Reply to Half-days on Wednesdays!?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]OMG. Honestly at this point, if you don't understand why parents are p*ssed at the idea of having to pick their kids up early on Wednesdays, you're not even trying to grasp the situation. And miss me with what "studies have shown." Studies have shown that being out of school has been a disaster, and any steps by DCPS to cater to teachers even more is just really not going to fly.[/quote]

Of course parents would and should be upset if they suddenly had to pick up their kids early on Wednesdays (well, most -- as with anything, I am sure there are some who like it, depends on your family arrangement). But I don't think that's what is being discussed. Sounds like kids would be in school but supervised by a non-teacher, potentially in programming but also possibly not. It sounds like there are lots of ways to do this and some are an inconvenience to families and some are not and some provide beneficial programming to kids and some do not.

I'll note that if your aftercare program is currently planting kids in front of the TV for hours, then the problem is not a proposal for 2 hours of PD time on Wednesdays but that you have a terrible aftercare program, and likely that should be addressed regardless of the Wednesday schedule.

I also wonder if schools are trying to solve multiple problems at once here, and what people's alternate proposals would be. Seems like the goal here would be:
- Provide planning and PD time to teachers, possibly reducing or eliminating PD days throughout the school year, AND
- Providing necessary remedial acceleration to students who need it (and we all know there are a lot of kids who need it after the past year) at a time that doesn't pull them out of other instructional hours but also does not impose scheduling challenges for families (as early morning or after school acceleration programming can).

Carving out 2 hours on Wednesdays to do both, and dealing with the issue of childcare by simply extending aftercare programs on that day, seems like a reasonable proposal to address these issues. Of course they could just do the PD days as they always have, but those can be very disruptive to family schedules and would not address the issue of providing remedial acceleration to students. You could provide the remedial acceleration outside of school hours, but then you might have low attendance. And you could do it during other school hours, but that means kids who are getting remedial acceleration would potentially be missing specials and other programming that can be particularly beneficial to kids who are struggling in academic subjects.

So what is the answer, if not a shortened school day, one day a week?[/quote]

tl;dr.  nobody should be wasting time on this. I truly think you don't get it.  [/quote]

Agree. Education policy is stupid, no one should ever spend time writing or reading 5 paragraphs on it. Just throw kids in classrooms for the maximum amount of time allowable for the maximum number of days a year, problem solved, who cares.[/quote]

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