- There appears to be a difference of opinion among several of the elected school board members in charge of Wellington Exempted Village Schools if this piece is any indication. At least one member says that district families have contacted him desperate for robust summer school to help their kids, whose grades and test scores show significant “unrealized erudition” (or whatever the currently-acceptable term for “not doing well academically” is), to catch up. At least one member says he has heard far less clamor in that regard. Whichever of them has the proper temperature of the populace, the district has another, related problem: Finding a way to “rebrand” whatever they are offering because district families see summer school as a punishment. If I were uncharitable, I would ask, “Well whose fault is that?” But my charitable response is to say that at least it seems as though the district is being consistent. It’s just like we have discussed here before in regard to online learning. Districts have spent so long vilifying and denigrating the quality of online charter schools that, unfortunately, they cannot plausibly change gears and embrace it, even now when such a model could actually help many students. I would imagine the old admonition of “Get your grades up or you’ll have to go to…summer schoooool!” is a hard one to abjure if it’s been an effective motivator for long enough. (Elyria Chronicle, 4/8/21)
- But an interesting corollary to the above can be found in this piece. It is intended, I think, to show that pandemic-mitigation school closures and remote schooling have been disproportionally harder on immigrant/English language learner students in Akron. Interestingly, I locked on to a couple of other points. (Quelle surprise, I hear you all say with sad certainty.) The virtual show-and-tell lunch introduced some time into remote learning as an effort to boost student bonding and multicultural interaction really sounded great to me. The school principal here plays it down as “smaller scale” integration (as opposed to what can happen during fully in-person lunch), but since this had apparently not occurred previously during in-person lunch, it seems to me that this was actually a huge new thing that could and should be continued now that in-person school has returned. Or perhaps I am making too much out of it? At least one school staffer may be on my side. Because I noted that the dean of students said immigrant students arriving now “get extra time, extra support, extra preparation, extra guidance.” This is new during the pandemic, but she tells the reporter that those “extras” will have to extend beyond it. To become part of the regular effort the school puts in. Like, you know, part of its brand. (WKSU-FM, Kent, 4/8/21)
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