Gadfly Bites 11/11/20 – Largesse

1. The Cleveland Public Library is partnering with nonprofit PCs for People to help distribute computers and WiFi hotspots for needy students in district and public charter schools. (Cleveland.com, 11/9/20) Free actual books are available to children in the Mansfield area thanks to the Ohio Governor’s Imagination Library Program and the actual Dolly Parton. (Richland Source, 11/9/20)
    
2. Two nonprofits and a church have teamed up together to create a learning pod serving two dozen kids from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Seems like it’s going pretty well, and the folks in charge have a number of compelling explanations as to why that is. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 11/9/20) Cuyahoga County is donating $500,000 of their CARES Act money to support that and 23 other affiliated learning pods serving K-8 CMSD students. (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 11/9/20)
   
   

3. Students in grades 6-12 in Troy City Schools returned to fully-remote learning this week (and the entire district lost a day of school) due to a Covid-related shortage of bus drivers. Some students attending private schools will be transported as normal, and some others have to make “arrangements”. (Dayton Daily News, 11/10/20) After less than a month in hybrid mode, Toledo City Schools is back to a fully-remote model for all students due to the uptick in Covid cases in the county. The district just this week received a $50,000 grant from Fifth-Third Bank to help support families with their remote learning needs. (Toledo Blade, 11/10/20) Meanwhile, publicly- and charitably-funded pandemic pods in the Toledo area are trying—and succeeding, we learn—to help families with the complexities of remote learning as it is happening there. The lesson here seems to be the same as in Cleveland: pods good, non-pods not good. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 11/10/20)
    
4. Meanwhile, one elected member of the Columbus City Schools’ board of education seems to be of the opinion that there’s simply too much that’s not working in education right now (“blended learning…benefits no one”, “100% virtual learning…has its own set of challenges…that requires time”) to debate the relative merits thereof. “[W]e should hit pause,” she writes, “and start making all our decisions through a post-COVID lens,” utilizing “the transformational (i.e., equity-gap closing) power of technology” whenever everyone’s up-to-speed on it. What happens in the interregnum is not clear, but city- and charitably-funded pods are definitely mentioned. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/10/20)
   
   

5. Most districts in central Ohio, including Columbus, are seeing a decrease in the number of Kindergarten students enrolled this year as compared to last. The culprit is said to be Covid-19, although only one anecdote is provided to bolster this conclusion. The piece spends a long time maligning school choice—including vouchers and especially those dastardly charter schools—as the potential repository for these “lost” dollars students with just as much evidence provided as with the former claim. Couldn’t you guys at least asked a local charter school how their Kindergarten class size is faring? Kudos to the superintendent of Hilliard City Schools however: he’s looking forward to a gigundous new class of Kindergartners in 2021. How’s that for optimism? (Columbus Dispatch, 11/10/20) Whatever Kindergartners are attending Stow-Munroe Falls City Schools this year—along with their grades 1 through 6 peers—will soon be returning to fully in-person learning following a unanimous vote of the district’s elected board. “There is a point when we have to go back,” said one of those elected board members, explaining her vote. Families not comfortable returning to fully in-person learning, currently scheduled to start at the end of November, have an online-only option they can choose instead, but the window for making that choice seems pretty short to me. (Akron Beacon Journal, 11/11/20)

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