Reply to Declining enrollment at APS

Forum Index » VA Public Schools other than FCPS

Reply to "Declining enrollment at APS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can I just confirm that the people upset with APS have withdrawn their children and will not be returning?[/quote]

At least one made that claim recently on AEM. Good riddance. [/quote]

I don't understand this mentality. I think it's actually bad for communities and public schools overall when a large percentage of the students opt out. I thought that was one reason APS historically has been better than Alexandria, for example, or DCPS. We don't really want to be a community where the wealthy send their kids private.[/quote]

I think what we're seeing is a community where the entitled send their kids private, and if it gives lower-income families more of a voice, I'm all for it.

I am frustrated by parents who can't distinguish between schools being closed and instruction being remote; by parents who think, all things being equal, teachers prefer remote instruction; by parents who think test scores and achievement are the same thing; by parents who think that because they rely on schools for child care, that is the schools' job regardless of circumstances

I am also frustrated that APS did not seem to do a better job of (or explaining why it didn't do a better job of) triaging and remediating -- or providing guidance to parents on how to remediate -- the biggest problems with remote instruction, such as a lack of social interaction. I think APS' longstanding inadequacy in diagnosing LDs such as dyslexia made life a lot worse for everyone involved. I don't think APS ever set clear guidelines for when it would and would not offer in-person instruction, what would be expected of students and teachers when there was in-person instruction, and how it would assess whether schools were safe places to be. [/quote]
For those of us with K-3 students, the biggest issue with remote learning wasn't a lack of socialization but a lack of learning.  Kids that age just aren't independent learners and cannot learn to read or write via iPad.  No additional communication from APS would fix that.  We we extremely fortunate enough to have a babysitter for childcare and who was able to spend her sole focus supervising virtual learning, and my kids still didn't learn what they needed to.  (To the clear, the babysitter was not someone with the capacity to teach the kids herself.)

For those who didn't witness this ridiculousness, our APS school's principal allowed teachers to combine classes so they could prepare fewer lessons and split responsibilities.  This meant we had 45-50 7 and 8 yos on a Teams call at a time.  There were zero small groups or 1:1 interactions for the entire year.  No work was ever graded.  No feedback given.  Report cards weren't even filled out.

Was your APS elementary school different?  Probably.  APS allowed each principal to concoct their own approach to virtual learning.  Some schools did better than others.  Regardless, K-3 cannot reasonably be taught virtually.  That cohort should have been back in person by October 2020 once we'd seen that schools weren't a major source of covid spread in other parts of the country.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics