How is first day going for DCPS kids?

[Anonymous]

To the poster telling the ‘ADD’ mom her kid needs more help you are spot on. So many parents hide behind ADD to not deal with a huge array of debilitating issues. And it’s to protect the parents. ADD doesn’t look like totally disengaging from school because find something uninteresting. There is more there.

And yes- all of these ‘bring back ECE posters’. What in the world? Let’s bring back mandatory grades, students of essential workers, and or special education students.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:First day of PK was an unmitigated disaster for my kid this morning. She is getting absolutely nothing out of this. DL is a joke for this age group. Why won’t our worthless mayor close bars so we can open schools for small children?

Honestly, they don’t need to. DC more than meets public health criteria to have elementary schools open and PK is the same age cohort as day cares and they are open. It’s unbelievably ridiculous that PK is distance learning. It absolutely not supported by any science or data that it is necessary.

I honestly don’t want to ever hear DC harp on about their goals to close the achievement gap ever again. They lost absolutely all credibility here for the rest of forever.

Would you like some tarter sauce for your red herring? No one is arguing PK is best or preferable in DL model. And no one is arguing that achievement gaps are helped by DL. Reasonable minds can disagree as to whether those challenges outweigh the risks of COVID spread. Since you are such a data lover I assume you realize that the majority of public school kids are 10 or older (a population that spreads the disease at the same rate as adults), so the decision matrix here isn't grade by grade, it is a system-wide decision with shared and finite resources.

P.S. You don't give two sh*ts about the achievement gap. That part of your post is just silly.

DP: Why shouldn’t the decision be made grade by grade? Seems quite reasonable to me to make decisions about elementary schools separate from middle and high schools,

Because you can't staff and scale resources necessary to support in-person and DL grade by grade.

This is such BS, I don’t buy it at all.

They should have prioritized in-person learning for small children, special needs, and children of essential workers right from the start. But instead we decided to open indoor dining and bars. I’m just so exhausted and angry. My older one is doing okay with DL, but my 4yo is crying every day because she hates virtual school and misses her friends. I have her on the waitlist for a couple of private preschools where I’m comfortable with the safety measures. DCPS has totally failed her. I guess I’m a sucker for expecting anything else

Parents of ECE are precious. We should totally upend all other schools and grades in favor of PK3 and PK4.

DP but I think the pp may have meant in-person learning should be prioritized for small children because SEL is more critical than content at that age and they simply don't learn well remotely. My MS child has been learning a lot remotely and doing well on exams. My K child didn't learn much and even regressed in some areas, and my PreK child didn't learn a damn thing in the Spring except for what I taught on our own (not even counting her frequent refusal to even engage online). I read the pp's comment as focusing on which ages in-person vs. remote learning has a bigger gap, not as which grades are the most important. YMMV.

What you and others are suggesting is running parallel school systems; one for ECE one for everyone else. So they should staff schools for ECE (along with special services, admin, etc.) and do DL for everyone else. Setting aside that the proposed solution doesn't match with DC's approach to public health (nor MD's or VA's), that's wholly impractical and cost prohibitive. It also ignores the reality that families may have kids in both ECE and upper ES and the drop-off/supervision challenges would create problems unto themselves. So I stand behind my snarky response that ECE families are precious, in that they can only see the world and education through the eyes of 3-5 year old parenting.

DL for ECE sucks. A lot. No one is arguing that fact (at least I am not). What I am arguing is that given where we are (without regard to how we got here - China conspiracy theories, too much consideration for community spread, etc.) there are hard decisions that need to be made, and they need to be made across an entire school system. So when people express their needs and desires for their kids in their demos that makes sense, but they also need to at least try and understand the world outside their needs and experiences to understand why decision-makers came to conclusions they did. I am not asking people to agree that the right decision was made, but I am arguing that if you can't at least acknowledge that there are considerations beyond your own immediate needs and wants, and further that any decision that doesn't maximize your utility is made in bad faith, then decision-makers may and should disregard or minimize your contribution to the discussion.

Immediate pp you're responding to here. It looks like the previous pp you got so nasty with DID consider the bigger picture beyond her own wants and needs and determined that small children, SN children, and children of essential workers should be prioritized for in person learning. I don't see how you concluded that she didn't, and her idea makes a lot of sense.