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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ah yes, another “I was ok with experimenting on teachers” thread.  Yes, the closures affected learning.  That’s because we had a pandemic that killed millions of people.  If you were advocating putting teachers back into the classroom prior to widespread vaccine availability and peak deaths (Jan 2021 in Virginia), I consider you absolute scum.[/quote]

My school district (DCPS) did not full reopen until August 2021, a full 8 months after teachers receive priority access to vaccines. Yes, some schools opened for some kids (not mine, to be clear) where teachers essentially volunteered to come back. But many schools, including ours, were closed from March 2020 until August 2021.

And don't forget all the school personnel who refused to get vaccinated even when vaccines were widely available, but also refused to return to work.[/quote]

Which school didn’t have kids in the buildings by March 2021? [/quote]

A huge number of schools on the East side. They may have had a small number of at risk kids, but they were not opening the school to all students. Some schools in this category that I have personal knowledge of: Miner, Payne, JO Wilson, Wheatley, Stokes East End.

Also, there were many schools that only offered an "in-school virtual" option to students in spring of 2021, where students could go to school where they would be minded by a non-teacher while sitting on tablets and participating in "lessons" with a teacher working from home. Schools could not always tell you how those "minders" would be staffed, and also had no explanation for what would be done for kids in K or 1st who are often not able to independently use a tablet, and certainly not for the duration of the day (not to mention the absurdity of expecting Kindergarteners to sit at desks and do virtual school for 8 hours a day).

At one point there was a spreadsheet floating around of exactly how many students were in actual schools as of March or April, and you can see a massive discrepancy between schools in the JR triangle and those elsewhere in the city. A lot of people will try to tell you that "demand was lower" in these part so the city because of the LIE that poor people and people of color were happy to keep their kids at home for longer and it was only privileged white people who wanted in person school. But this ignores the fact that many of these schools could not get teachers to come back in person and only offered families a babysitting service with no details about who would be doing the babysitting, and continued virtual education. At that point, yes, it was easier for a lot of families to keep kids home rather than try to figure out if that was even a safe or appropriate environment for kids, especially younger kids (though I'd also worry about behavioral issues among older kids and the ability of these unidentified "minders" to address behavioral problems).

A lot of parents in DC at well-resourced DCPS schools don't realize how much of their "return to school" in spring 2021 was accomplished with funds from the PTO, teachers who were more willing to return to work with the higher SES populations, and administrators more willing to lean on teachers to return, AND to provide them with proper support to do so.

This was not the experience of the majority of schools in the city, and no one talks about it. Here's the order in which school children in DC went back to school:

August 2020: rich kids at privates
March 2021: rich kids at publics
August 2021: everyone else

And people wonder why test scores are bad, truancy rates are bad, behavioral problems are up, juvenile crime is up? This isn't rocket science.

DC FAILED children during the pandemic. Fail. Grade F. [/quote]

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏[/quote]

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