Going Remote

[unrequited23]

Honestly, I'm starting to wonder about disruptions to school buses. Several districts were cancelling bus routes before winter break due to staffing and most have been heavily recruiting substitute drivers since the beginning of the year.

I'm lucky that I can drive my kids to school if necessary but I know not every parent has that luxury.

 

[Disneylover99]

My kid goes to Purdue so they are back on Campus, which is a good thing. Those of you that want to stay home stay home.

At this stage, I don’t think most people want to stay home. Parents, teachers, students all want to go back. The problem (at the moment, at least in my area) are the classes that will be folding left right and centre due to illness/quarantine.

 

[slo]

I was really hoping that my DD’s school system would do e-learning for the first few weeks they go back to school, but it appears they will be returning to in-person school. If the school decides to give parents a choice of in-person or e-learning, we will choose the e-learning. DD18 loved e-learning, she was bummed she couldn’t do it this fall, and since I’m immune compromised I prefer it too. We’ll see how it goes….

 

[Kae]

At the k - 12 level it’s not about wanting to stay home. My friend teaches in a poor urban district, the week before Christmas break there were no security guards, tons of students spent days in the gym because teachers were out, cafeteria was closed. With so many out sick teaching isn’t happening. Unvaccinated staff here need to test weekly, so many who are not showing symptoms have to quarantine. Would you rather remote instruction or red rover all day.

I have teacher and staff friends. They say the students did not know how to get back "into the swing " of things and their behavior is horrible. In poor urban areas going remote is not the answer at all. I won't even answer you about unvaccinated staff.

 

[Suger Mag]

I teach community college biology/anatomy. Despite our Dean's expectation that people would welcome a return to in person learning in the Fall of 21; we had a lot of trouble filling our in person classes. Instead of filling 20 seats as usual and even opening new sections.... we were struggling to fill just 6 seats. However, all the remote sections are full. Be interesting to see what spring enrollment brings.

 

[Makmak]

I have teacher and staff friends. They say the students did not know how to get back "into the swing " of things and their behavior is horrible. In poor urban areas going remote is not the answer at all. I won't even answer you about unvaccinated staff.

There are so very many behavioral issues at all levels, I don’t know where to start. Instability, lack of structure, and constantly shifting expectations are the main causes. In addition, when schools “go remote” many working parents scramble for childcare. They can’t tell the babysitter “oh and help them with online school” since elementary aged remote learning is a lot of work for the caregiver, many sitters took it off the table completely and facilities that offered this service charged a premium and filled quickly. Therefore, the parents found care, but some of the kids were not “attending.” My local district teachers are scrambling to close the gap since some kids attended everyday and some kids did nothing….zero. There’s also the issue of instability as children are shuffled to different care providers due to the ever changing schedule. In my district the idiotic board made the decision to cut two hours out of every Wednesday (they think this will cure teacher burnout…) Parents had a week to figure out a plan. And now, there isn’t even a “regular schedule” for busses or the school day. Kids need to know “what happens next” in order to feel secure. When they suddenly have to sit an extra hour at school because a bus driver has to do a triple run (this is happening in several districts in my area) or their teacher is out/quit so they have a different sub daily doing random things, then Friday is remote and now Wednesday's are half days, they stop caring and act crazy. The adults do as well in my observations.

 

[Makmak]

I teach community college biology/anatomy. Despite our Dean's expectation that people would welcome a return to in person learning in the Fall of 21; we had a lot of trouble filling our in person classes. Instead of filling 20 seats as usual and even opening new sections.... we were struggling to fill just 6 seats. However, all the remote sections are full. Be interesting to see what spring enrollment brings.

This is happening at my institution as well. The “old school administrators” insist that in person is “normal.” But really at our institution in the past decade most of the growth has been in online asynchronous. Now that Zoom exists, some students prefer it and there has been talk that it will become a permanently offered mode of instruction. Now that we have been doing this remote thing for so long, it feels like a waste of time to drive to campus, park and walk into a building….

 

[cmarsh31]

I’m in higher education and our college just said we will be remote the first week. We start 1/10.

What’s so annoying is we were pressured to “return to campus” this semester. We have designed our courses for that scenario and now must convert at least one week to alternative formats. Then…..they added they will “re-evaluate” on a weekly basis. For those of us that actually care enough to try to make lessons interesting, it’s a LOT of work to change lesson plans from “in person” to remote. And I imagine it’s more difficult when not teaching adult learners, or when worrying about keeping very young children engaged. K12 teacher burnout is at an all time high, and this switching weekly/last minute creates much more work for educators and is not going to help matters.

Spot on. I'm *assuming* I'm in person on Tuesday when we go back (private school, we get an extra day off!) but I'm ready to PIVOT at a moment's notice. Luckily my school was one of the very few that stayed in-person almost all of last year, it's always our goal to have them in the classroom as safe as possible. We've got a decent system now - when I had Covid at Thanksgiving, one of our TAs, who likes math, covered my classes and I made videos at home. He showed the videos, paused & prompted them as needed, then was able to offer help on the homework. However, this really only works if you have a school set-up that's got the resources to do so. Plus, you need the parents & students to be onboard. Again, perks of small private school. My seniors had me as freshmen, and my freshmen either have older brothers who have me, or my reputation is already in place. I was able to step back in after my quarantine and basically just clean up a bit and keep going. My pay is significantly lower than in the larger urban public school I came from.... but the rewards right now are priceless.

Rough guess, 75% of the faculty has already had covid in the past 2 years.

I'm going to sit here and NOT prep for Tuesday yet... maybe Monday night?

 

[spiders]

They are relaxing guidelines and reducing quarantine times for essential workers while simultaneously trying to say that others should stay home. It’s such a joke.

 

[SteveH]

I can't see our three area school districts going back to remote or hybrid, not without a Governors mandate and not without an emergency school board meeting. Last round of elections changed all three school boards so without clear, justifiable and enforceable mandate by the State. Plus, our Health District hasn't updated any data since the 30th and with only 24 of 408 ICU beds used for Covid-19 it would be really hard to justify based on the current data. If anything they might cancel because of predicted snow on Monday.

 

[monsterkitty]

As of now, my former district has teachers going back tomorrow and students Tuesday.

However, along with COVID we are also battling the fires from the past week. 35 staff members totally lost their homes in the fire and another 73 either sustained damage or are still unable to get back into their homes. That's over 100 staff members that will probably not be back in classes this week due to the fire. Who knows how many will not be there because of the virus.

 

[SteveH]

@monsterkitty a high school buddy of mine lost everything in Denver fires. So sad.

 

[DisneyJamieCA]

My kid goes to Purdue so they are back on Campus, which is a good thing. Those of you that want to stay home stay home.

Clearly you don’t understand how this is working. For many, it’s not a choice we have. The decision is made by somebody else. You also clearly don’t understand what the actual issue is. For 99% of schools it’s staffing, not any fear.

But please, by all means, get your emergency sub credential and come help out at the schools.

 

[Mrs. Ciz]

I hate covid! I had it for 2 weeks last Jan and luckily didn’t pass it to anyone in my family. I don’t want it again! I teach 6-8 English. My private Catholic school is a covid hotbed right now bc we have so many anti mask/anti vax families. It started ripping through those families right after Tgiving and then spread exponentially. We ended up sending 4th and 5th grades home for a week of remote learning and shutting down the whole school for Xmas a day early. I know covid screwed up Christmas for so many families! Luckily I’ve escaped reinfection so far (had covid, vaxed and boosted). I’m thinking that it will be even worse this week after all the Christmas get togethers. Having so many kids out and trying to keep them on track is a total pain, but being fully remote was much worse. Thank goodness we only had to do virtual learning for the last 2.5 months of the 2019-2020 school year. However, if teachers start falling sick, we won’t have a choice. We are a very small school and have so few subs this year. If teachers get sick, we are done for.

We’ve got 3 to 8 inches of snow in the forecast for tomorrow, so I’m hoping for a snow day or two!!!

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

This is happening at my institution as well. The “old school administrators” insist that in person is “normal.” But really at our institution in the past decade most of the growth has been in online asynchronous. Now that Zoom exists, some students prefer it and there has been talk that it will become a permanently offered mode of instruction. Now that we have been doing this remote thing for so long, it feels like a waste of time to drive to campus, park and walk into a building….

At a higher level institution I would not enroll in a 4- year university that was switching my learning to be remote all the time. I do think it's fair to delay coming back to campus and I wholeheartedly agree on that front but I'm not paying tuition and course fees AND campus fees for a campus I'm not actually using. I would have paid for an online school if I had done that.

In my state and the state next to me enrollment is down but it's not necessarily because people prefer online vs not. I think people have given up on higher education because they weren't getting even a fraction what they were paying for.

Now lower education? People were flocking to private and online schools because they didn't like the rules of public schools with a side portion being their student learning better. But most was due to uncertainty in just what would be done and they wanted the control more.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Those of you that want to stay home stay home.

That sorta was the mantra back when mandates were all the rage and people were rallying against keeping them in place after so long but right now since November it seems many places have been dealing with covid, flu, colds, other respiratory illnesses, strep (oddly I've know multiple people with this including my sister-in-law no covid but strep and a sinus infection), etc

I've watched my state go from almost the lowest level for flu cases to now being high almost at the vey high level. Part of that is going to be a mismatch in the flu vaccine with the dominant strain which does happen from time to time. It's probably at the worst time though given how the flu was non-existent last year.

It's just a lot ya know? It's taking out large swaths of people at once.

Less to do with stay home stuff, I think we've moved on from that train of thought these days.

 

[disny_luvr]

My school district is going back tomorrow. I just checked my school email (first time in 10 days!) and the superintendent emailed out that many staff members are out due to Covid or other health issues (stomach bug is really going around my area). The email was basically to let everyone know that they will need all hands on deck. Related arts teachers will be pulled to cover core teachers classrooms, music lessons will be cancelled, support staff that is certified to teach will be pulled, etc., so no plans on closing here. We also have no mask mandate in our school district and the number of students out before the holidays was high, I can't imagine what it will be like tomorrow.

 

[ctinct]

Our governor insists schools can be open safely. Our case numbers for the month that just paaaed were way higher than the months we were remote last year in my district. Lots of staff shortages before vacation so I’m afraid of what we will be walking into tomorrow.

And our district’s protocols stink. Nurse will not send anyone home unless they have a fever. Like someone unthread said, parents medicate their kids, send them to school, and say they have allergies.

 

[Mrs. Ciz]

I was notified a couple of hours ago that my school is closed tomorrow due to the snow in the forecast tonight/tomorrow. Yippee!

 

[GreatLakes]

My son's school (private preschool through 8th) is in person tomorrow but we are assuming at some point over the next month he will be back remote. The numbers are the numbers and we will deal.

He managed to only go in for 5 days between Thanksgiving and the end of the year due to us testing positive.

It is hard for both of us to get all our work done with him home but we can't control what the virus does and shift on the fly a lot.