[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Las-Cruces-Public-Schools-Our-plan-to-get-students-back-to-school.pdf”]
Getting students “back in classrooms” may not be the highest possible goal during these times. Rather, accomplishing learning goals whatever the learning location might turn out to be, seems a better direction, with so much uncertainty about Covid 19 still ongoing and projected to continue.
Granted moving education forward now is a huge challenge. The above document reflects ongoing attempts to assemble a wide spectrum of expertise and capability in order to address the challenge. How effective such process may be is unknown. But at the very least people will have a platform for discussion that hopefully leads to actions.
OTOH, of strange but perhaps revealing, implication, the participation of parents in the process is an afterthought down at the article’s end. All the more so since LCPS has supported “Community School” expansion in the last year or so, which is heavily parent focused. LFH Is also heavily parent involved.
As noted previously here, and elsewhere, school buildings have become a locus for a number of “social services” such as food/ meal distribution, healthcare provision, pre and post school day supervision/ babysitting.
Additionally we live in a time when the need to “get students back in classrooms” is explicitly tied to parents needing to safely place their kids outside the home so that they may proceed to return to work outside the home. This reveals that schools have an additional “social service” non learning function as simply daycare in a safe setting.
There have been news articles stating that some mothers, noting the hard choice of maintaining employment when their kids are at home most days, have decided to become, perhaps temporarily, mothers who teach kids at home, instead of working outside the home.
Somewhere in the LFH/ WFH world might be the seeds of new learning and economic structures that will meet the needs of families to “make things work better”. Somewhere in that process are the various state’s needs to find ways to save costs in education. Teachers jobs have been, for the most part, located in physical buildings. Will that change soon, and if so, how? Teacher’s salaries take up a great portion of educational expenses at the state and local level. It appears there may well be upcoming crises that all shareholders in the educational equation will have to deal with.