What Would You Recommend for DCPS Reopenings-High School Edition

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You all are nuts. Teachers working 7:30-5:00?? Classes in the park in Ward 8??? Even if kids don’t pass the virus to adults...who do you think works in schools?

7:30 - 5:00 are the actual contract hours at some charter schools. It takes a mental toll on the teachers, and is really unsustainable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You all are nuts. Teachers working 7:30-5:00?? Classes in the park in Ward 8??? Even if kids don’t pass the virus to adults...who do you think works in schools?

7:30 - 5:00 are the actual contract hours at some charter schools. It takes a mental toll on the teachers, and is really unsustainable.

I'm in my building 7:00-4:30 (voluntarily) but I can't imagine it being mandatory five days a week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You all are nuts. Teachers working 7:30-5:00?? Classes in the park in Ward 8??? Even if kids don’t pass the virus to adults...who do you think works in schools?

7:30 - 5:00 are the actual contract hours at some charter schools. It takes a mental toll on the teachers, and is really unsustainable.

I'm in my building 7:00-4:30 (voluntarily) but I can't imagine it being mandatory five days a week.

+1. That’s the time I need to put in to get everything finished. If I had students that whole time I might lose my mind.

[Anonymous]

Where my family is in Australia, I believe that the system is that kids go one day per week to school, based on first letter of their last name (i.e. A-E go Monday, F-M go Tuesday, etc).

This is for elementary -- not sure how this would work for HS with more complex scheduling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was thinking 7:30-12:00 and 12:30-5:00 so there’s no lunch period.

I don’t think all teachers would staff 7:30-5:00. I think you’d have to have 2-3 shifts. I have kids and can’t get to school before 7:45 because of daycare drop off, but those without could volunteer to do the early shift.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was thinking 7:30-12:00 and 12:30-5:00 so there’s no lunch period.

I don’t think all teachers would staff 7:30-5:00. I think you’d have to have 2-3 shifts. I have kids and can’t get to school before 7:45 because of daycare drop off, but those without could volunteer to do the early shift.

Before I had kids, I would have loved to start teaching at 7:00 and to be done by 2:30 instead. This would require a drastic change it what we're used to, but every solution will.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was thinking 7:30-12:00 and 12:30-5:00 so there’s no lunch period.

I don’t think all teachers would staff 7:30-5:00. I think you’d have to have 2-3 shifts. I have kids and can’t get to school before 7:45 because of daycare drop off, but those without could volunteer to do the early shift.

Before I had kids, I would have loved to start teaching at 7:00 and to be done by 2:30 instead. This would require a drastic change it what we're used to, but every solution will.

I think you would have to staff teachers from 7:30-5:00 otherwise you don't have enough people to teach classes- even if you split the day in half you still need most teachers to run both sessions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was thinking 7:30-12:00 and 12:30-5:00 so there’s no lunch period.

I don’t think all teachers would staff 7:30-5:00. I think you’d have to have 2-3 shifts. I have kids and can’t get to school before 7:45 because of daycare drop off, but those without could volunteer to do the early shift.

Before I had kids, I would have loved to start teaching at 7:00 and to be done by 2:30 instead. This would require a drastic change it what we're used to, but every solution will.

I taught on an A/B schedule from 7:10-2:30 for 8 years in both Georgia and Virginia. I loved it. It left enough time in the day to make appointments and such without taking off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Open now! What we are doing is stupid and harmful.

https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/30/closing-schools-for-covid-19-does-lifelong-harm-and-widens-inequality

You know what else widens inequality? DEATH

Death of caregivers, death of siblings, deaths of entire communities who who have pre-existing conditions. But who cares about that right?

There's almost no evidence that kids pass corona onto adults. Who cares about that, right? If Denmark can figure out how to re-open school safely, the US can, too. Think outside the box- conduct classes in parks where possible. Copenhagen's parks are currently full of kids taking classes. Anything is better than pretending that this distance learning set up is working well.

This is factually wrong, based on the two studies of kids transmitting Coronavirus that I know of off the top of my head. What is true is that the data so far shows less evidence of kids as patient zero for a household or a school that we'd expect. However lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack. I've never been upstairs in one of my friend's houses, so I have no evidence that their house has bedrooms. Should we base life or death policy decisions on a bet that my friends house has no bedrooms?

[Anonymous]

I found this article to be interesting and pose some considerations I haven't seen elsewhere -

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/08/teacher-predicts-what-his-classroom-others-will-look-like-fall/

I do like the idea of teachers rotating because then it's only one desk/table that needs to be cleaned between classes.

[Anonymous]

Since the question of the post is for HIGH SCHOOL - here's my thoughts as a HS teacher.

We go to a more college-like schedule. Right now all DCPS HS use an A/B schedule of some sort. So a pre-covid 2 week cycle would look like this:

M- A
T- B
W-A
T-B
F-A

M-B
T- A
W- B
T- A
F- B

We could easily split kids into two cohorts - 1 and 2. Cohort 1 could be in school, while Cohort 2 is at home doing online assignments, projects, whatever makes sense for the class. So a 2 week cycle would look like this:

M- A1 (Cohort 2 on DL)
T- B1 (Cohort 2 on DL)
W-A2 (Cohort 1 on DL)
T-B2 (Cohort 1 on DL)
F-A1

M-B1
T- A2
W- B2
T- A1
F- B1

This would let students take the same classes they would otherwise, let teachers teach the same classes they would otherwise, but automatically cut class sizes about in half. Teachers wouldn't have to do all that much more planning - it would definitely take an adjustment period, but I think it's completely doable if announced early enough in advance. Then if infections drop, all students can come to school with little in the way of schedule changes. We could switch between all students in school and the half/half cohort model with ease if there are smaller infection spikes throughout the school year.

That's my $0.02.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Open now! What we are doing is stupid and harmful.

https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/30/closing-schools-for-covid-19-does-lifelong-harm-and-widens-inequality

This x 10000