Spokespersons for principals, teachers, and nurses have called on Mayor De Blasio to delay reopening and provide more time to prepare schools, reports Gotham Gazette, a publication of the Citizens Union Foundation.
The principals union, the teachers union, and the nurses union have come out against the city’s plan to reopen classrooms on September 10 with a mix of remote and in-person learning.
In a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators urged the officials to move the start of in-person school to the end of September to give schools more time to prepare, while offering fully remote learning as they do.
”Given the lack of information and guidance available at this time, CSA believes that NYCDOE’s decision to open for in-person learning on September 10th is in disregard of the well-being of our school communities,” wrote CSA President Mark Cannizzaro.
The union is seeking more clarity on essential questions around sufficient staffing, hiring of nurses, PPE supplies, and support for students with special needs, among others. With individual school plans due to city officials Friday, if approved administrators and teachers will have fewer than 15 “working days” to implement them before students arrive, Cannizzaro wrote.
Trump and DeVos are the same. Both are hiding. Nobody gets near Trump who hasn’t been tested BUT the country doesn’t have enough tests for the rest of us. DeVos, who wants to destroy public schools and expects teachers to welcome back their students is hiding in her huge mansion which is being protected by security details that will cost taxpayers millions.
I don’t have the words to adequately explain what I think of either of these destroyers.
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Betsy DeVos accused of ‘hiding’ in her mansion as she pushes for schools to reopen
Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon
August 13, 2020
As school systems across the country reckon with the innumerable challenges of re-opening amid the pressures of a resurgent coronavirus pandemic, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has reportedly isolated herself within her expansive Michigan estate…
As DeVos has apparently distanced herself from population centers while the pandemic’s effects impact new parts of the country, she has simultaneously pushed for the nation’s public schools to put teachers and students back in the classroom full-time. DeVos’ hardline advocacy, which flouts both the warnings from public health officials and increasingly robust medical data, drew fierce criticism from Democrats before she supposedly disappeared into her summer home.
Recently, a mobile billboard featuring three LED screens with slogans blasting DeVos — “stop hiding in your mansion” and “start protecting our kids” — has been making its way across cities throughout Michigan…
But NBC News reported Tuesday that it could not find any records of a significant number of public events held by DeVos with public school officials. Noelle Ellerson Ng, the associate executive director for advocacy at the School Superintendents Association, told the outlet that the group had not heard from DeVos at all this year.
Dubbed the “McMansion from hell” by BuzzFeed, the education secretary’s 22,000-square-foot estate on the shore of Lake Macatawa commands a 24-hour, taxpayer-funded security detail courtesy of the U.S. Marshals Service when she is present.
DeVos, who is the only Cabinet member protected by the agency, was afforded the unusual arrangement in February 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions after her encounter with protesters at a Washington-area middle school. The total taxpayer bill could run to $26 million, or about 0.1% of DeVos $2 billion net worth, should she serve through Trump’s full term…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/betsy-devos-accused-of-hiding-in-her-mansion-as-she-pushes-for-schools-to-reopen/#.XzUynoPegbY.gmail
being hated by the public because, as a public servant, she has an openly anti-public agenda
Let’s hear it for Washington State in Pullman, WA. I can still sing the Washington State fight song. “Fight, fight, fight for Washington State. Win the victory……” Forget the year.
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Joe Biden and the Great Leaders of 2020 Are Part of a Club
They’re the graduates of public universities, and they’ve stepped into the void of presidential leadership.
Since the Harvard-Yale game that was the 1988 general election, all U.S. presidents, including the Wharton School graduate currently occupying the White House, have been Ivy League alumni. President Gerald Ford (University of Michigan, ’35) often ditched “Hail to the Chief” as his walk-on music and replaced it with his college fight song, but he never won the Electoral College, having assumed the Oval Office after Richard Nixon resigned.
So if Joe Biden (University of Delaware, ’65) prevails in November, he will be the first graduate of an American public university to be elected president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Technically, the University of Delaware bills itself as “private-public” because of an arcane corporate charter. Yet it is a state-funded land-grant college charging out-of-state students about $11,000 more in tuition than residents, and it was defined as public by the court that ordered it to desegregate in the 1950s. So we state school alumni will be claiming Mr. Biden’s potential victory as our own. And just as L.B.J. had a fellow state schooler on the ticket in Vice President Hubert Humphrey (University of Minnesota, ’39), Mr. Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, is a Howard alum who also graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law….
What I know right now, in this year of calamities, of burials, killing, isolation and impeachment trial, is that so many of the elected officials who have stepped into the void of presidential leadership are the graduates of public universities. And there are enough of them that we should acknowledge this moment of culmination…
Resourceful governors who bucked federal negligence include the Democrats Michelle Lujan Grisham (University of New Mexico, ’81); Jay Inslee (University of Washington, ’73); and the dauntless “woman from Michigan,” Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan State, ’93), who thinks like a general, looks like a ’40s film star and talks like she’s ice fishing for muskie. And the Republicans Larry Hogan of Maryland (Florida State, ’78) and Mike DeWine of Ohio (Miami University, ’69) — whose June approval rating among Democrats was 81 percent…
I fear for teachers, students and ANY adult who is in a school. Schools have been underfunded for years and don’t meet the requirements to be safe environments. Why has the CDC advised against regular testing in K-12 schools? I believe Redfield is a Trump toady.
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‘I Don’t Want to Go Back’: Many Teachers Are Fearful and Angry Over Pressure to Return
Teachers say crucial questions about how schools will stay clean, keep students physically distanced and prevent further spread of the virus have not been answered.
Now, as teachers listen to a national conversation about reopening schools that many believe elevates the needs of the economy and working parents above the concerns of the classroom work force, many are fearful and angry. They point out that so far Congress has dedicated less than 1 percent of federal pandemic stimulus funds to public schools stretching to meet the costs of reopening safely.
The message to teachers, said Christina Setzer, a preschool educator in Sacramento, is, “Yes, you guys are really important and essential and kids and parents need you. But sorry, we don’t have the money.”
Earlier in the shutdown, Mr. Trump acknowledged the health risks to teachers over the age of 60 and those with underlying conditions, saying at a White House event in May that “they should not be teaching school for a while, and everybody would understand that fully.”
But this week, as the administration launched a full-throated campaign to pressure schools to reopen in the fall — a crucial step for jump-starting the economy — it all but ignored the potential risks teachers face. More than one-quarter of public schoolteachers are over the age of 50.
Teachers say many of their questions about how schools will operate safely remain unanswered. They point out that some classrooms have windows that do not reliably open to promote air circulation, while school buildings can have aging heating and cooling systems that lack the filtration features that reduce virus transmission.
Although many districts are spending millions this summer procuring masks, sanitizers and additional custodial staff, many teachers say they have little faith that limited resources will stretch to fill the need.
They also worry about access to tests and contact tracing to confirm Covid-19 diagnoses and clarify who in a school might need to isolate at home in the event of a symptomatic student or staff member.
The C.D.C. has advised against regular testing in K-12 schools, but on Wednesday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said the Trump administration was exploring whether testing being developed for other vulnerable environments, like nursing homes, could be used in schools.
Indeed, educators have had to process a head-spinning set of conflicting health and safety guidelines from Washington, states and medical experts.
The C.D.C. has recommended that when schools reopen, students remain six feet apart “when feasible,” while the American Academy of Pediatrics released guidelines suggesting that three feet could be enough space if students wore masks.
But after major pushback from educator groups, who felt there was too little attention on the health risks for adults who work in schools, the Academy joined with the two national teachers’ unions on Friday to release a statement saying, “Schools in areas with high levels of Covid-19 community spread should not be compelled to reopen against the judgment of local experts.”
In Arizona, Ms. Wysong, 30, said she was willing to return to her Tempe classroom; she is not in a high-risk category for complications from Covid-19 and her school caps classes at 15 students. But given the long-term teacher and substitute shortage in Arizona, which has some of the lowest educator salaries in the nation, she said she believed the overall system could not reopen safely with small enough class sizes.
Health and education experts who support reopening schools have sometimes questioned the need for strict physical distancing, pointing in recent weeks to emerging research suggesting that children may be not only less likely to contract Covid-19, but also less likely to transmit it to adults.
In interviews, many teachers said they were unaware of or skeptical of such studies, arguing that much about the virus remains unknown, and that even if teachers do not catch coronavirus in large numbers from children, it could be spread among adults working in a school building, or during commutes to and from schools via public transit.
The education systems in Germany and Denmark have successfully reopened, but generally only after local virus transmission rates were brought under control….
This comes from the Chicago Teachers Union.
CTU |
New Polls Show Black and Brown Families Overwhelming Support CTU’s Demand for High-Quality Remote Learning
Teachers seen as supporting safety needs of students, families, as virus ravages Chicago’s Black and Latinx neighborhoods.
CHICAGO—On Thursday, the Chicago Teacher Union released findings from an eye-popping Lake Research poll that found Black and Latinx families to be overwhelmingly opposed to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to re-open city schools to in-person learning, and support CTU’s push for remote learning. This poll comes on heels of a month-long campaign and nationwide August 3rd Day of Resistance, sponsored by the CTU.
During the campaign, rank and file members, parents and their grassroots allies raised their collective voices to push back against the misguided attempt to re-open schools without a transparent, fully funded, scientific-based, and racially just plan.
According to the poll, African American voters were among the most opposed to in-person learning (61%), but opposition to re-opening the schools for in-person education is the consensus position, as a majority of Latinx voters (52% oppose to 35% support), and nearly half of whites (49% oppose to 37% support) agree. These results are in direct contrast to Lightfoot’s dangerous and non-science based in-person hybrid plan.
“Our public school families have been resounding in their opposition to the mayor’s plans to re-open schools to in-person learning this fall—at the same time that our union has fought to anchor our safety concerns in the needs of the district’s overwhelmingly Black and Latinx families,” said CTU President Jesse Sharkey. “We know the incidence of the virus is highest in the same Chicago neighborhoods that look to CPS to educate their children—the very same communities hammered disproportionately by this virus. Voters have wisely chosen the remote learning path that the CTU and our allies have advocated, and put safety first for Chicago’s hard-hit Black and Brown working-class neighborhoods.”
Since the poll was conducted, over 2,000 students, teachers and school staff across five US states have been placed in quarantine after hundreds of COVID-19 cases emerged because of irresponsible in-person school re-opening.
The poll was designed and administered for the CTU by Lake Research Partners, which conducted the poll by phone using live, professional interviewers over a representative mix of landlines and cells, as well as online using text-to-online methodology. The survey reached 600 likely 2023 municipal voters in the City of Chicago between July 30 – August 4, 2020. The margin of error for the full sample is +/-4.0%.
Key findings are summarized below.
A majority of voters (54%) opposes re-opening the schools for in-person learning at the end of the summer, versus just 29% who support it. Another one-in-six voters (17%) is currently undecided. African American voters are among the most opposed to in-person learning (61%), but opposition to re-opening the schools for in-person learning is the consensus position, as a majority of Latinx voters (52% oppose to 35% support), and nearly half of whites (49% oppose to 37% support) agree.
Chicagoans are dissatisfied with the Mayor’s approach to this issue. Fully 50% of voters rate the job Lightfoot is doing on her handling of re-opening Chicago public schools this fall as “just fair” or “poor” compared to just 33% who believe she is doing an “excellent” or “good” job on this front.
In comparison, Chicago Public School teachers remain exceedingly popular and trusted voice in this debate, with 69% of Chicago voters rating them favorably compared to just 18% who rate teachers unfavorably.
Voters are negative in their outlook on the direction of the city, with just 30% believing the city is headed in the right direction, and nearly half (48%) believing the city is pretty seriously off on the wrong track. Voters are even more pessimistic when it comes to the direction of Chicago Public Schools, with just 19% saying the schools are headed in the right direction compared to a 55% majority who believe the schools are pretty seriously off on the wrong track.
Voters are highly concerned with the health and safety of students, teachers, and school staff upon returning to in-person classes Fully 78% rate this between an “8-10” on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means it is not a concern at all and 10 means it is a major concern, including 64% who rate it a “10”, the highest expression of concern available offered.
The data contains one further warning sign for any future efforts to rush in-person learning before safety standards for controlling the virus can be assured. While voters are concerned about the health and safety of students, teachers, and support staff, they are even more concerned about the health and safety of all Chicagoans, should students and school communities become super-spreaders of the coronavirus. Another 78% of voters rate this possibility between an “8-10” on the same 0-10 scale, including 65% who rate it a “10”, or major concern.
As with opposition to the push to re-open schools for in-person learning, concerns about the health and safety of students, teachers, support staff—and all Chicagoans—are even more pronounced among voters of color. Among African American voters, 71% rate the health and safety of school communities a major concern and 74% rate the health and safety of all Chicagoans a major concern. Among Latinx voters, 67% rate both scenarios major concerns. Among whites, slightly smaller majorities rate each scenario as major concerns: 57% in the case of school communities and 59% in the case of the city as a whole.
Finally, voters respond with resounding support for every component of the CTU plan for Chicago public schools during the pandemic, but are particularly supportive of CPS providing internet access and a laptop or tablet to all students (84% support overall, 75% strong support), increasing the number of teacher assistants available during remote learning to support student and family learning needs (82% support, 72% strong support), and providing learning opportunities to parents and caregivers on how to assist students with remote learning, offered at several different times to reach as many people as possible (82% support, 67% strong support).
In addition, Chicago voters support CPS providing one full-time nurse and one social worker to each school to monitor and support students and staff’s physical and mental health, upon the eventual transition to in-person learning (86% support, 72% strong support).
Chicago Teachers Union • 1901 W. Carroll Ave. • Chicago, IL 60612 • 312-329-9100
http://www.ctulocal1.org
for the schools Chicago’s students deserve
Mississippi Is What a School Reopening Shitshow Looks Like
Aug. 14, 2020
“How bad does it have to get? Is it a certain number of cases? Is it one death? Well, we’ve already had one teacher who died.”
It was, she said, a very typical first day of school. And that was the problem.
“Right now is not normal by any stretch of the imagination,” Alexander told The Daily Beast. “And they don’t even think about it. But I’m thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, there are 50 kids huddled up around me.’”
“We keep preaching, ‘Don’t gather in groups.’ Well, when you’ve got kids, they’re going to gather in groups. That’s just the nature of kids…
“What these numbers let me know is that we did it too soon. And it’s going to get worse,” said Erica Jones, president of the Mississippi Association of Educators, the biggest teacher’s union in the state. “All it takes is one student to come in with the virus and ‘boom,’ the spread is there.”
As states around the country weigh the merits of in-person learning, Mississippi is becoming a lesson in how quickly reopening schools could turn a first wave into a tsunami. For teachers, this is a terrifying prospect: Many of them are locked into contracts they signed back in February, before the virus was even a major threat in this state. And reneging on them isn’t an option.
In Mississippi, breaking a signed contract can cost teachers their license.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississippi-schools-are-a-coronavirus-disaster?source=email&via=desktop