Tag: schools

As Trump Calls for Schools to Fully Reopen, His Son’s School Says It Will Not

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St. Andrew's Episcopal School, which President Donald Trump's son Barron attends, in Potomac, Md., April 29, 2020. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, which President Donald Trump’s son Barron attends, in Potomac, Md., April 29, 2020. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The school attended by President Donald Trump’s son will not fully reopen in September out of concern over the coronavirus pandemic despite the president’s insistence that students across the country be brought back to classrooms in the fall.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a private school in Washington’s Maryland suburbs, said in a letter to parents that it was still deciding whether to adopt a hybrid model for the fall that would allow limited in-person education or to resume holding all classes completely online as was done in the spring. The school will decide early next month which option to follow.

“We are hopeful that public health conditions will support our implementation of the hybrid model in the fall,” said the letter signed by Robert Kosasky, the

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Which Country Gets High Marks for Reopening Schools?

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Carl Court/Getty
Carl Court/Getty

As American school officials debate when it will be safe for schoolchildren to return to classrooms, looking abroad may offer insights. Nearly every country in the world shuttered their schools early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have since sent students back to class, with varying degrees of success.

I am a scholar of comparative international education. For this article, I examined what happened in four countries where K-12 schools either stayed open throughout the pandemic or have resumed in-person instruction, using press reports, national COVID-19 data and academic studies.

Here’s what I found.

Israel: Too much, too soon

Israel took stringent steps early on in the coronavirus pandemic, including severely restricting everyone’s movement and closing all schools. By June, it was being lauded internationally for containing the spread of COVID-19.

But shortly after schools reopened in May, on a staggered schedule paired with mask mandates and social distancing

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UM professors upset over school’s plan to have in-person classes amid rising COVID cases

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As Miami-Dade County — the epicenter of the pandemic in Florida — reports thousands of COVID-19 cases each day, some faculty and staff at the University of Miami are pushing back over the school’s plan to reopen its campuses, feeling the administration has ignored their pleadings over personal safety.

The private university, based in Coral Gables, granted its nearly 17,000 students the power to decide how to learn, but failed to do the same for many of its approximately 16,000 faculty and staff, full and part time, some employees said.

Students got two choices: Take classes entirely remotely, or return to campus and take some classes in person and some online, which UM describes as a “hybrid protected model.” UM encouraged professors who qualify as vulnerable with underlying medical conditions, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to request accommodations, but didn’t do same for those who

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Success Academy Offers Sobering Lesson for Reopening NYC Schools

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(Bloomberg) — If any school in America could find an edge just now — a magic way to reopen kindergarten or teach Algebra online — you might think it was one beloved by Wall Street millionaires and billionaires.

But not even Success Academy, the largest charter-school network in New York, the nation’s largest school district, has easy answers for teaching kids during this pandemic.

As school districts everywhere weigh bringing students back against the risks of spreading the virus, Success Academy offers a sobering lesson about how daunting that calculus has become. This much is certain: reopening schools is now one of the most formidable obstacles to fully reopening New York — and the nation’s entire economy.

Over the years, Success Academy has formed ties with the likes of hedge fund luminaries Dan Loeb, Ken Griffin and John Paulson, who have collectively lavished tens of millions on the network and

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Central Florida schools push learning option that lets them can keep student funding

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Central Florida public school districts are giving parents choices on how their children learn this fall, and many schools are pushing programs that would keep students in their home district.

The reason? Money. Public schools receive full funding for students who take classes on campus or through their own online learning model, but lose out on funds for kids enrolled in the Florida Virtual School — which could mean teacher layoffs.

Principals in Orange County have sent messages to parents through phone calls and social media posts expressing funding concerns and “highly recommending” the district’s new virtual program, OCPS [email protected], over the other virtual school option.

West Orange High School principal Matt Turner wrote in a newsletter to parents that he was “lobbying heavily” for families to pick on-campus learning if they’re comfortable or [email protected], which will have live, online lessons that follow a traditional school schedule.

“I just wanted

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Schools Can’t Reopen Safely Without A Lot More Money. Congress Is Running Out Of Time.

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WASHINGTON ― In a matter of weeks, millions of children will head back to school in the middle of a pandemic, leaving millions more parents filled with anxiety about risking their child’s health ― not to mention school staff ― to get an education.

Public schools cannot safely reopen without a massive infusion of emergency funding from Congress, which is already dangerously late to this. Think of all the things a single school needs: Hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes for classrooms. No-touch thermometers. Regular deep cleanings, which means hiring more custodial staff. Ensuring that every school has at least one full-time nurse (25% of schools have no nurse at all). Someone on every school bus to screen kids’ temperatures before boarding. Gloves and masks for staff. Masks for students who don’t bring one from home. Resuming before- and after-school child care programs with new cleaning protocols.

That doesn’t even factor

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Case of teen jailed for missing online classwork shows how schools and courts oppress Black students

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While school districts all over the country grapple with how to best educate youth this upcoming academic year during a global pandemic, one Michigan teen sits in a juvenile detention center with no prospect of returning to in-person or remote learning anytime soon. The 15-year-old, identified only as Grace, has been in jail since May because she violated the terms of her probation by not completing her online coursework, according to a new report co-authored by ProPublica Illinois and the Detroit Free Press.

Grace, who is Black and has diagnosed ADHD, was on probation for fighting with her mom and stealing a cellphone from a classmate. After her school transitioned to remote learning on April 15, Grace said she felt unmotivated and overwhelmed by the work for her school, located in the predominantly white community of Beverly Hills, Mich.

That’s true of many students displaced from their schools, but, calling

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Teen jailed for missing online classwork shows how schools and courts oppress Black students

dhita yudha

While school districts all over the country grapple with how to best educate youth this upcoming academic year during a global pandemic, one Michigan teen sits in a juvenile detention center with no prospect of returning to in-person or remote learning any time soon. The 15-year-old, only identified as Grace, has been in jail since May because she violated the terms of her probation by not completing her online coursework, according to a new report co-authored by ProPublica Illinois and The Detroit Free Press.

Grace, who is Black and has diagnosed ADHD, was on probation for fighting with her mom and stealing a cell phone from a classmate. After her school transitioned to remote learning on April 15, Grace said she felt unmotivated and overwhelmed by the work for her school, located in the predominantly white community of Beverly Hills, Michigan.

That’s true of many students displaced from their schools,

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Fall 2020 Reopening Plans At The Top 100 U.S. Business Schools

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They’ll be following all the rules this fall at the University of Michigan: masks, social distancing, smaller class sizes, frequent hand and surface washing, and more — much more. They’ll also be pioneering new rules for a new reality, particularly in the realm of remote instruction, as befits one of the country’s leading centers of social and cultural innovation. Put it all together and Scott DeRue, dean of the Ross School of Business, expects a memorable term.

“As with every year, I’m looking forward to welcoming students back to campus safely for a very successful fall term,” DeRue says. “Of course, I also recognize the profound difficulties that many of our students face in this moment, and that much uncertainty remains for all of us. We will get through this, and we will do it together.”

Five months after it shut down business school campuses and curtailed spring instruction and … Read More

Pandemic drives business schools to overhaul curricula

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Andrea Galeotti, a professor at London Business School, did not realise what he had started when he began preparing a talk on coronavirus for his students this spring in response to growing interest in the pandemic.

“There was a lot of confusion,” he recalls. “It was a mess in Italy, and the UK was not even talking about lockdown. I started to pull together information so people could make sense of it. I couldn’t stop, it was so interesting to learn about, and soon I had 40 slides. I was very surprised to see the reaction.”

His presentation with his colleague Paolo Surico evolved into Leading Through a Pandemic, a range of free online materials which have been widely shared. They sparked discussions with governments to shift policy towards the use of real-time data to guide a more rapid economic recovery, and helped inspire an overhaul of the curriculum for

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