Reply to Which schools are still not open for ANY In-Person learning?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You may be tired of 'it's a pandemic' but that's honestly too bad. Your feelings do not matter. Now that the United States is really on track to recovery we should have full IPL, the state of things now was not the state in January. 
You may think you 'know' the science but ultimately DCPS decided that term 4 was not the time and their team of experts.

Again your feelings do not matter. You will get school in the Fall, this is a poor time in history. Feel free to call out schools but at the end of the day the only one we are all hurting is children.

If you want to be a part of that go right a ahead. You're just as bad as teachers who could have came back in term 4.[/quote]

The numbers last summer were among the lowest of the pandemic -- we could have opened for 3 solid months of IPL back then. We chose not to.

I advocated hard for outdoor classes at my school, which has a large field space and could have offered at least some outdoor IPL during the temperate months (and honestly even most of the winter) with just a reasonable investment in materials. I was repeatedly told that this was a waste of time because we'd be opening the classrooms "in a month or so". They started saying that in August. It's May.

This is not about feelings, it's about practicality. There was no reason to wait until January to assess and then use the height of the pandemic to retroactively determine that we just weren't going to have IPL at all this year at many schools. And then by March it was "well lets get everyone vaccinated" and then by May it's "well there's only 6 weeks left." In the meantime, thousands of children in this city are dealing with real negative impacts from being out of school for this long. Yes learning loss, but that's not even my main concern. I'm talking about the socio-emotional impacts of being jerked around for a year, promised things that were not delivered, separated from friends and teachers. There are children at our school who have simply disappeared. You think this is just about my feelings? Wake up.

Oh, and speaking of that "many schools" issue -- how is it that we are in a school district where some schools are almost entirely IPL and some are almost entirely DL? You can claim it's about demand all you want, but I go to a majority black and hispanic school with almost no IPL and large demand for it. But we don't have the resources -- too many teachers with medical exceptions, others on allowed leave, insufficient funds for additional staff. It's not a space issue -- the school has unused classrooms even during a normal school year. And yet... no IPL. There are majority white schools in this city where every family who wants IPL is getting it. Explain it. Did the "team of experts" decide that only rich white kids should get IPL?

You can tell me all you want that this is about my feelings, that I should stop complaining, I don't care. This year has been a total failure at every level. The only children who have been well served by the decisions of this year are the wealthiest kids in the district who formed pods, successfully lobbied receptive school administrations, and had the extra cash to throw at the problem until they got what the wanted. The rest of us were completely failed.

I will not forget this. I will not forgive this.[/quote]

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