News from the pre-pandemic era
Three Ohio school districts in Ohio – Cleveland, Dayton, and Toledo – won a court victory this week in a very old case. As Jeremy Kelley explains it in the Dayton Daily News, each district was awarded millions of dollars by a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge, who ruled that the state “improperly calculated funding tied to charter school enrollment” from 2004 through 2007, “as well as ‘add-in students’ who enrolled in charter schools after the state’s annual October enrollment count.” The process “resulted in [those districts] getting less funding than called for in the state formula.” No word yet on whether the state will appeal the verdict whose legal wranglings have gone on for a decade already.
Meanwhile, in the present day
Here’s a terrific students-eye view of the first week of this year’s virtual classes at various schools in Cuyahoga County, including Parma Community School. This is an honest and hopeful assessment of the problems and opportunities as described by the students in their own words.
Virtually the new normal
The same tone of optimism pervades this story, looking at the first month of school for one Huber Heights fourth-grader attending an online charter school for, it appears, the first time in her school career. Her likes and dislikes are those of a typical fourth grader, although she seems surprised at how much she enjoys the lack of classroom disruptions she was used to in a brick-and-mortar school.
Pandemic pods
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently took a look at the way charter networks across the country, including Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, were adapting the “pandemic pod” idea to support their families with remote and hybrid learning. Some great work on display here in difficult times.
Ohio’s K-12 coronavirus case dashboard debuts
This week, Governor Mike DeWine rolled out Ohio’s dashboard for reporting Covid-19 cases in district, charter, and private schools across the state. Coverage of the dashboard’s debut is here. You can take a look the dashboard itself—updated weekly—at the Ohio Department of Health’s website.
