All along
Here’s a nice look at how Franklinton High School, a charter on Columbus’ west side, has fared while conducting fully in-person classes since the beginning of the school year.
Enrollment shifts
The Dayton Daily News took a deep dive into fall school enrollment data for district, charter, and private schools in Montgomery County. The pandemic seems to have led to overall enrollment declines across the board for brick-and-mortar schools, but there are some interesting outliers in all categories bucking those trends. Some substantially so.
New guidance
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released new guidance for safe school reopenings during the pandemic.
Transportation troubles
Columbus City Schools has returned elementary school and several other groups of students to a hybrid in-person schedule, necessitating school bus transportation for district students for the first time since March, 2020. Unfortunately, charter and private school students learning in-person this year—who were the transportation system’s only customers since the fall—are now being relegated to second or third fiddle. One charter on the city’s south side has been forced to curtail its school day in order to accommodate the limitations placed on bus availability by the district. And the rancor is escalating, leading to calls for an end to the required busing of non-district students.
Maximum flexibility for minimum hours
With harsh winter weather blanketing much of Ohio recently, discussion of the place of snow days in a remote-learning world has ramped up. The Ohio Department of Education took to the media to remind schools that those who submitted remote learning plans to the state back in August were automatically considered to have met the state rules for minimum hours of instruction that have guided school-year schedules since 2014. Thus, they have the flexibility to call off school due to weather concerns (even on remote days), staff professional development (or vaccination days), and even screen-free “mental health” days and not have to make up those hours.
