Online school put US kids behind Some adults have regrets Health - Lifestyle HEAD TOPICS

Online school put US kids behind Some adults have regrets

10/21/2022 3:25:00 PM

As effects of the pandemic on kids become clear some adults are second-guessing extended school closures In @AP interviews nearly 50 educators parents and health officials looked back at decisions to keep kids online – and some had regrets

Health Lifestyle

Source

The Associated Press

As effects of the pandemic on kids become clear, some adults are second-guessing extended school closures. In AP interviews, nearly 50 educators, parents and health officials looked back at decisions to keep kids online – and some had regrets. BOSTON (AP) — Vivian Kargbo thought her daughter’s Boston school district was doing the right thing when officials kept classrooms closed for most students for more than a year. Kargbo, a caregiver for hospice patients, didn't want to risk them getting COVID-19 . Dallas Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde initially disagreed with the Texas governor’s push to reopen schools in the fall of 2020. “But it was absolutely the right thing to do,” she said.Still, many school officials said with hindsight they’d make the same decision to keep schools online well into 2021. Only two superintendents said they’d likely make a different decision if there were another pandemic that was not particularly dangerous to children. In Clayton County, Georgia, home to the state’s highest percentage of Black residents, schools chief Morcease Beasley said he knew closing schools would have a devastating impact, but the fear in his community was overwhelming.But in the predominantly Latino and Black Rhode Island community of Central Falls, more than three-quarters of students stayed home to study remotely. Read more:
The Associated Press » Online school put U.S. kids behind; some adults have regrets PolitiFact - Claim that Boston University created COVID-19 strain with an 80% kill rate omits important details A COVID strain was engineered in a Boston lab. Here's why you shouldn't panic. COVID researchers infect mice with different strains — and some are way more deadly than others

Tina Forte Clueless AOC is out of touch Prime News

Candidate for U.S. Representative in New York, Tina Forte calls out opponent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her refusal to debate, her radical leftist policies... Read more >> You’re legitimately 2 years behind Shut. Up. You are just as responsible as school boards, Fauci, all of them. Every single lucid person knew this from the beginning. You chose to elevate the “Grandma Killers” and “If we can just save one life” nonsense with ZERO coverage of the costs. Pure gaslighting. The problem was never online school. the problem was making public in person schools that didn't have correct equipment to do online school try to do with this with limited funding and resources at such short notice. COVID has killed million+ Americans in 2 yrs. Fear, uncertainty & incompetent national, state and local leadership has all contributed to the current mental state of school aged children. Common sense working toward the common good absence from society is the 1 threat to us all. Cut it out. This is such bs It was a difficult time. It was never going you be good. It was a pandemic with over a million dead! Lots of others were very sick. Move the hell on. How many of AP's management had their kids in private schools as the press organization was cheering on public school closures? Just stopping back to see the medical expert convention. ajlamesa “Some adults…” No …it’s more like “Only real adults” are questioning closures. And we have been for almost three years. Only some? Are they all named Rip Van Winkle? I can't even begin to tell you all the problems with this article. What a bunch of gobbledygook. Online school put U.S. kids behind; some adults have regretsVivian Kargbo thought her daughter’s Boston school district was doing the right thing when officials kept classrooms closed for most students for more than a year. Not an educator (but wife is) and I knew this was not going to be good. Parents aren’t just now waking up to the fact that virtual learning was harmful, we knew all along. But our states and school districts shut us out because they were afraid and wanted to teach in their pjs. Kids are still suffering. Hold. them. Accountable. ALT HEADLINE: GovRonDeSantis was right. OHH? Incredible it took until October 2022 to write this article Really? I’m shocked! I REGRET NOTHING! School closures saved countless lives! The lockdown was the right thing at the time. But we still need to recognize the consequences and work extra hard with educators to help kids get back on track mental health wise and in academics. Lots of us were saying this shit from day 1, but places like the AP reported on those concerns like we were insane. How many districts used the time buildings were empty to upgrade the HVAC & how many states used federal funds to buy 1 or 2 filters for every classroom. We could have opened faster if everyone agreed to wear masks. But as usual, GOP politics poisoned our response & hurt kids. PolitiFact - Claim that Boston University created COVID-19 strain with an 80% kill rate omits important details Boston University researchers created a new COVID-19 strain in a bid to better understand the omicron variant. But recent headlines and social media posts about their work ignore critical context. Did we vote on this and under what authority? Gee, you guys are to cowards to say. The critical context being...what? Our Side so Okay? From the no shit department With all the sick kids, how are those mask mandates treating you. Breaking news: Hindsight is 20/20. People made the best choices that they could in a changing landscape with incomplete data. Rather than looking back, let's address what we can do about education going forward. Ya think? 'behind' according to our arbitrary made up guidelines? Some parents have regrets? I guess a few are happy their children have speech impediments? Duh. This is what happens when you have a teachers Union dictating to the CDC what they want. Need a complete overhaul of US education system to prepare students to complete in global economy We are social creatures. My granddaughter came to stay with us when she was 4 or 5 she asked us to take her to the park. When we arrived, no one was there. She asked to go to another park. 'Why', I asked. She said 'no one is here, and that's no fun.' And yet paying educaters higher wages is not even being discussed by anyone. A COVID strain was engineered in a Boston lab. Here's why you shouldn't panic.A flurry of tweets and headlines aside, the study ignited a debate on creating viruses in labs. Here's what you need to know. Natural immunity wins again? COVID researchers infect mice with different strains — and some are way more deadly than others Boston COVID researchers have combined the omicron variant spike protein with the original virus, testing the created strain on mice “to help fight against future pandemics.” Scientists Deny Making Deadly Horror COVID in a LabResearchers at Boston University have staunchly denied that they developed a hyper-deadly COVID-19 strain in their labs using gain of function research. Coworker Has Sad Little Vacation Souvenir On Desk To Help Mentally Whisk Him Back To BostonPOTTSTOWN, PA—Commemorating his weekend-long trip with a depressing snow globe displayed prominently in his workspace, office payroll coordinator Andy Shinn keeps a sad little vacation souvenir on his desk to help mentally whisk him away to Boston , coworkers reported Thursday. “In the middle of a long day, this small… What a losah, youah retahded Whatever. The 10-years-ago brand... in math and 8 percentage points lower in reading compared with schools meeting mostly in person, according to a 2022 study by Brown University economist Emily Oster.“We need something on the scale of the Marshall Plan for education,” said Kamras, the Richmond superintendent.our partnership with Facebook .We’re just beginning to understand how our genes and COVID-19 mix. The setbacks have some grappling with regret. “I can’t imagine a situation where we would close schools again, unless there’s a virus attacking kids,” said Eric Conti, superintendent for Burlington, Massachusetts, a 3,400-student district outside Boston.” ___ Gecker reported from San Francisco. His students alternated between online and in-person learning from the fall of 2020 until the next spring. What’s more, the study found that this hybrid strain was actually less fatal in mice than the original — not more. “It’s going to be a very high bar.C.” Dallas Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde initially disagreed with the Texas governor’s push to reopen schools in the fall of 2020. “We get a completely independent look at anything that’s about to be done. “But it was absolutely the right thing to do,” she said., contributed to this report." About the study study , which is not yet peer-reviewed, researchers at the Boston lab wanted to examine the spike protein in COVID-19’s original omicron variant, called Ba. Some school officials said they lacked the expertise to decide whether it was safe to open schools. “Schools should never have been placed in a situation where we have choice,” said Tony Wold, former associate superintendent of West Contra Costa Unified School District, east of San Francisco. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. “With lessons learned, when you have a public health pandemic, there needs to be a single voice. To do so, the researchers added a spike protein from omicron to an original strain of SARS-CoV-2 to create a new strain they called Omi-S.” Still, many school officials said with hindsight they’d make the same decision to keep schools online well into 2021. This controversy will likely add to the. Only two superintendents said they’d likely make a different decision if there were another pandemic that was not particularly dangerous to children. In some communities, demographics and the historic underinvestment in schools loomed large, superintendents said. All the mice infected with omicron survived. In the South, Black Americans’ fear of the virus was sometimes coupled with mistrust of schools rooted in segregation. Cities from Atlanta to Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi, shuttered schools — in some cases, for nearly all of the 2020-2021 school year. ADVERTISEMENT In Clayton County, Georgia, home to the state’s highest percentage of Black residents, schools chief Morcease Beasley said he knew closing schools would have a devastating impact, but the fear in his community was overwhelming. They said more research is needed. “I knew teachers couldn’t teach if they were that scared, and students couldn’t learn,” he said. Rhode Island was an outlier among liberal-leaning coastal states when it ordered schools to reopen in person in the fall of 2020. “We can’t do this to our kids,” state education chief Angélica Infante-Green remembers thinking after watching students turn off cameras or log in from under blankets in bed. Determination of those proteins will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies," said Mohsan Saeed, one of the study’s lead authors, in a statement provided by Boston University. “This is not OK.” But in the predominantly Latino and Black Rhode Island community of Central Falls, more than three-quarters of students stayed home to study remotely. To address parent distrust, officials tracked COVID-19 cases among school-aged Central Falls residents. They met with families to show them the kids catching the virus were in remote learning — and they weren’t learning as much as students in school. It worked. Among teachers, there’s some dispute about online learning’s impact on children. But many fear some students will be scarred for years. “Should we have reopened earlier? Absolutely,” said California teacher Sarah Curry. She initially favored school closings in her rural Central Valley district, but grew frustrated with the duration of distance learning. She taught pre-kindergarten and found it impossible to maintain attention spans online. One of her biggest regrets: that teachers who wanted to return to classrooms had little choice in the matter. But the nation’s 3 million public school teachers are far from a monolith. Many lost loved ones to COVID-19, battled mental health challenges of their own or feared catching the virus. Jessica Cross, who taught ninth grade math on Chicago’s west side at Phoenix Military Academy, feels her school reopened too soon. “I didn’t feel entirely safe,” she said. Mask rules were good in theory, but not all students wore them properly. She said safety should come before academics. “Ultimately, I still feel that remote learning was really the only thing to do,” Cross said. A representative from the American Federation of Teachers declined in an interview to say whether the national union regrets the positions it took against reopening schools . “If we start to play the blame game,” said Fedrick Ingram, AFT’s secretary-treasurer, “we get into the political fray of trying to determine if teachers did a good job or not. And I don’t think that’s fair.” Regrets or no, experts agree: America’s kids need more from adults if they’re going to be made whole. The country needs “ideally, a reinvention of public education as we know it,” Los Angeles Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. Students need more days in school and smaller classes. Short of extending the school year, experts say intensive tutoring is the most efficient way to help students catch up. Saturday school or doubling up on math or reading during a regular school day would also help. ADVERTISEMENT Too few school districts have made those investments, Harvard economist Tom Kane said. Summer school is insufficient, Kane says — it’s voluntary, and many parents don’t sign up. Adding school time for students is politically impossible in many cities. In Los Angeles, the teachers union filed a complaint after the district scheduled four optional school days for students to recoup learning. The school board in Richmond rejected a move to an all-year school calendar. There are exceptions: Atlanta extended the school day 30 minutes for three years. Hopewell Schools in Virginia moved to year-round schooling last year. Even the federal government’s record education spending isn’t enough for the scope of kids’ academic setbacks, according to the American Educational Research Association. Researchers there estimate it will cost $700 billion to offset learning loss for America’s schoolchildren – more than three times the $190 billion allocated to schools. “We need something on the scale of the Marshall Plan for education,” said Kamras, the Richmond superintendent. “Anything short of that and we’re going to see this blip in outcomes become permanent — and that would be criminal. ” ___ Gecker reported from San Francisco. Collin Binkley in Washington, D.C., Sharon Lurye in New Orleans, Arleigh Rodgers in Indianapolis, Claire Savage in Chicago and Brooke Schultz in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report. ___ .