first kids in America went back to school during the pandemic. Many of these openings happened in areas where cases were high or growing: in Georgia, Indiana, Florida. Parents, teachers, and scientists feared what might happen next. The New York Times reported that, in parts of Georgia, a school of 1,000 kids could expect to see 20 or 30 people arrive with COVID-19 during week one. Many assumed that school infections would balloon and spread outward to the broader community, triggering new waves. On social media, people shared pictures of high schools with crowded hallways and no masking as if to say I told you so.

Fear and bad press slowed down or canceled school reopenings elsewhere. Many large urban school districts chose not to open for in-person instruction, even in places with relatively low positivity rates. Chicago, L.A., Houston—all remote, at least so far.

It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be a major spreader of COVID-19.

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