What needs to be done to repair damage of Covid/school closures/quarantines/Covid policy in DCPS?
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Anonymous
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Ok, posting this with some trepidation based on how comments about school closures have been received on this board recently. But genuinely trying to start a conversation about both what some of the fallout of school closures and other Covid policies that have harmed some kids and families in the district (I understand not everyone feels harmed by these policies and I accept that -- some people have been harmed), as well as the loss of trust and community as a result?
Looking for genuine, good faith suggestions here. These are some of the issues I think need to be addressed, and I personally think we would do best to discuss them directly and take them seriously. Some of these are based on my personal experience, some based on families I know or at my school. For reference, we go to a Title 1 school in Ward 5, where I think you see more fall out from school closures than you might at schools in wealthier neighborhoods. I mention that not to start a fight, but simply to acknowledge these issues may not be universal: - The inability of working families to be able to realistically rely on school and after school programs as childcare. This is a problem that has persisted at our school, when aftercare programming was serious stripped down post-Covid and many families were frustrated with the poor quality of care, but simply cannot afford alternatives (very few families at our school can afford nannies, and we have few other childcare options in the neighborhood). - The intense burden on parents, but especially working mothers, over the last two years, to oversee virtual school at home, secure replacement childcare for their kids, prepare kids for attending school during Covid (masks, testing, teaching them heightened sanitation rules) as well as to handle this year of quarantines. Most of the moms I know are completely burned out and barely treading water. - The impact of masking on very young kids. My youngest is afraid to go to school without a mask. Even outdoors. He's never attended school without masks. This is a more minor concern for me, but I'd still like to see common sense policy on this, especially for our youngest learners. Those are the main ones for me, but if there are others, please share. We personally aren't as worried about learning loss as some seem to be (we worked our butts of to avoid it and this is an area where I think our school and teachers have been phenomenal -- major props to them). But if that's a concern for you, do share. |
Anonymous
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Priority #1 is getting rid of quarantines.
For me, priority #2 is staffing up special ed and support staff. They are so burned out - and gaps there will make it hard to catch kids up. #3 is ensuring the kids that missed all or part of K and 1st can read - however that happens. #4 is encouraging kids that missed all or part of junior/senior year to enroll in college or finish HS if they dropped out. |
Anonymous
Schools are open so it seems like these have been solved. Masking is optional and probably will be for the foreseeable future |
Anonymous
These are good priorities. Regarding #4, my kids are in ES (OP here) but this is something I worry about for my neighborhood and community a lot. We live close to our MS, and there are real challenges there. Because my kids aren't that age I don't know what kind of outreach is currently being done. I know that our school worked hard to connect with families that were checked out during virtual school this year, and for example this year's summer programs are seeking to keep this kids and families connected and supported. I assume similar efforts are being made at the MS/HS level, but perhaps people with kids at that level can speak to this? |
Anonymous
| I’m with PP. You’re continuing to fight windmills, OP. |
Anonymous
It seems these specific problems are not solved. If families fear that future closures and quarantines will compromise childcare, they may have to make difficult choices (including people dropping out of the workforce) to deal with that uncertainty. One thing I'd really like to see is an honest assessment of how closure and quarantine decisions were made over the last 2 years, and then come up with a plan for future issues like Covid (or Covid itself, depending on what happens with variants) so that families are not left high and dry the way they have been for the last two years. It's hard to imagine this happening because of how opaque Central Office and the Mayor are about.. everything. But I think that would go a long way towards repairing trust and helping families plan for the future. I'd also like to see more family-level mental health outreach. I think a lot of what is happening with mental health right now cannot be addressed just with kids in school. I think we're seeing whole-family dysfunction that is pandemic-related and schools are the main resource for a lot of families who don't have ready access to things like family therapy or support groups. I'd love it if we had parent support groups at our school, for instance. |
Anonymous
| I would like to see an appropriate study examining the exacerbation of achievement gaps among the various communities in DC. |
Anonymous
For two years, I’ve been told that I was greedy selfish and lazy bc I had fears of going back too early during a global pandemic. Now you’re asking me to respect and listen to the fears of people who honestly believe schools will close again. Ain’t happening |
Anonymous
Do you live in DC? Schools were closed, with most resources directed toward virtual school, from March 2020 until August 2021, after all adults and many kids had access to vaccines. Who told you that you were greedy/selfish/lazy? You got exactly what you wanted. However, those closure impacted many families negatively, and those problems were compounded by a year of uncertainty and quarantines. It's time to address the fall out from those closures. And yes, part of that is figuring out what we do next time because "close schools for over a year" is not going to be an acceptable option for the majority of parents in the city. So now would be a great time to discuss what went wrong this time so we don't repeat the same mistakes. For instance, I'd support development of a virtual academy that is centralized so that in the future, people with immunocompromised kids or family members, or who have other reasons to for wanting to avoid in-person school during a health crisis, can access education without having to keep all students home if we can avoid it. I also have a lot of frustrations with how resistant all parties (DCPS, teachers, parents) were to creative solutions back in 2020-2021. I advocated hard for us to adopt policies that would reduce risk while still keeping kids in school -- outdoor school, hybrid, shortened schedule. Every time I brought it up, it was treated as unfeasible. And yet simply closing schools and leaving individual families to scramble was viewed as feasible. Maybe we need to start creating contingency plans for another Covid-like event so that we are able to pivot to in-person alternatives rather than simply rely on individual families and teachers to simply absorb the systemic failures in the next crisis. |
Anonymous
Your first paragraph belies belief. I was teaching in a DCPS school in Feb ‘21. And if you don’t think we were called all those names, please feel free to search the forum Beyond that, I’m not surprised you were dismissed. I don’t know if you remember, every school had a reopening committee of teachers, admin, and parents. As a teacher who served on their RCC, there was no bandwidth for more suggestions from parents who had all the answers that would just magically work if people would listen. I don’t think it’s rude or inaccurate to say that we knew better than you. Now, I do think contingency plans should be made. All for that. I don’t think we need to keep rehashing the past |
Anonymous
| I'm not understanding why the OP is getting such pushback. |
Anonymous
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For us, it was that the services and timing of testing for learning disorders and some other issues was delayed. We didn't really see the issues, because we had no gauge for what was normal. That means we were playing catch-up with identifying those issues this year. Since getting testing is always a time-consuming process, there was no opportunity to put things in motion that we discovered over the year. That leaves the implementation of services for next year.
We've paid for the testing, the tutoring, the therapy. It's just we are still not where we should be. What does school need to do? I mean, they have to provide the mandated services in the future. Those services were just delayed a year. Not sure that this means the expense/resources will be compounded from the school's perspective. But I would think there are others that are also playing catch-up, so the need for more special ed teachers and resources is going to be higher. |
Anonymous
You can’t make a plan for the future without looking at the past. Isn’t your whole argument here that you know better than parents with other ideas because of experience? Well what better experience to look at with regards to future health crisis than Covid? What worked, what didn’t? Some stuff didn’t work well. Let’s talk about that and what we should do next time instead. Also, schools varied widely in reopening in spring if 2021. Our ES never offered in-person spots to anyone except the highest risk kids. Our school has a lot of housing insecure kids and serious IEPs, so even people with more mild IEPs never saw the inside of a classroom that year. |
Anonymous
I think there's a difference between rehashing the past and doing a post-mortem. This includes looking carefully at what happened and criticizing it when necessary. I will say that I work in education research, and it was clear from the beginning that closing schools and moving everyone to virtual was a harmful policy position. It was justifiable when we had little information about Covid, but once we had pretty clear data on both the lack of harm Covid would do to children and healthy adults, and the significant harm that virtual presented for the most educationally-vulnerable children, it was frustrating to see the institutional inertia. By early 2021, I was working with researchers on panels about COVID-19 and educational inequities--the harm was clear by then. I wish more use would have been made of our research at that time. |
Anonymous
| Actually, looking back at it, we began our work in September 2020. We concluded our work in March. |