Gadfly Bites 7/31/20 – What exactly grows out of a pandemic pod?

1. Weeks of questions, concerns, protests, and petitions over Dayton City Schools’ disastrous transportation scheme for charter and private school students ended this week. Why? Because the district decided to go fully online for the first quarter of the school year. Jeremy Kelley’s piece makes clear that the district’s yellow buses will now be for the sole use of whatever schools of choice are in operation during that period. Of course, who knows who or how many that will be? (Dayton Daily News, 7/29/20)
    
2. You’d think that covering school reopening plans would be really important, but I’m here to tell you that the biggest news in this story is that a cordial and productive joint meeting of the ADC and the elected school board occurred in Lorain. Link (Elyria Chronicle, 7/31/20)
    
3. Editors in Columbus opined this week about the need for the community to step up and help local students get the connectivity they need to properly engage with remote learning. All well and good, but that is probably a pretty easy fix at this point (I mean it’s just money, right?) I wonder how proper engagement—or indeed proper remote learning teaching—is going to be done after the tech situation is handled? (Columbus Dispatch, 7/30/20)
    
4. We don’t typically talk about daycare here in the Bites, but that may change soon. I’ve been hearing about these so-called “pandemic pods” that parents are creating (is that where pod people come from?). But here in Ohio, I think that something similar may be cooking up from another source. Why do I suspect this? Because a daycare center owner just told me so: “We want to help the parents out as much as possible so that they don’t work eight to 10 hours a day and have to go home and work with their children on their education program. That’s just too much for a parent to try and handle,” she said. “If [K-12 schools] are going to require children, school-agers, to do their school work during the day and a parent is working full-time, especially if it’s a single parent ... if they are bringing them into child care, we’re going to have to be equipped with a school-age teacher who understands what each district may require.” Someone should look into this, maybe. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/31/20)
    
5. As you probably have been able to tell, I have been loving these Cleveland TV news stories on education recently. They may not provide much in the way of answers, but they are asking all the right questions. (Cleveland 19 News, 7/31/20)
   

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