Gadfly Bites 7/10/20 – The electronic fine print

1. State Senator Peggy Lehner took a visit to the I Promise School in Akron (pre-pandemic, I’m guessing), and the experience inspired her to pen this opinion piece for The Hill. It is very good, if you ask me. (The Hill, 7/9/20) And speaking of the I Promise School, the LeBron James Family Foundation announced that they have at last found a place to create the multi-use sports and activity space they’ve been working on since the school opened. It will be on the top deck of a parking garage a quarter mile from the school. Creative thinking and unusual partnerships there, but the renderings look fantastic and work is expected to be completed quickly so that the space will be accessible to I Promise Students this fall. Nice! (Cleveland.com, 7/9/20)
    
2. As my loyal Gadfly Bites subscribers will no doubt recall, I am grudgingly embracing the plans of those school districts creating their own “fully online schools” for the upcoming school year. In the spirit of competition. But I, from my humble perch, would urge parents exploring these newly-invented electronic wheels to make sure of what actually is being offered before deciding. For example, while you will get a free iPad for joining up to the Galion Online Academy (not my first choice of name; I prefer Galion Gigabit Gymnasium myself, with that last word pronounced with a hard “g” also), you will also get canned curriculum from an unknown source and you will get literally a fraction of a teacher. The more kids who sign up, the less of a teacher y’all get. Just sayin’. (Galion Inquirer, 7/8/20)
    
3. It is also important to note, in the spirit of competition, that some districts do have a modicum of prior experience with online and hybrid learning. In what can only be a nod to honesty and fairness in competition, the superintendent of Woodridge Local Schools actually goes out of his way to remind us of the pre-pandemic uses of online and hybrid learning. Not only will the as-yet-unnamed online academy (World Wide Woodridge, anyone?) be used for district families who do not want to return to in-person learning, it will also be “an alternative to suspension and expulsion when students have behavioral difficulty”. Additionally, bossman makes sure that current charter school students living in the district can bring their state money themselves back into the waiting arms of their district this way too. I like this honesty. More, please. (The Suburbanite, 7/9/20)
   

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