Month: August 2021

Washington D.C. should offer virtual school instruction this fall

mlerner10 Charter Schools, Covid-19, Mayor Bowser, PCSB, SBOE Leave a comment

Yesterday, WTOP revealed that all Prince George’s public school parents who want to enroll their Kindergarten through six grade students in virtual learning will be able to do so. This program will be in effect until a Covid-19 vaccine is available for children under twelve years old. It makes sense.

There are still details we do not understand about this virus. My wife Michele and I vacationed in Provincetown, Massachusetts right before Independence Day. No one was wearing masks and social distancing was not being practiced. However, I’m confident that one hundred percent of the people walking on Commercial Street were vaccinated. Approximately, one thousand people contracted the virus that weekend, some needing to be hospitalized. I listened to one individual who became ill state that he had experienced the worse forty-eight hours of his life.

Also Wednesday, the DC State Board of Education sent a letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser requesting that a virtual option be granted for pupils. In rationally spelled out arguments the board requests Ms. Bowser to also relax attendance rules, allow waivers for in-person learning to include one for household members who have a health exemption, end referrals of student absences due to Covid to the Child and Family Services Agency, increase weekly Covid testing to all students and staff from the current policy of ten percent of unvaccinated individuals, add a requirement that all staff and students older than sixteen be required to be vaccinated according to CDC guidelines, and increase resources for mental heath care and treatment. In addition, the communication includes a request that the Mayor issue a new public health emergency so that the city pays for Covid testing, and reverse the mandate that prevents school nurses from caring for students and staff that may have contracted the disease. These recommendations are completely logical to me.

The critical factor is that charter schools may decide on their own to again offer online classrooms. The DC Public Charter School Board can begin today approving amendments from schools that request them to make this a reality. I spoke to one prominent charter leader recently who explained that the school had been encouraged to apply for a virtual teaching amendment only to later be told that the request would be denied. I will not conjecture here about the reason behind the reversal.

CNN reports today that over one hundred thousand people are now hospitalized in the United States, more than double this time last year. From the article:

“With no vaccines available to children under 12 and school starting up across the country, experts are concerned about the growing number of infections among children. Texas Children’s Hospital is seeing an unprecedented surge of coronavirus cases, with a record number of kids being hospitalized for the virus, and children are showing up sicker than before, Dr. Jim Versalovic, interim pediatrician in chief at the Houston-based hospital system told CNN Wednesday.”

Many in our community have first-hand experience with the devastating impact of Covid-19. The impact has been particularly bleak for the Black community, where eighty percent of Covid deaths occurred. It is the prudent and dignified action to take to offer these families a virtual learning option.

D.C. parents and educators fight over bringing children back to in classroom learning

mlerner10 Covid-19, Mayor Bowser, OSSE, SBOE Leave a comment

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has mandated that children return to the classroom when DCPS starts school on August 30th. But many parents and instructors are raising concerns. Yesterday in an excellent article the Washington City Paper’s Ambar Castillo captured these issues as expressed at a State Board of Education meeting last Wednesday evening, which revolve around fear of the rise of Covid-19’s Delta variant, the inability of students to accomplish social distancing due to a lack of space, the fact that there is no available vaccine for children younger than twelve years old, and the lack of a virtual learning option. In addition, parents argued that lunch should be provided outdoors, which led Raymond Weeden, the Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS executive director, to explain that this is not possible for his attendees because of the large number of shootings around the school’s Anacostia neighborhood.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the City Paper piece was the revelation that the founder and long-term head of Achievement Prep PCS has now joined the DC Charter School Alliance. Sarah Lewis is listed on the school’s website as the interim CEO. Ms. Castillo wrote:

“Shantelle Wright, the DC Charter School Alliance Interim Director of Advocacy and Policy, expressed a need for “a citywide contingency plan should the District have an unexpected outbreak that puts schools remaining open at risk.” She said the alliance is asking the mayor to include charter schools when the city coordinates a protocol to tackle an even worse COVID caseload crisis.”

Ms. Wright is expressing a point of view previously expressed by the Alliance that is driving me up the wall. What happened to the days when charters took control of their own destiny? Isn’t it possible for the Alliance or the DC Public Charter School Board to devise a contingency plan for an unexpected outbreak? How hard can it be? Wouldn’t the answer be to return to distance learning lesson plans?

The DCPCS has granted permission to KIPP DC PCS and Maya Angelou PCS to offer limited virtual learning going forward. The board turned down a request for Howard University PCS’s request to do the same although no reason was given. Apparently, AppleTree PCS withdrew an initial request to be able to provide virtual instruction. Friendship PCS already has an online institute.

At the same meeting complaints were raised about Ms. Bowser’s expressed policy that school nurses will not be allowed to care for students or teachers who may have contracted the virus. This would be handled by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. WTOP’s Acacia James captured Washington Latin PCS’s head of school Peter Anderson explaining that his school’s nurse resigned due to this condition. From her article:

“’When we pushed back on this, our nurse also tried to push back on this, was told nothing’s going to change and so she quit,’ Anderson said. ‘And so now we no longer have a nurse and we don’t know what the situation is going to be for us.’”

There is also controversy over testing. Ms. James stated that the city will cover the cost of testing ten percent of students. However, if a school decides to test more than this number, it will have to pay.

It appears that D.C.’s school sectors are about to begin a grand experiment of teaching children in person during a pandemic.

 

This is not America

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On Saturday morning my wife Michele and I brought drug store items over to the 1310 Kitchen and Bar to participate with owner and chef Jenn Crovato’s effort together with the Georgetown Inn to accumulate donated supplies for the approximately twenty-five hundred Afghanistan refugees anticipated to settle in the Washington, D.C. area in the next few weeks. We were escorted into the storage room by one of the hotel’s front desk personnel. She was from Afghanistan and thanked us profusely for our assistance. She then started to cry.

The young woman explained to us that her husband was trapped in the airport in Kabul and she did not know at this point whether he would be able to leave the country. She stated that she had worked for the Americans in her place of birth and that the future for her and her husband was terrifying for people in her situation in Afghanistan with the Taliban in charge. She was able to get out under the Special Immigrant Visa program which is what her husband is also using in his effort to escape. She told us that the remainder of her family back home is moving every couple of days in order not to be killed because of her prior service to the United States.

We also began to cry.

Of course, most United States citizens wanted our military out of Afghanistan. A twenty year war is way too long. I shared the feeling that if the residents of that country could not defend themselves at this point in history as we are about to mark two decades after the 9/11 terrorist’s attack, then it was time to go. However, I have to say that I am disgusted regarding the manner in which we have turned our backs on those that fought with us. The entire troop withdrawal appears to be incompetently planned and executed. This is not how America behaves.

I had the exact same reaction last week when I learned that fifteen year old Kemon Payne was stabbed and killed by a sixteen year old outside of KIPP DC’s Public Charter High School. Both boys were students there, with the victim attending from preschool. The Washington Post reported that the murder resulted from an altercation that started with a friend of Mr. Payne bumping into the suspect.

The nation’s capital is currently experiencing the highest murder rate in sixteen years. The Post story about this incident included this paragraph:

“In the midst of the scrum, police said, Kemon, who started classes last week at KIPP DC College Preparatory public charter school, was stabbed twice in the chest. He died at a hospital. He was the third person to be killed in a matter of hours in D.C.”

I simply do not know what has happened to values in our land. We must get back to a focus on teaching the difference between right and wrong that are the bedrock of our society. In addition, unless parents and the adults in leadership positions are leading by example, then life for us all will never improve.

It is time to wake up to what is important in the world.

D.C. charter school movement shows signs of renewal

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Yesterday, in a highly unusual move, the DC Public Charter School Board held its monthly meeting at one o’clock p.m. instead of in the evening. That is far from the perfect time to ensure maximum public participation. But it is summer and there was only one item on the agenda. The board considered allowing the See Forever Foundation, the organization that currently operates two campuses of the Maya Angelou Public Charter Schools, to open a second high school at the D.C. jail.

The charter amendment request provided an excellent opportunity to hear from the school’s new chief executive officer Clarisse Mendoza Davis. She was so articulate and positive in her remarks that if you are having a bad day I highly recommend watching this hearing so that your frame of mind can be flipped in the completely opposite direction. Ms. Davis spoke passionately about literally meeting these students where they are, including having her staff figure out how to teach young people who are in solitary confinement and permitted only an hour a day to leave their cells. After her presentation, the board quickly and unanimously approved the request.

The opportunity for Maya Angelou came because the D.C. jail’s contract with DCPS to provide instruction to inmates through its Inspiring Youth Program concludes at the end of September. The Department of Corrections then contacted Maya Angelou PCS to see if it would provide the service. It is fascinating to me that the D.C. government reached out to a charter. If it can do it in this instance, then I do not see why it cannot do the same regarding replacing all of the failing traditional schools that are doing a disservice to our children with charters.

The other positive development on Monday was that the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews wrote a glowing column regarding the work of my friend Susan Schaeffler, the CEO of KIPP DC PCS. The occasion was the twentieth anniversary of Ms. Schaeffler opening her first campus in a church basement to teach low income kids. Mr. Mathew remarked:

“As the chief executive of KIPP DC, she now leads 20 schools with 7,300 students from preschool through high school. That is 7 percent of the D.C. public school population. Her team has established high standards for learning that have drawn strong support from D.C. families, while evolving from a focus on just college to a promise to help students achieve successful careers — what KIPP calls “choice-filled lives”— by whatever paths they select.”

I first met Susan and KIPP DC’s president Allison Fansler years ago at one of Fight for Children’s Fight Night charity galas. I’m sure they were invited due to their close relationship with Michela English, then the president and CEO of Fight for Children. I was chairman of the Washington Latin PCS board and invited Susan to become one of our trustees. Washington Latin was sometimes criticized for being a school for affluent families which was not true. In fact, it had one of the most diverse student bodies I had ever seen for a charter. I wanted to do something tangible to demonstrate that we were dedicated to instructing all children in the city. Susan agreed to join us and despite her incredibly busy schedule she attended our meetings and made many strong contributions to our institution. When it became clear that her day job and family commitments were just too much to serve formally at Latin she became a trusted advisor to head of school Martha Cutts until she retired from leading the charter.

Yesterday was a great day.