Chalkbeat

Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school expands real estate footprint in Philadelphia

2026-07-22T21:48:51+00:00

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Pennsylvania’s largest cyber charter school, Commonwealth Charter Academy, is expanding its real estate footprint into Philadelphia with a 32,000-square-foot site at the city’s Navy Yard.

Cyber charter students log onto class from home and complete assignments online, without ever having to attend class in-person. But officials with Commonwealth Charter Academy say the site will have offices for staff, as well as a service center for the school’s growing number of Philadelphia students.

The school’s enrollment has nearly doubled over the past five years, to 35,000 students. Last year, around 5,000 lived in Philadelphia, according to state data.

Philadelphia families have increasingly chosen to enroll kids in cyber schools, often as a way to keep kids safe from gun violence and bullying. But as cyber charter enrollment has grown, some officials and advocates have raised concerns about their academic outcomes and spending.

“With the number of families and students we have down there, we are eager to get back into Philadelphia so those students and families have a connection to their school,” said Timothy Eller, Commonwealth Charter Academy’s chief branding and government relations officer. Though the school previously leased office space in Philadelphia, it closed it a few years ago and had been looking for space to buy ever since, Eller said.

The Navy Yard building cost $6 million, according to documents from the school’s May board meeting obtained by the advocacy group Education Voters of Pennsylvania and shared with Chalkbeat.

Since 2022, the school has spent nearly $50 million purchasing real estate statewide that is currently under development, the documents show.

The Navy Yard building will enable students and parents to connect with teachers, complete state testing, attend tutoring, meet with counselors, and participate in field trips, Eller said. It’s part of the school’s goal to expand from 21 to 27 “family service centers” statewide in the next few years.

But to Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters of Pennsylvania, the real estate holdings “symbolize the excess funding that exists in the cyber charter sector that is not being used to actually educate kids.”

Students at cyber charter schools, including Commonwealth Charter Academy, graduate at a lower rate than the state average. Last year, around 16% of the school’s elementary and middle school students scored proficient on the state math test, lower than the averages for both the state and Philadelphia.

“How do these buildings and the investment in them really further the mission of the cyber charters to provide an online education?” said Spicka.

An audit from the Pennsylvania Auditor General released last year found that Commonwealth Charter Academy’s rapid real estate expansion “is unusual and outside the normal operating model of a cyber charter school.”

“Those dollars could be allocated to improving online educational opportunities and technological advancements rather than increased overhead and costs associated with physical facilities,” the audit stated.

In last year’s state budget, which followed that audit, state lawmakers lowered the amount each district pays cyber charters per student, saving Philadelphia nearly $50 million. This year’s state budget, which Gov. Josh Shapiro signed earlier this month, holds cyber charter funding steady.

Commonwealth Charter Academy’s real estate expansion comes as Philadelphia’s school district plans to close 17 schools beginning next year and works to eliminate a $300 million budget deficit.

Eller said the school does not aim to attract more families through expanding its family service centers, but rather to serve the students already enrolled.

Rebecca Redelmeier is a reporter at Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She writes about public schools, early childhood education, and issues that affect students, families, and educators across Philadelphia. Contact Rebecca at rredelmeier@chalkbeat.org.

57 Philadelphia schools will go remote Wednesday due to heat

2026-05-19T22:23:22+00:00

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School will go remote for students at 57 Philadelphia schools Wednesday due to soaring temperatures, district officials announced Tuesday evening.

That’s over a quarter of the 218 district-operated schools in the city.

All early childhood centers operating at those schools will also shift to virtual learning.

And all in-person after-school activities, including all athletic programs scheduled for Tuesday, are canceled as well.

The move comes after Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg urged the district to declare a heat emergency Monday.

Steinberg said in a statement that the district’s failure to do so on Monday, when temperatures reached above 90 degrees, put students and staff “in uncomfortable and dangerously hot conditions.” Some 53 Philadelphia schools have “insufficient cooling” according to a district spokesperson’s statement from April.

“District administration is directly responsible for mitigating dangerous conditions inside of school buildings,” said Steinberg. “They should declare Wednesday a virtual learning day so that families and staff can plan accordingly.”

Schools were closed Tuesday due to the primary election. Schools sent students home with their Chromebooks on Monday, according to the district’s announcement.

The 57 schools that will shift to remote learning on Wednesday are:

AMY Northwest
Bache-Martin*
Blaine, James*
Building 21
Catharine, Joseph*
Comegys, B.
Comly, Watson
Cooke, J.
Crossan, Kennedy
Disston, Hamilton
Dunbar, Paul
Emlen, Eleanor*
Fell, D Newlin
Fitzpatrick
Fox Chase
Franklin, Ben HS
Girard, Stephen
Harding, Warren
Henry, Charles
Hill-Freedman
Hopkinson, Francis
Houston, Henry
Howe, Julia
Jenks, Abram
Jenks, John S
Lamberton*
Lingelbach, Anna
Loesche*
Ludlow, James
McCloskey, John
McClure, A.*
McMichael, M.*
Mitchell, Weir
Moore, J. Hampton
Motivation
MYA
Olney Elementary
Overbrook ES
Parkway West
Patterson, John*
Powel
Rhawnhurst*
Rowen, William
Roxborough HS
Sayre, William
SLA Middle
Sharswood, George*
Sheppard, Issac
South Phila. HS*
Spring Garden
Spruance, Gilbert*
Sullivan, James
Tilden, William
The U School
Vaux
Wagner, Gen. Louis
Washington, Martha

An asterisk designates schools that have prekindergarten or Head Start on site.

Pennsylvania denies AI cyber charter school application

2025-01-29T20:42:40+00:00

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Pennsylvania’s Department of Education issued a scathing denial on Wednesday for a controversial cyber charter school built around artificial intelligence.

The department determined the application for Unbound Academy “provided no evidence of sustainable support” for the school and said it “lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to provide comprehensive learning experiences to students” and “fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other public schools,” among other concerns.

“There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards,” the denial reads. The application “failed to provide even a list of courses that would be offered to students.”

The founders behind Unbound Academy promised the school would educate students twice as fast by giving them two hours of individually crafted lesson plans and academic work designed by AI tutoring software. In their model, teachers would shift from their traditional roles to instead become guides tasked with motivating and supporting students rather than doing the instructional work of teaching.

Founder MacKenzie Price told Chalkbeat she believes the model will revolutionize education.

Pennsylvania’s Interim Acting Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer determined this week that Unbound’s promises were largely without sufficient proof and did not provide adequate plans to serve students with disabilities or other vulnerable student populations.

“The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards,” the denial letter reads.

The denial letter further assails Unbound Academy’s application as failing to “reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances.”

The state also said the school demonstrated little interest from Pennsylvania families and submitted no petitions or letters of support from parents, students, or educators.

Pennsylvania teachers’ unions celebrated the denial on Wednesday.

“There is no way that two hours of AI-guided learning in core subjects could replace direct instruction from a certified teacher or meet state academic standards,” Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Price, Unbound Academy, and its affiliated private schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Unbound can appeal the state’s decision within 30 days.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Two AI-powered charter schools could soon open in Pennsylvania

2025-01-24T18:44:53+00:00

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Student lesson plans built and personalized by artificial intelligence. Just two hours of classes daily. Frog dissections, defusing bombs, and ascents of Mount Everest — all in virtual reality. And teachers who transform from traditional instructors into “guides.”

That’s the vision MacKenzie Price has for a new cyber charter school in Pennsylvania. In Price’s telling, her AI-powered model turbo-charges students’ academic performance so much that they — and their guides — are free to spurn traditional classes for several hours of the school day and pursue other enriching activities instead. The tech entrepreneur says her program will revolutionize education, and she says she has the numbers to back it up.

But several other states have reviewed her pitch and rejected it. She’s already had to clarify perhaps her most startling claim about whether her schools really employ traditional teachers; in Pennsylvania at least, they would. Critics say what she’s selling is based on selective data from expensive private schools. And they’re deeply skeptical that the core teaching method holds up to scrutiny.

While schools nationwide are trying to incorporate AI-powered instruction into the classic teacher-in-front-of-the-classroom format, Price wants to blow that format up and put AI in the lesson-planning driver’s seat. It’s perhaps no surprise she’s zeroed in on Pennsylvania — it’s become the cyber charter capital of the nation, with 60,000 students enrolled full time in cyber charters in 2023-24. Yet the schools’ often lackluster academic track record and other concerns have led to calls for more accountability and pressure on Gov. Josh Shapiro to place a moratorium on new cybers.

Price told Chalkbeat she’s determined to expand, and she thinks Pennsylvania could be the key. “I want this to impact millions of students,” she said.

The backbone of Price’s schools is 2 Hour Learning — a model she co-founded that relies on a mix of proprietary AI tutoring software and third-party apps like Khan Academy, IXL, and Amplify. She also co-founded the Alpha School in 2014, a group of affiliated private schools which are built around 2 Hour Learning. The platform is also used at several other specialized schools Price is associated with that serve gifted and talented students, students pursuing sports, and refugees.

In fact, Price has sought to start not one but two charter schools in Pennsylvania. By the end of the month, the Pennsylvania Department of Education is slated to decide on whether to give Price’s plan for a cyber charter, Unbound Academy, the green light.

Recent news might not augur well for that application: On Tuesday evening, the Lancaster school district administration advised their school board to reject a proposal to open a brick-and-mortar charter school called Valenta Academy that would use 2 Hour Learning.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the school’s application “at a later date” according to a spokesperson. (Valenta Academy is also operating as a private microschool in Bastrop, Texas.)

Can AI-powered learning ‘help everybody’?

Both Unbound and Valenta would run on the 2 Hour Learning model, although it’s Price’s cyber charter school that’s drawing a lot of the attention.

According to the school’s Pennsylvania application, Unbound Academy would launch in the fall of 2025 with 500 students in grades 4-8 and only four teachers. By its fifth year, Unbound plans to enroll 2,500 students and 76 teachers. And the application projects a 90% student retention rate each year — much higher than other cyber charters have projected in their applications.

In year two, Unbound Academy projects it’ll be ranked in the top half of all Pennsylvania schools, according to the application.

Price said with AI driving each student’s learning, all lessons will fit individual needs. A fifth grader who struggles with reading but excels in math may receive AI instruction for reading at a fourth grade level but 25 minutes later may be doing pre-algebra work. That’s something traditional grade-level schools aren’t set up to do for every student, she said.

“I really believe that this method of educating people is something that can help everybody,” Price said.

As her model has drawn national attention, Price has changed her tune when it comes to perhaps her most dramatic claim.

“We have removed the teacher from the front of the classroom. No one has ever dared to do this before,” reads a promotional booklet on 2 Hour Learning. “Imagine starting a school and declaring, ‘We won’t have any academic teachers.’ We did exactly that!”

But Price acknowledged that what the school does is not quite “exactly that.”

“We have teachers. Teachers are critical to any education system,” Price said. “What we are doing is transforming that role of teachers so that we can allow them to focus on doing what they really do best, which is being able to positively impact students and build connections with them and provide motivation.”

Indeed, the application for Unbound Academy says candidates for the “guide” role must have a bachelor’s degree and hold a valid Pennsylvania teaching certificate to adhere to state teacher certification requirements.

Nevertheless, Price’s model is getting an icy reception in some quarters.

“Just as we do not accept students using AI software to write their essays or complete homework assignments for them, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers, specialists, and support staff in the classroom,” said Arthur Steinberg, who’s president of both the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers’ Pennsylvania affiliate. “There are far too many examples of AI products failing badly for states to do anything less than exercise extreme prudence when considering new AI-based models and schemes.”

AI-powered school makes big test score claims

Unbound’s application repeatedly cites results from the Alpha private schools showing their students not only learn content “twice as fast” as their peers, but can also rapidly learn any grade-level content they may be behind on.

To support this claim, Price points to scores from MAP, a suite of standardized assessments from NWEA. She said that on average, students in the 2 Hour Learning model “experience 2.4 times the academic growth compared to their peers in traditional education settings.”

Alpha schools also promote remarkable numbers, saying for example that its students rank in the 99th percentile of academic performance. Alpha’s website notes that it relies on the Pomodoro technique for time management, a reference to using a kitchen timer to increase productivity.

“The results that I’ve been able to get from our schools have been absolutely phenomenal,” Price said.

Her work doesn’t stop with American students. The 2 Hour Learning Model has been used in a virtual setting by Ukrainian refugees, Price said, and those students are also demonstrating accelerated learning. But those results are not public.

Reactions by other states to Price’s educational model have been mixed.

Late last year, Arizona — where the policy landscape is very receptive to disparate schooling models — approved an application from Unbound Academy. But Arkansas, North Carolina, and Utah have rejected it. Price said she also has an Unbound application pending in South Carolina.

Officials from the North Carolina Charter School Review Board shared several questions and concerns about the school, according to the meeting minutes from their review of Unbound’s application last September.

One official, Alex Quigley, said that Price had made a “compelling” case, and that Unbound’s model could be piloted in schools before scaling up. Yet he also noted that at least one of the Alpha Schools charges $40,000 a year for tuition. While Alpha schools in Texas and Miami do charge thousands for tuition, Price said many of the students at Alpha’s Brownsville, Texas location come from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds and attend on scholarship.

Another North Carolina official, Bruce Friend, said he “wasn’t clear about the role of the teacher compared to the role of AI and the parent.” Board officials also expressed worries about whether the school could meet the mandated academic calendar, student accessibility, and whether it was appropriate for young students to do a “massive” amount of learning online.

Then there’s skepticism about using in-person private school test results to project success with a cyber charter school.

Cyber charter operators in Pennsylvania have told Chalkbeat their students’ test scores “can’t and shouldn’t be compared to brick-and-mortar school scores.” Cyber charter students frequently move in and out of virtual learning environments. Many may be dealing with bullying, mental health issues, family instability, or physical health constraints. In short: They’re different from typical tuition-paying private school students.

Yet Price said she’s undaunted by the differences between students at Alpha schools and those who may enroll in a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania. She believes her 2 Hour Learning technique can work for anyone and can work in traditional public schools too.

“The great news about public charters is we’ve got to report our results. We’ve got to be able to show how we do on standardized tests compared to other students in Pennsylvania,” Price said. “So the proof is going to be in the pudding.”

Many cyber charter teachers ‘struggle to help students’

But supporters of traditional public schools say there’s too much uncertainty embedded in Price’s proposals.

Unbound’s cyber model is unproven and “does not have a track record,” said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a group that is critical of charter schools.

Burris also said she was struck by the large number of Unbound cyber charter applications despite the group only having experience with brick-and-mortar private schools.

“I have never seen this phenomenon before,” Burris said of a group pursuing so many different types of schools at the same time.

Susan Spicka, executive director of the Education Voters PA advocacy group, said she rejected Price’s idea that the day-to-day work of being a classroom teacher is something that can be minimized by or subordinated to AI.

“There are a lot of very highly qualified, excellent teachers in Pennsylvania who teach at cyber charter schools, and they struggle to help students succeed when they are sitting at home on a computer in the online environment,” Spicka said. “It’s hard for kids to learn at home. The level of frustration my kids felt with stuff like that when they were forced to do it [during COVID] was off the charts. They hated it.”

Spicka also questioned how Price’s model serves students with disabilities if there’s no classroom teacher assigned to monitor them while they learn.

Unbound’s application says the school will adhere to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and “will offer a variety of special education programs and related services, delivered both directly by specialized staff and through contracts with external providers” via “in-person visits” or online teletherapy sessions.

For English language learners, “adaptive online programs like Duolingo” will be incorporated into their lessons and parents will have access to translated documents and “real-time interpretations during virtual sessions.”

Regardless, Spicka and others are lobbying for more scrutiny on cyber charters.

For example, they’re looking for lawmakers and Shapiro to add more funding and staff to the state education department so it can increase Pennsylvania’s monitoring of cyber charter schools.

State Sen. Lindsey Williams, a Democrat, has promised to introduce legislation for a moratorium on all new cyber charters until the state is better able to monitor the ones currently in operation.

In a December memo to her colleagues in the state Senate, Williams pointed to research showing the schools “consistently under-perform both brick and mortar charters and district schools,” and “every one of Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools has been identified as needing some level of support and improvement under the state’s accountability system.”

Williams wrote that it’s not surprising that private operators like Price “perceive our state as ripe for profiteering off of Pennsylvania’s children and taxpayers and apply to open new cyber charter schools.”

As for Price, she’s already thinking bigger than Pennsylvania.

She said if the Trump administration “called me up and said, ‘what would you do if you were in charge of K-12 education’?” she’d tell them to embrace “personalized learning technology” — like 2 Hour Learning.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Why thousands of Philly families are switching to cyber charter school

2024-10-01T13:13:47+00:00

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Sameerah Abdullah sends her three school-aged kids to a cyber charter school for some of the same familiar reasons that other families across the nation do, including the flexibility and personalization. For financial literacy class, they go to the bank to open an account. For science class, they head to a museum. On nice days, they try to get out of the city and into the woods.

But her motivations are also deeply personal, cultural, and, in some ways, unique to Philadelphia. Abdullah was an intern for a school guidance counselor in West Philly before having children and was struck by the exhausted teachers, the unappetizing cafeteria food, and the students’ cursing and bad behavior.

The city’s gun violence epidemic has only strengthened her resolve. Her nine-year-old son, Musa, was separated from his father during a mass shooting in a West Philly park during an Eid al-Fitr celebration in April and has struggled with loud sounds ever since.

Another reason, Abdullah thought, to keep her kids home.

“The shooter actually brushed through him when he was running,” said Abdullah, whose children attend Reach Cyber and Commonwealth Charter Academy. “At that moment, it made me realize, I had to teach my kids what to do in a crisis situation.”

Dawud (left) and his brother Musa listen to their Muslim studies instructor. The ability to incorporate religious and cultural practices into their education was a major reason why their mom enrolled them in cyber charter school.

Abdullah is part of a growing number of Black, brown, and low-income Philadelphians turning to cyber charters because they see them as a safe and flexible educational option for their families. Nearly 15,000 of Philadelphia’s more than 197,000 students attended a virtual cyber charter school last year — a 55% increase since the 2020-21 school year.

In fact, Pennsylvania has quietly become the “cyber charter capital of the nation,” according to a report from the education advocacy group Children First PA. Nearly 60,000 students statewide were enrolled full time in cyber charters in 2023-24, according data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Children First researchers found Pennsylvania enrolled more full-time cyber students than any other state — including ones like California, Texas, and Florida with much larger K-12 student populations.

Like traditional charter schools, cyber charters are publicly funded but independently run schools approved by the state Department of Education. There are 13 cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania, as well as a smaller virtual academy run by the Philadelphia school district for the past decade. School districts across Pennsylvania collectively send those 13 schools an estimated $1 billion a year, including almost $270 million from the Philadelphia school district last fiscal year.

Philadelphia families like Abdullah’s told Chalkbeat they are increasingly choosing virtual schools for the schedule flexibility, smaller class sizes, and safety and bullying concerns at their childrens’ traditional schools. Gun violence fears in particular have driven some of the demand for online options, according to families who spoke with Chalkbeat.

While gun violence overall is down in Philadelphia, 40% of gun violence victims this year were younger than 18, according to city data. Though the majority of Philadelphia’s gun violence does not take place on school property, as the Trace recently reported, five Philadelphia schools were among the top 10 nationwide in experiencing shootings near their buildings in the last decade.

But as more families in Philadelphia withdraw from the traditional district in favor of these cyber charter schools, the charter operators have come under fire from public education advocates for failing to improve student performance. The state has acknowledged in its decision letters renewing several cyber schools’ charters that some of the organizations are not performing up to their standards, but has stopped short of revoking their charters.

With cyber charter enrollment rising as traditional district enrollment shrinks, education advocates say the state should be taking a more hands-on approach to ensuring the operators are delivering a quality education — and holding accountable those that don’t.

“These schools are failing to ensure that the kids they bring in are learning and will be able to graduate, ready for a productive career or higher education,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of the public education advocacy group Education Voters PA. “That is a huge problem.”

Asiyah Jones, 6, works on her laptop at her home in Philadelphia. Asiyah likes to draw, and her mom Sameerah said she can incorporate artistic opportunities into Asiyah’s English and math lessons.

Parents on remote learning: ‘I felt it was safer’

Remote learning was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic, when school closures shuttered buildings and students across the country learned online. But parents like Shawna Hinnant enrolled their children in cyber charter schools long before COVID.

A resident of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia — a community that has grappled with a thriving open-air drug market and concentrated gun violence — Hinnant said she didn’t feel comfortable having her kids walk to school on sidewalks littered with discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia.

Additionally, her two sons had experienced bullying at both traditional public schools as well as brick and mortar charter schools.

“That’s why I decided to go with the online school because I felt like it was safer,” said Hinnant.

Hinnant said she was also drawn in by the resources the cyber charter schools offered: Free printers, gift cards to Target for school supplies, and computers.

Many Spanish-speaking Philadelphians are also choosing cyber charters run by Latino-led organizations because of gaps they say persist in the traditional district’s language and cultural services. And Muslim families like Abdullah’s likewise are moving online to incorporate more spiritual, cultural, and religious teachings alongside the traditional curriculum.

Musa and Dawud look at their schoolbooks.

“Now that the whole COVID thing has dwindled down a little bit, it’s kind of like, ‘hey, you know what my kids did really well,’ or ‘I liked having my student at home’ … or ‘I’m not home and I don’t want my child to walk to school.’ It’s a safety issue,” said Lisette Agosto Cintrón, principal at the district-run online school, the Philadelphia Virtual Academy, and a former principal at ASPIRA bilingual cyber charter school in the city.

Agosto Cintrón said she has also worked with families of students with chronic illnesses or are homebound. Her students also come from households that have been disrupted due to domestic violence, refugee situations, or threats of gun violence against families stemming from “neighborhood beefs.”

“Transiency doesn’t matter in my world,” Agosto Cintrón said. “The school travels with the child.”

Some cyber charter schools struggle to perform

Though families told Chalkbeat they’re mostly happy with the education their children are getting online, cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania have reported lower standardized test scores and graduation rates than all schools statewide.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of 2023 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test score data, 36.8% of cyber charter school students scored proficient or better in English language arts, compared to 53.5% of students statewide, and 13.7% scored proficient or above in math, compared to 33.4% statewide. (Their results are mixed when compared to the Philadelphia school district’s scores — 34.2% proficient or better in English and 20.4% proficient or better in math.)

Sarah Cordes, an associate professor and education researcher at Temple University, has researched cyber charter high school students and found that they tend to have worse test scores and higher rates of chronic absenteeism than traditional public school students, even when controlling for the differences in student population. Students who enroll in a cyber charter school are 9.5 percentage points less likely to graduate in four years, Cordes found, and are 16.8 percentage points less likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution.

“What really stood out is just how consistently negative the results were, and that it was across populations,” Cordes said. “It didn’t seem to matter if you came from an urban district or a rural district or a suburban district, it seemed pretty equally bad.” Cordes said her results were consistent across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, “which is unusual in education research.”

The state has considered cyber charters’ lagging test scores when authorizing or renewing the schools, but, in most cases, has stopped short of revoking their charters.

Take Reach Cyber, the school that Musa and his brother Dawud attend. In July, Pennsylvania Education Secretary Khalid Mumin wrote in a letter to the school that for the past few years “students in all grade levels and all subjects have significantly underperformed on the PSSA and Keystone Exams, specifically when compared with traditional public schools.”

Still, despite these concerns, the education department granted Reach a five-year charter renewal.

The state education department included identical language in the renewal decision letters for PA Distance Learning Charter School and Insight PA Cyber Charter School.

To be sure, test score data comes with complexities. Unstable home situations don’t often create ideal test taking environments, cyber charter operators have said. What’s more, many families who choose cyber charter schools because of their nontraditional outlook on education are more likely to opt-out of standardized testing.

And cyber charter operators argue that students perform better on state tests the longer that they attend the schools, but their student populations tend to move in and out of virtual learning. (Cordes’ analysis, though, didn’t back up that assertion at the high school level.)

Jane Swan, CEO of Reach Cyber, said in an email that “cyber charter school student scores can’t and shouldn’t be compared to brick-and-mortar school scores.” Swan said the school conveys the importance of state tests to families but “many families invoke their right to refuse testing due to philosophical, health, or logistical reasons.” She also noted that students arrive at the school “significantly below grade-level proficiency.”

Parents like Abdullah said they look beyond test scores and overall school performance when choosing cyber charters.

“I think that with my children, the testing is important, but at the end of the day, character building is important, being responsible is important, being a good neighbor. Community work, that’s important as well,” she said. Abdullah is also an experienced educator herself and is pursuing her doctorate in education online with a focus on student safety and mental health.

Beyond performance, critics of cyber charters accuse them of drawing vital funding away from struggling traditional public schools, since district schools send cyber charters the same per-student tuition it would spend educating a child in one of its classrooms, minus some costs for transportation and facilities. Districts must send this tuition payment for every student who lives in the city but is enrolled in a cyber charter, regardless of whether that child was ever educated by the district.

Advocates have called foul on the state’s four largest cyber charter schools for using those funds to amass nearly $500 million in real estate, such as office space and parking lots, and more than $20 million on advertising and gift cards. Cyber charter leaders have defended their spending, saying their schools retain physical assets to protect their finances from instability. Furthermore, the operators say they need buildings to house technology infrastructure like servers, office space for school staff, and “family service centers” where parents can get in-person assistance.

Dawud spends some time on his laptop for class, but his family also makes sure to build in time for recess and playing outside.

Pennsylvania lawmakers seek education reforms

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Harrisburg has put forth efforts to reform the way cyber schools are funded and monitored, but the boldest changes haven’t gained much traction.

The most recent state budget Gov. Josh Shapiro signed in July included $100 million to reimburse school districts for payments they make to cyber charter schools and some alterations to the way special education students are counted and funded. But the wholesale reforms some lawmakers had proposed did not make it into the final budget.

Calls by local school boards for more oversight cross party lines, according to Lawrence Feinberg, director of the Keystone Center for Charter Change, who has been following the growth of cyber charter schools.

“I know public education is far from perfect, but theoretically, there’s accountability built into it. It seems to me that for 20 some years, accountability has been missing from the cyber charter arena, both fiscally and performance-wise,” Feinberg said.

Despite the drawbacks, parents are still seeking online learning

While advocates fight for more oversight of cyber charters, some families in Philadelphia say they’re not happy with their traditional neighborhood schools and don’t have time to wait for the district to improve.

Still, for some students, the adjustment to online learning can be hard.

Starlynne Santiago, 18 and an engineering technology student at Drexel University, said making the switch to a cyber charter was “scary” at first for herself and her brother, Skyler Rodriguez, 12. But she forged close bonds, even over the computer screen.

“Overall, I think the education was the same, and I feel like the connections I had with the teachers were way closer than what I had in-person school,” she said.

Ultimately, Santiago was able to graduate a year early from Reach Cyber by taking summer classes and working with career coordinators to focus her studies on engineering.

Her brother said it’s been harder for him to make friends in online school, and while he wants to finish middle school virtually, he’s not sure it’s the right fit for him long term.

Sameerah Abdullah is an experienced educator herself and has been supporting her kids through their online classes.

Musa, active and gregarious, and his mom have different philosophies about his future as well.

Though he loves going to school with his siblings, “once I get to middle school, I would like to go to a real school,” Musa said. “I don’t want to be in middle school and have my whole life be on a laptop. … I like to talk and help others.”

Abdullah said she recognizes her children are outgoing and need friends, socialization, and time outdoors. She said she works hard to tailor their online school experience so that they can travel, meet up with other online families, take field trips, and play with their friends in the neighborhood.

Her goal, she said, is to one day create a space where families like hers can join up, and do online homeschooling together.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

College Together provides different path for Philadelphia students to earn their degrees

2024-07-02T10:00:00+00:00

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Sanya Sek worked hard in high school. She got all As, including in Advanced Placement courses. She applied to college and even got into Bryn Mawr.

But her parents, both of whom had fled the Khmer Rouge in war-torn Cambodia when they were young, could not afford college, even though they prized education. The financial aid she was offered fell short of covering all the costs, including room and board, books, and the myriad ancillary fees. So she enrolled instead in Community College of Philadelphia.

“I took the safer option,” she said. “I had hopes to get into a decent college, but I felt the hard work I put in didn’t get the result I wanted.”

Sanya Sek said she benefited from College Together's project-based approach to learning.

But then Sek, 22, met Oscar Wang and discovered College Together, and a whole new set of doors opened for her.

Wang, 32, has worked since 2013 on mentoring first-generation students from Philadelphia to attend college. He started a group called Mentor for Philly while still a student at Haverford, which morphed into Philly College Team after he graduated in 2014.

But after working with dozens of students, he realized that most never finished their degree.

Mentorship, he reasoned, wasn’t enough. Enter College Together, which now has a staff of six, a spacious Center City office, and counts 21 college graduates who have passed through its program, including Sek and Rodriguez.

“It’s been a 10-year journey to answer a single question, how to get more Philadelphia students not just into, but through college,” Wang said. And not just through college, he added, but armed with marketable skills and free of debt.

Pursuing a degree through College Together is affordable – even no cost to students who qualify for Pell Grants. It has several partners, including the school district, the Mastery and KIPP charter networks, and foundations including the Philadelphia Foundation, Claneil Foundation, and the Samuel L. Fels Fund. Most crucially, it partners with Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Campus, an online school, through which students can earn their degree by doing a series of projects that develop real-world skills necessary to succeed in today’s job market.

While in the program, they can do their coursework from home or from College Together’s Center City office on Walnut Street, where they have access to one-on-one tutoring, laptops, research assistance and, often, food.

The help he needed to stay on track

MarcAngelo Rodriguez, 26, grew up on the mean streets of Kensington, stayed out of trouble, and graduated from Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School in 2016. He enrolled in CCP, but left within a year. Then he tried training to be an automotive technician at Universal Technical Institute, a for-profit trade school.

When that didn’t pan out either, he worked different jobs – in retail, food services, security. His real goal was to be a police officer, and ultimately a detective.

Marcangelo Rodriguez dreams of becoming a detective. He was one of 21 students who earned a degree through College Together this year.

Rodriguez heard about College Together and got in touch with Wang. Now both he and Sek possess college degrees they likely would not have attained otherwise. Sek is pursuing a career in communications, and Rodriguez has dreams of becoming a detective.

Typical students in Philadelphia, especially those in neighborhood high schools – mostly low-income young people of color – have been “undervalued, ignored, or overlooked by traditional institutions and structures” and needed an alternative path, Wang said. These are students “who need flexibility, for instance, so they are not punished for missing class because they had to babysit.”

He chose to partner with SNHU Global Campus because “it was built with working adults in mind,” Wang said. In establishing College Together, he discovered that in designing its online degree program, SNHU educators quizzed employers like Boston Children’s Hospital on what skills they look for, and “reverse engineered” their coursework with the goal of building student competencies. SNHU is accredited by the New England Commission on Higher Education.

Today, there are a dozen organizations around the country like College Together that work with SNHU in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans. Together they form the Post-Secondary Success Collective.

“This is what they call the community-partner model,” Wang said, explaining that in order to access SNHU’s courses offered through its competency-based innovation lab, students have to go through a nonprofit.

The tuition is $2,333 a semester, and students can double-up on courses year-round without paying more money. He said that Mastery, for instance, touts the program as the only pathway in Philadelphia through which students can earn a bachelor’s degree for under the amount of a federal Pell grant – essentially making it free to them.

Students prize learning by doing

Sek’s parents pushed her to do well and were proud of her achievements, but their culture prioritized keeping her close over anything else, she said. For high school, she could have attended a top magnet school – she got into Central and Palumbo, among others. But her parents didn’t want her going far away – she had never even learned how to use SEPTA.

So she attended Mastery-Thomas, a charter high school that was a 5-minute walk from her South Philadelphia home.

It turned out to be a good choice, she said, with a small student body, caring teachers, and a dual-enrollment option that allowed her to earn college credits in high school. But she didn’t get much help with financial literacy – she didn’t understand loans, and her parents were all about “save money, save money,” she said. That’s how she ended up at CCP.

It wasn’t easy at first; she started during the pandemic year. Plus, despite excelling in AP courses, she was done with learning based on reading a textbook “and answering multiple choice questions … I was forcing myself to memorize everything and not retaining anything. The purpose of learning was not there for me.”

Things got better after she switched her major from liberal arts to business. After getting her associates degree, she figured she’d save money and attend a local school like Drexel or Temple. That’s when her high school adviser, with whom she kept in touch, told her about College Together.

The project-based approach to learning at SNHU suited her. While earning her degree in management, she could engage in real-world problem solving. In one scenario, she had to explain how she would de-escalate a conflict between two employees in a work setting. Another required her to set up a business plan for a new pasta restaurant in a neighborhood with a competitor just a few blocks away. To do that, she had to research demographics and develop an advertising pitch to build clientele. She relished these kinds of tasks. “They require critical thinking and emotional intelligence,” she said.

So she not only got her degree from SNHU, but convinced Wang to hire her as College Together’s first communications director.

Rodriguez made it through Kensington CAPA, appreciating its newly built campus, but also sometimes “acting like a dumb teenager who followed the crowd” and neglecting his studies. As a result, he wasn’t well prepared for CCP. While he aced courses that focused on his interest, criminal justice, he faltered in others, like English.

Plus, life happened: He got married and had a daughter.

In 2022, he said, “I did an evaluation of my life, I was still working in retail, I was 24 and I had a kid. I felt I was at a dead end … I knew I wanted a career, and I had ambitious goals for myself.” He had heard about College Together through a friend, “and Oscar invited me to join the program.”

It took him two years to get his degree from SNHU. During his college experience, he was determined to do well. Like Sek, he appreciated the real-world nature of the learning experience.

“Teachers were willing to put in the work to invest in me, and them investing in me made me want to invest in myself,” he said.

Now he is in the process of applying to the police department.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Cyber charter enrollment is soaring, but Pa. has outdated funding system and weak oversight, report finds

2022-01-28T18:59:08+00:00

Pennsylvania has the highest number of students in cyber charter schools and spends the most on them of any state, but has the weakest oversight of academic and fiscal performance, a new study has found.

The report by the advocacy group Children First found that enrollment in Pennsylvania’s 14 cyber schools soared by 59% during the 2021-21 school year to nearly 61,000 students, or about three times the size of the Pittsburgh school district, the state’s second largest after Philadelphia.

“All 14 cybers scores below state average in reading and math,” said ML Wernecke, the primary author of the report and director of the PA Charter Performance Center, a project of Children First. The charters’ high school graduation rate is 54%, well below the state average, she said.

But almost all – 99.7% – of charter enrollment growth over the past two years has come in these online schools, the report said, fueled by the pandemic.

At the same time, the amount that districts are paying in the form of tuition for their students who attend cyber charter schools is approaching $1 billion “and have doubled over the last five years,” Wernecke said.

The report attributed the surge in enrollment in part to the concerns of parents “whether schools would open and stay open during the initial year of the pandemic.” And it warned that the “persistence of COVID and its multiple variants means that this trend is likely to continue, especially in light of pervasive advertising on TV and other media by cyber charter schools.”

Another recent study by Education Voters PA using information from a right-to-know request found that cyber charters spent $35 million in advertising over the last two years.

The Pennsylvania Coalition for Public Charter Schools could not be reached for comment.

Cyber charters are authorized by the state, not local districts, which nevertheless absorb the cost under a 20-year-old funding system that has never been updated.

Under the system, there is no standard tuition rate for cybers; they get the same amount as brick-and-mortar charters, even though their costs are less.

Districts are required to pay tuition for each student who enrolls in any charter, an amount calculated based on a district’s own spending. The per-pupil rate can vary from around $8,900 to $24,000 per student.

There are also different rates depending on whether a student needs special education services, also calculated based on a district’s own spending and unrelated to the actual cost of educating the student.

Because the districts have no control over the cyber schools, opposition to the current system has united rural and urban districts in urging change. The school boards in 410 of Pennsylvania’s 500 districts have passed resolutions calling for charter funding reform.

A bill is pending in the legislature that would overhaul charter funding in the state; among its provisions is to set one payment for cyber charter schools.

“Charter schools are here to stay, we’re not calling for abolishing them,” said Bob O’Donnell, superintendent of the State College Area School District. “But we have to align funding with actual expenses.”

Cyber charters especially, he said, “don’t share building and maintenance costs. Many are receiving a higher rate per-pupil than they should.”

Three state legislators spoke during Thursday’s virtual press conference announcing the report’s findings, two Democrats and a Republican. And while all said they favored school choice, including cyber charters, they agreed that the law governing how charters are paid for, especially cyber charters, is long overdue for revision.

Rep. Curtis Sonney, an Erie Republican who is the majority chair of the House Education Committee, said he was dismayed at a lack of movement in the legislature on the issue.

“We’re continually moving charter reform legislation out of the House. There is a frustration in not being able to get anything across the finish line,” he said.

Rep. Joseph Ciresi, a Democrat from Montgomery County and sponsor of HB272, which would reform charter funding and regulation, called the current law “way outdated…it’s costing our districts hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Rep. Jordan Harris, a Philadelphia Democrat, also said reform was long overdue.

“We need to update charter law and address oversight and funding, but also address the fact that so many parents are dissatisfied with the option provided every day in our traditional schools,” he said. “We cannot ignore the fact that parents are making the decision to want something different.”

Philly school enrollment continues decline, while cyber charters see surge

2021-11-24T15:52:36+00:00

Philadelphia’s overall public school enrollment has dipped by about 4,300 students compared to the 2020-21 school year, falling from 202,944 last school year to 198,645 this year.

This amounts to an overall drop of 2% as district-run schools, brick-and-mortar charters and alternative schools all saw declines. But enrollment in online options has surged as families remain wary of sending their students back into buildings after nearly a full year of virtual learning due to the pandemic.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of preliminary data provided by the district, enrollment in district-run schools declined by 4%, from 119,492 to 114,902; in charter schools by 2%, from 68,364 to 66,890; and in alternative schools, which mostly enroll those in danger of not finishing high school, by 6% — from 2,925 to 2,750.

Enrollment in the district’s small virtual academy, however, has tripled since last year, from 637 students to 1,925. The category that includes cyber charter enrollment rose by 16%, from 12,132 to 14,087. (Special education students attending approved private schools at district expense are counted in the same category as cyber charters.)

Virtual schools account for only a small fraction of the district’s total enrollment, and their gains weren’t enough to offset the district’s enrollment declines in nearly every grade. Pennsylvania’s cyber charters, which have low overall records of student achievement, are chartered by the state; the district has no control over them but must pay for any city students who enroll.

Earlier grades were the hardest hit, with elementary schools accounting for more than 80% of the drop. Every grade from first through fifth lost more than 700 students compared to last year.

The biggest enrollment decrease during the pandemic was in kindergarten, which saw a 30% drop last year compared with the 2019-2020 school year — three times the nation’s average decline in kindergarten enrollment. A Chalkbeat analysis of the data shows that kindergarten enrollment went up by about 1,100 students for the 2021-22 school year, but it is still below pre-pandemic numbers and district projections.

Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early learning, said she was encouraged by the increase and said kindergarten is now at 91% of capacity.

“I think we’re bouncing back,” Castelbuono said. Pre-pandemic, she said that between 95% and 96% of available kindergarten seats were normally filled.

She added that while the district is still doing outreach, “most of the families that want to send their kids back have sent their kids back” by this time in the school year.

At a Board of Education meeting last week, Superintendent William Hite said that this year’s kindergarten enrollment “is still lower, not as much as a year ago, but still lower than what has been anticipated.”

The only other grade where enrollment increased this year over last year is ninth grade.

Hite also said that school officials are working on a plan to find any missing students — those who were enrolled last year but can’t be accounted for this year.

The district has been going through a series of engagement and re-engagement activities with city agencies like the Department of Human Services, or DHS. While it is possible to track students who move from district to charter schools, or vice versa, those who move to other districts or enroll in non-public schools are harder to trace.

Johann Calhoun contributed reporting

Philadelphia widens free internet eligibility for families with children in school

2020-12-18T23:46:59+00:00

Do you have Internet Essentials? Take this survey about the quality of your connection.

Philadelphia has expanded eligibility for PHLConnectED, its program to provide free internet access to families with school-age children.

City officials intensified outreach this week to families who now qualify for the program.

Under the new guidelines, all families who participate in public benefit programs with income qualifications, such as food stamps, will be eligible. Students who receive special education services or are learning English also qualify.

“We want to connect as many families as possible to reliable internet access,” said Mayor Jim Kenney in announcing the outreach campaign. “As digital learning continues, access to high-speed internet is more important than ever.”

Among the main beneficiaries of the expansion are customers who were enrolled in Comcast’s low-cost Internet Essentials program — especially those who fell behind on their payments — before the pandemic forced most learning online and Comcast began offering free access to new customers.

Even at $9.95 a month, the cost can prove too much for families who are struggling with other obligations, especially those who lost jobs during the pandemic.

“Throughout this process, we’ve also learned that many families already have internet service, but struggle to afford it,” said Chief Information Officer Mark Wheeler. Those already enrolled were not eligible for the two-months-free offer Comcast made last spring to new customers when some virtual learning began for almost all the schools in the city.

About 7,000 people signed up for the Comcast offer between April, when the offer was made, and August, when PHLConnectED started as a joint venture with the city, school district, internet service providers, and several foundations and non-profits. The $17 million program promised free internet until June 2022 to eligible households with students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in the Philadelphia school district, as well as at most charters and some private schools.

Those 7,000 families have since been notified that they could enroll in PHLConnectED and receive free internet through the end of the 2021-2022 school year. That group accounts for more than half of the 12,000 families PHLConnectED has enrolled since its August launch, according to officials.

As part of PHLConnectED, the city designated three organizations to employ “digital navigators” who track down families, tell them about their eligibility, and help them complete the multi-step process.

“Most of the people I have talked to on the phone about Internet Essentials and PHLConnectED, they don’t know where to start,” said Miyo Imai, a digital navigator for the ExCite Center of Drexel University.

Besides Drexel, the other organizations with digital navigators are Community Learning Center, an adult literacy organization, and SEAMAAC, an advocacy group for immigrants.

Even before PHLConnectED started, Drexel and the other organizations had been reaching out to clients trying to help them with their internet connectivity and to obtain Chromebooks or other devices.

Signing up for PHLConnectED requires several steps, and many families just didn’t follow through.

“They have to take the initiative,” said Imai, who is a Drexel student studying computer science and psychology. “In the beginning, we weren’t getting very many calls, and we weren’t sure how to get the word out there.” It’s a Catch-22, she said — promoting a program online doesn’t work if people aren’t online.

“It was hard to get the word out to people who really needed it,” she said. The city turned to advertising through other means, which helped somewhat, she said.

But altogether, she estimates that she only succeeded with about 10 families to complete the process from beginning to end.

To sign up for the program, families can call a 24-hour, 211 hotline. They get a promotional code from the district or their participating school, which they must then activate before receiving the equipment they need to get online. Some families, such as those with less stable living situations, get hotspots through T-Mobile if that will better serve their needs.

Imai and other navigators said many families are in situations where other life challenges take priority over signing up for internet access.

“We have people coming back to us who don’t know how to set it up once they get a kit from Comcast,” Imai said, “Some have data plans on their phone, so we can send them links. But with other people, it is harder. They’ve never seen a modem or a router, they don’t have any idea what to do with them. There is such a range of people’s experiences with tech.”

Other people have called the Drexel navigators to say that their internet speeds are “ridiculously low. “One woman said she couldn’t open up a single web page,” she said.

Existing customers whose bills are in arrears will not have those obligations forgiven, but have not had their service cut off and will be able to receive free service through June 2022.

Before the expansion, eligible families included those with no access or access only through mobile phones, anyone experiencing housing insecurity, or those who had students who spent their days with caregivers at locations without access.

Board of Ed makes a bumpy return to meeting in person

2020-08-14T05:11:11+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In what proved to be a long, disjointed evening marred by technical difficulties, the Philadelphia Board of Education held an “in-person” joint committee meeting on Thursday, its first non-virtual session since the arrival of the COVID pandemic in March.

The four-hour-plus meeting covered a range of topics but resulted in no specific recommendations from the two board committees represented: Finance & Facilities and Student Achievement & Support.

The evening’s most concrete lesson: Faithful fidelity to COVID safety protocols requires constant vigilance by leadership. That was brought home by board member Angela McIver, who on at least four occasions had to remind District staffers to sanitize the speaker’s lectern and its PowerPoint “clicker” before speaking into the microphone.

“You all should just be happy that you’re not my children,” McIver joked.

Otherwise, it was an evening of considering and discussing a variety of short- and long-term School District projects, periodically interrupted by problems with phone connections, poor audio, confusion over procedure, and breakdowns in video streaming. The agenda included an update on reopening plans, a debate on a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, and a lengthy presentation about a proposed tax abatement for a South Philadelphia redevelopment project.

Where needed, votes on those items will take place at next week’s board action meeting on Aug. 20.

Board members also heard a sobering financial update from Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, whose latest figures show that the District remains on solid footing, but faces a future in which costs and revenues alike are increasingly difficult to predict.

Much will depend on additional federal stimulus, Monson said, but prospects for the proposed HEROES Act have dimmed as talks have stalled in Washington.

“The single biggest thing is going to be the federal response, HEROES or whatever they want to call it,” Monson said. “I’m less optimistic than I was a couple weeks ago … We’ll keep working and talking to folks about why we need those funds.”

Money matters: A positive balance for now

Board meeting photo by Lauren Wiley

While member Maria McColgan joined the session by phone, the seven other board members were present, seated at individual desks set six feet apart at the front of the District’s central office auditorium. Most wore royal blue T-shirts promoting the U.S. Census, the backs of which read: “I live, I vote, I count.” District officials sat, spaced apart, in what is normally the audience seating, and they came forward to speak as needed.

In his presentation, Monson told the board that the District’s current fiscal year looks on track to end with a fund balance of $179 million, slightly larger than anticipated due to cost savings associated with closing school buildings in March.

But the year to come will be a challenge, he said, due to questions about costs and tax revenue.

“For the economy to stabilize would probably be the single most important thing,” Monson said.

On the cost side, he said, “there are so many changing guidelines,” and that makes assessing costs difficult. Monson said his team is working with multiple projections for the costs associated with various scenarios, as recommendations evolve for pandemic-related items such as personal protective equipment, ventilation, and instructional supports.

Likewise, with revenue, District officials won’t start to get useful data until the fall, but Monson anticipates some declines. Locally, for example, real estate tax revenue will probably remain stable, but liquor-by-the-drink revenue looks “shaky,” he said.

For immediate needs, Monson said, state officials still have two big pots of cash they can dip into: the governor’s $60 million emergency fund and the far larger remnants of Pennsylvania’s share of federal stimulus from the CARES Act – about $1 billion. Some of that money could go to school districts, but for now, all of it remains in Harrisburg, unspent.

“We’re essentially waiting for the governor and the legislature to act,” said Monson. “The need is now.”

However, when asked by member Lee Huang, Monson told board members that so far the District hasn’t had to compromise for lack of finances.

“We have not said ‘no’ to anything,” Monson said. “There are enough reserves set aside [and] this buys us time. … There’s a point where we’re not able to do all the things we want to do now. We’re not there yet.”

Reopening: Principals’ plans due soon

With the start of virtual classes just weeks away, Chief of Staff Naomi Wyatt told the board that principals have just one week to submit their schools’ digital learning plans for review.

Few principals have yet done so. “All [plans] will be submitted and approved by Aug. 21,” Wyatt said. “To date, two have been submitted and approved.”

The principals’ plans are meant to show that they’re ready to manage their school’s students and staff safely and effectively as the virtual school year begins. Students will learn online until at least November. Principals have been asked to spell out plans for class schedules, staffing, student support, teacher observation and training, and more.

Principals have said that they have numerous unanswered questions about such matters, including allowable schedules for teachers and online privacy protocols for students. None testified at Thursday’s session, but Robin Cooper, head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, has said that the board can expect to hear from her members at its action meeting next week.

Wyatt also spoke extensively about cleaning, saying that 42% of District buildings have been completely cleaned, with the rest soon to be completed. She also said that ventilation assessments of all rooms in all buildings will be completed by Oct. 9, part of a larger “readiness” push. District officials are in the process of gathering 250,000 masks and 19,000 hand-sanitizer units, Wyatt said, and systems will soon be in place to track the need for such equipment at each site.

Four charters to try ‘hybrid’ learning

District officials told the board that all 86 Philadelphia charter schools had submitted their required “health and safety plans” to state officials. Christina Grant, head of the District’s Charter Schools Office, told the board that although most charters will start the year virtually, four have proposed “hybrid” plans with some in-person instruction. She did not name the four.

Grant’s office plays no formal role in evaluating, authorizing, or monitoring the implementation of the charters’ safety plans, and she has advised that parents who have questions about particular schools contact those charters’ boards.

However, the Charter Schools Office is involved in some discussions about interconnected services such as transportation, because the District pays for transit for charter students. “The four schools that are exploring hybrid options, to the extent that they need busing, we’re going to provide that,” said Grant.

Black Lives Matter resolution uncertain

The board discussed a proposed resolution supporting District participation in a “Black Lives Matter Week of Action.” The resolution would encourage District officials to “participate in the national Black Lives Matter At School Week … during the first week of February each year.”

Some Black board members found the resolution wanting. Board President Joyce Wilkerson said she had “no interest” in supporting rhetorical statements when more substantive action is merited.

“It isn’t enough to say, ‘Black lives matter.’ We need to do more,” Wilkerson said.

Board member Julia Danzy said she would like to see racism addressed comprehensively, and all year round. “We don’t just exist in February. We exist 12 months of the year,” she said.

Other members urged action on the resolution, including Lee Huang and Mallory Fix Lopez, who said that a vote in favor of the resolution next week would be a good way to show board support for students and staff as the school year begins.

Consultants for antiracism training

The board debated a proposed $700,000 contract for the Massachusetts consulting firm KJR Consulting, focusing in particular on a $150,000 portion earmarked for “antiracism” training for Superintendent William Hite’s 110-person executive team.

Some members questioned the need to hire a Boston-area firm with little experience in social justice when many in Philadelphia have done extensive work in that area. “We talk about building internal capacity,” said Fix Lopez. “How does that help internal capacity?”

Added member Leticia Egea-Hinton: “Is there no one in Philadelphia who does this work, that understands Philly? … I sort of feel that we really needed someone that was closer to our roots.”

Wyatt said that KJR was a familiar enterprise that has good relationships with District executives and can build on past “mindset” work it has done with central office staff, in which it helped promote the idea that “all students can learn.”

KJR has worked with the District since 2018, Wyatt said, and is well-positioned to engage in hard conversations.

“They do understand the leadership team,” she said. “Because we’ve worked with them, they’re going to be able to lead us in a familiar way.”

Wyatt said the District would bring in other partners, too.

“We’re also working with Philadelphia groups,” she said. “We’re not working exclusively with folks that aren’t from Philly.”

Member Ameen Akbar said he was concerned that the District’s various anti-racism efforts weren’t as well coordinated as they could be. Principals, teachers, and administrators are all involved in various initiatives, he said, but the overall effort “feels like it’s missing some pieces. … It just feels piecemeal,” Akbar said.

Request on Keystone Opportunity Zone

The Philadelphia Department of Commerce is requesting the District’s support for a series of tax abatements at the site of a former South Philadelphia refinery. Duane Bumb, the city’s deputy director of commerce, gave a detailed presentation about development plans for the 1,300-acre site near the Philadelphia International Airport, which officials hope to make a Keystone Opportunity Zone.

That would spare the developers a number of costs, such as some sales and occupancy taxes, but require them to make “Payments in Lieu of Taxes”, or PILOTS, amounting to 110% of the assessed real estate value. The PILOT agreement for the South Philadelphia site would guarantee the District about $746,000 annually, Bumb said.

Board member Akbar said the massive development project provided a “real opportunity” for internships and other student benefits. Filling out the various parcels is expected to take a decade or more.

And although Bumb was optimistic about such prospects, he could offer no guarantees. Board President Wilkerson said she worried that once the board gives its blessing to the project, the annual PILOT payment will be the extent of the benefit.

“My concern is, we’ll sign off and then we’ll never see [the developers] again,” Wilkerson said. “People will ask us, ‘Where are the jobs?’ and we’ll say, ‘uhhhh.’”

City launches program to provide free internet access to 35,000 families

2020-08-06T21:38:11+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The city and the Philadelphia School District are tackling the digital divide with the launch of PHLConnectED, a $17 million program to offer free Comcast Internet Essentials service to 35,000 families of K-12 students for two years.

The program will be paid for by public funds and private donors. Officials said Comcast is contributing $7 million to the effort. The city will use $2 million in local CARES Act funding, $1 million from the William Penn Foundation, and additional grants from the Neubauer Family Foundation, the Philadelphia School Partnership, and others. The School District and a number of charter schools also are investing in the project. So far, $11 million has been raised.

The city hopes to secure the funding to extend the program beyond two years. Mark Wheeler, Philadelphia’s chief information officer, said this effort addresses “an immediate need,” adding that the city is engaged in a longer-term effort to bridge the digital divide with the goal “to address the needs of all households beyond K-12 and make it permanent.”

“The digital divide has been a long-standing and significant barrier” for public school families, said Superintendent William Hite. He said he believes the program will close that divide.

The city will spend $7.2 million on two years of wired internet access, $5.1 million on hotspots and $1.7 million on a digital navigator program to offer families training and technical support. The navigators also will assist multilingual families and those who need services for students with special needs.

The program is being implemented with a “strong diversity and equity lens,” said Wheeler.

In recent weeks, public education advocates, including teachers and principals, have rallied for free access for students. After today’s announcement, several key advocates, including the group Movement Alliance Project (formerly Media Mobilizing Project) and City Council member Helen Gym, reiterated calls for Comcast to open up residential hotspots to provide reliable universal access across the city.

“I don’t believe that the District, which is facing a looming billion-dollar deficit, should be paying any extra money to Comcast or any network provider just to get its students online,” Gym said in a statement. “Paying for individual hotspots or trying to hardwire families address by address is extremely complicated in a city where 19,000 evictions occurred last year alone – pre-pandemic. Any address-based system will fall short as families unfortunately become more transient as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and fallout.”

Comcast has said opening up residential hotspots is technically problematic and would result in slower service for paying customers.

Wheeler echoed Comcast’s arguments against opening up residential WiFi hotspots as unrealistic, saying the connections would be too unreliable and variable based on the distance capabilities of household networks. Additionally, private customers would have to volunteer to donate a portion of their bandwidth for public use. “I don’t see how it is workable or feasible,” he said.

Wheeler said the city selected Comcast to provide the free internet access because the hometown company is the only provider that covers all city neighborhoods. T-Mobile will be providing the hotspots for students who are housing-insecure.

The School District and city are reaching out to families who they know are in need of help accessing the internet, based on information from the spring when the pandemic forced schools to close and students to quickly pivot to online learning. Families with children enrolled in the District who need access are being asked to call 215-400-5300 if no one has yet reached out to them.

“We are trying to reach the hardest-to-reach families,” said Otis Hackney, the city’s chief education officer. “Students who are not connected.”

When schools shut down in March, Comcast offered the first two months of Internet Essentials free to new customers. After that, it costs $10 a month. The company’s CEO Brian Roberts and his wife also donated $5 million to help the District purchase laptops for students who didn’t have computers at home.

However, some Comcast customers said they had trouble qualifying for the free service because of past-due bills or lack of proper documentation. Under this new initiative, schools will give any household who lacks access a code to use to call a hotline to enroll in the program. Families will not be screened with the usual eligibility rules. Comcast will then turn on internet service, with the cost covered by the money that has been raised. The city also is bulk-purchasing home wiring for the internet through Comcast.

City and school officials released statements in favor of the PHLConnectED, with most emphasizing the need for universal internet access across the city and noting that this is just a first step.

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Philadelphia was grappling with a crisis of poverty and inequality that left far too many of our vulnerable young residents without access to quality educational resources that they deserve,” said City Council President Darrell Clarke in a statement. “The events of 2020 have made it clear that internet access is not a luxury, it’s a basic necessity and we should make every effort to provide it to our residents.” He thanked the coalition for making digital equity “a top priority.”

Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children & Youth, said, “Brokering this partnership to tackle and overcome the myriad of connectivity challenges students faced last spring is remarkable and will make a world of difference for students in this city. There is a great deal more to be done to make virtual instruction meaningful, but it all begins with dependable connectivity, reliable internet access with reasonable speed.”

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan called the announcement a “welcome step forward.”

“Our students will be depending on access this fall so that, in these trying times, they are able to connect with their educators and their peers while staying healthy at home,” he said.

In a statement to the Notebook, Robin Cooper, president of Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, said: “CASA requested for Comcast to assist the School District of Philadelphia in ensuring that the equity issue was resolved. We are almost there.”

“This collective and moral responsibility can be met if we are truly attempting to close the achievement gap,” said Cooper, who protested in front of Comcast headquarters with CASA on Wednesday. “Comcast, who has a 40-year rich history in the city of Philadelphia, can truly put children and families first by giving high-speed internet and residential hotspots. CASA is requesting Equity Through Connectivity.”

Devren Washington, senior policy organizer at Movement Alliance Project, called the new program “a notable win for Philly’s students, educators, and the community members who have been organizing and advocating to close the digital divide ahead of the upcoming school year.” But he added that “it is far from enough.”

In addition to reiterating the call to open residential hotspots, the advocacy group wants Comcast to offer the program to educators, including paraprofessionals, and increase Internet Essentials’ upload and download speeds.

Council member Gym called on Comcast and other internet service providers to make Philadelphia “a shining example of the advances of the tech and communications industry by opening its residential networks so no child or family has to have a barrier to online learning.”

She added, “It is a shame that the city has to fill a gap that Comcast, Verizon, and other service providers have the resources to make happen.”

Hite promises all students will have internet connection by the start of school

2020-07-30T00:45:16+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Superintendent William Hite has pledged that all students will have internet access by the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, which will be all-virtual, at least until Nov. 17.

“We’re going to solve that problem,” Hite vowed in a Wednesday call with reporters. “All of our children who need internet access will have it.”

On Tuesday, Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson said that responsibility to assure this went beyond the District to the city and the internet service providers themselves. Comcast and Verizon are the major ones in Philadelphia.

“My position is we’re not starting school unless every child is connected,” Wilkerson said. If the District has to, she said, “we will pay for it. But we can’t pretend we’re running school virtually and have children who have no way of getting connected.”

Hite couldn’t say for sure how many families with children in city schools continue to lack reliable internet access at speeds and bandwidth sufficient to attend virtual classes and do classwork online. In the spring, the District pegged the number at around 5%.

“Individuals who provide the services have the data,” he said. “We do not have the data. It’s the ISPs and all the mobile service providers who can do that.”

In part due to the inability to serve all children and the inequity that represented, the District provided only “review and enrichment” online from mid-March, when schools closed due to the coronavirus, to early May — a period of six weeks.

Hite said that “lots more people are trying to engage in this effort now,” representing the city, the District, and the providers.

“Either through work that is happening in collaboration with the city, City Council, the Commerce Department, and all of the providers, or through efforts of the District, we’re going to see to it that … every student that needs it will have it,” he said. “We were trying to solve that problem in the spring, but … either through solutions that will come through the city, or through the District itself, we’re going to solve that problem.”

He said access would be “treated like Chromebooks.” The District purchased 40,000 of these computers and distributed them to all the students who said that they needed them to do schoolwork in the spring.

Advocates, including Council member Helen Gym, have called for the providers to open up the residential hotspots, in addition to the commercial hotspots that Comcast and Verizon did open up to the public when schools closed.

Hite said that he didn’t want to elaborate on preferred “types of solutions,” but said another solution might include the installation of more towers in any “deadspots” in the city. “We solved the hardware problem” by providing the Chromebooks, he said. “Now we’re trying to solve the internet access problem.”

A Comcast spokesman referred all questions about how providing service to all students would be accomplished to the city and the District. “The City and School District are really leading this work, and they’re also the lead for [communications],” said an email from spokesman Charlie Douglas. “I hear they’ll have a larger update to share in the next week or two.”

Hite said the online instruction provided to students in the first quarter “will not be like the spring.”

Malika Savoy-Brooks, the District’s chief of academic support, said virtual learning will include real-time instruction by teachers in new materials and provide opportunities for project-based learning, independent tasks, and peer-to-peer learning, said

Teachers and principals will receive enhanced professional development through August, and the original start date for students will be pushed back from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2 to provide more days for teacher training.

The school board is scheduled to convene at 4 p.m. Thursday to vote on the revised “health and safety plan” required by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which does not include details about educational delivery. The board recessed its July 23 meeting at Hite’s request after the public came out in force to oppose the initial hybrid plan, in which most students would attend school for two days a week and teachers would be in school for four days.

At that meeting, there were 153 speakers registered and more than 100 actually spoke. This meeting continuation is limited to 10 speakers on the health and safety plan action item.

School communities, however, are still full of questions about how the all-virtual instruction will be implemented. The issues include attendance requirements, grading, extracurricular activities, and teacher autonomy.

Two other resolutions on Thursday’s agenda indicate that the planning process for reopening schools has been guided by pro-bono consultants that Comcast helped to secure. In those resolutions, the board is accepting a donation estimated at $345,000 for the services of Ernst & Young for project management services concerning the development of the reopening plan and up to $63,000 for the services of Accenture.

Both resolutions describe Comcast as “a partner with the District for many years” that has an existing relationship with each of the consulting firms. They add that “the District is benefiting from additional capacity and support” from the companies in developing its complex scenarios for conducting education during the pandemic.

Some written testimony submitted to the board raises questions about those two resolutions.

Inspired by @positv_slope, I'm posting my written testimony submitted for tomorrow's @PHLschoolboard meeting here. They didn't give us much time (less than 24 hours), so it isn't my best work. 9 questions for our leadership. #PHLed https://t.co/4c3uMSdi90
— Charlie McGeehan (@CMcGeeIII) July 29, 2020

On Wednesday, Hite and other District officials offered some details about how the now all-virtual first quarter will help students with disabilities who need one-on-one therapies or other interventions. Savoy-Brooks said those students will receive “teleservices” that meet their Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs.

Hite also said that the District would use the time between September and November to accelerate building projects to mitigate issues with asbestos, lead, and ventilation.

The revised reopening plan calls for the city to set up centers where students of essential workers can participate in their virtual classes in supervised settings during school hours. The city is planning to use locations such as recreation centers, and some schools may also serve as these learning centers, Hite said.

Some teachers have also indicated that they may want to teach from their classrooms rather than from home, and that option is also being studied, he said.

With the revised all-online school opening, advocates call for more action on expanding internet access

2020-07-29T00:26:29+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Since the Philadelphia School District announced that digital learning will continue for all students at least through Nov. 17, the issue of how to ensure universal internet access across the city has become more urgent.

Board President Joyce Wilkerson said the responsibility to make sure all families have access goes beyond the School District to the city and the internet service providers.

“My position is we’re not starting school unless every child is connected,” said Wilkerson. “If we have to pay for it, we’ll pay for it. But we can’t pretend we’re running school virtually, and we have children who have no way of getting connected.”

She notes that personal hotspots are $190 a person “for just a one-year commitment.” The District bought 2,500 of them for families this spring.

Wilkerson added that it would be a “disgrace” for the city “if we started the school year knowing children don’t have a supportive environment to be in school virtually. Those for me are huge issues. The onus is on not just the District, but the broader community to do its best to put their resources together so all children have the opportunity to be successful.”

Council member Helen Gym agreed.

“The city needs to get its butt in gear,” Gym said. “I don’t think there has been a serious effort to make this happen at any level.”

The District has estimated that as many as 5% of its students do not have reliable access to the internet. Since March, when schools abruptly closed, the District spent $11 million to buy and distribute upwards of 40,000 Chromebooks to families and will continue to do so, according to the revised reopening plan announced Tuesday by Superintendent William Hite. City officials have said that up to 10% of students in the city have transient home lives.

A 2019 survey by the District found that only 45% of students in grades 3-5 had access to the internet from a computer at home; 56% of students in grades 6-8 and 58% of students in grades 9-12 had access.

A letter sent to staff and families on Tuesday stated: “City leaders are … working with numerous local internet companies to provide reliable internet access to all Philadelphia students who need it for the start of school and throughout the school year.”

The city earlier this month publicized its plan to expand digital access. It has a goal of “ensuring all K-12 public school students have consistent access to the technology, internet, and supports they need to engage in remote learning in the fall of 2020 and beyond.” The city is “reimagining the future of public computing centers,” and “guaranteeing that all Philadelphians have access to affordable and reliable digital solutions” for work, education, and health care, the plan says.

In addition, the city is creating a Digital Equity Coordinating Committee to “work with a broad range of stakeholders and communities to create solutions.”

Gym said that effort is fine, but “not a direct response to the pandemic. … I don’t think it has the urgency that meets the crisis we’re facing right now. We need something faster and bolder.”

Comcast, the primary internet service provider in the city, has expanded its Internet Essentials program, which provides basic service for less than $10 a month. When schools shut down in March, it offered two months free to new customers. It also opened its public hotspots to general use.

But there were numerous reports of people having trouble signing up due to a lack of proper paperwork, language barriers, no permanent address, or a past history of overdue bills. Comcast modified its criteria, including those regarding past debt, but problems remained, Gym said.

“Right now, the barriers to getting online are too high, and it’s not just about money,” she said. “It’s about the application systems are in English, students and families are transient. Any address-based system will have flaws in a city that sees 19,000 evictions in any given year. … What do I tell a parent with two kids who can’t speak English and can’t afford the internet?”

Plus, the speeds offered by Internet Essentials aren’t fast enough to allow students to fully take part in online classes, she said, especially if there are several children in one household.

Gym and other advocates have called on Comcast and other service providers to open up residential hotspots as a temporary measure while the city – and, presumably, the nation – work toward a solution to make broadband more widely available. The providers say this is technically difficult and raises other concerns, including privacy issues.

Gym and other advocates dispute this.

“This is temporary,” she said, “so students can get online. We can’t have internet service rooted to an address. We need, for a short period of time, to open citywide broadband network accessibility. This is something that has been asked for for a while.”

In May, U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (New Jersey), Kamala Harris (California), and Ron Wyden (Oregon) asked Comcast to open up its hotspots that are enabled on the Xfinity routers used by home subscribers.

According to an article in Ars Technica, the three wrote a letter to Brian Roberts, the Comcast CEO, who personally donated $5 million to help buy Chromebooks for Philadelphia schoolchildren.

While Comcast “has taken important steps” to help more people get connected, “it can – and should – do more to help children and teachers … across the country,” wrote the senators, all Democrats. “We urge you to start by dropping the paywall and providing free access to Comcast residential public Wi-Fi networks.”

The senators said Comcast’s response that this would increase congestion and affect service speeds for the paying subscribers “does not add up,” citing past company statements that the public and private networks operated by its residential routers “are completely separate.”

If that is true, the senators said, “it should not matter if the person using it has paid Comcast for a Wi-Fi access pass or if they are a low-income school child trying to do their homework.” If that is not true, they said, then Comcast has not been leveling with its customers.

Shortly after schools shut down in March, Superintendent William Hite said he had asked Comcast, which has its corporate headquarters in Philadelphia, to open up the residential hotspots, and he was rebuffed.

Gym said there needs to be more “affirmative communication” between the city and District with Comcast and other internet service providers.

“The education of a generation of children now relies on internet connectivity,” Gym said. “This is a temporary and necessary act, not of charity but of economic security and of educational necessity.”

But beyond that, she added, the country needs to “move away from the idea that internet is for-profit and only reserved for those who can pay. In a pandemic, all of us, including corporate actors, need to pull together and make sure children are safe and cared for. This cannot be about profit. This is a crisis, and we need bold action.”

Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children & Youth (PCCY), said that although she thinks the internet should be regulated as a utility, “that is not pertinent here.” Like Gym, she said that Comcast and Verizon, which also has an office building in Philadelphia, should do more now to ensure that online education is effective and that today’s students won’t suffer lifelong consequences.

“I’ve got to hope that since we are the home city of one of the largest internet providers in the country and [host] one of the largest telecom providers, these two partners will be good corporate citizens,” Cooper said. “Their homegrown children need to be able to learn, and [the corporations] have the wherewithal, skills, and capacity to solve this problem. I hope that using this moment of reckoning with both a public health crisis and a racial equity crisis, they will step up to make sure all children have the connectivity with high enough quality and with a device that makes it possible for them to learn remotely.”

Comcast officials indicated a willingness to comment but had not done so by the end of the day. The story will be updated when they respond.

Hite says learning to be all virtual at least until November

2020-07-28T17:58:34+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

UPDATED 6:30 p.m.

Responding to an avalanche of opposition and fear regarding safety from the COVID-19 outbreak, Superintendent William Hite is now proposing that school be virtual through at least the first marking period, which ends Nov. 17.

In a letter posted on the Philadelphia School District website, he said that “after careful consideration of all the feedback we’ve received,” the District is backing off its initial hybrid plan that would have had most students learn in person at least two days a week and would have required teachers to be in the building four days a week.

“I believe it’s important to listen. And it’s important to have your trust and support as we all try to create a plan that will help our children learn in an environment we have never experienced,” Hite wrote.

After the first quarter, students would “transition to the hybrid learning model as long as guidance from the Philadelphia Department of Health and other indicators support it is still safe to do so.”

He also noted that they are not going forward with the Districtwide online digital academy option, which neighborhood school families and staff worried would result in a loss of resources and teachers at their schools. “For the hybrid model, we will continue to evaluate digital opportunities that prioritize students being taught by teachers in their enrolled school,” he wrote.

On Thursday, the Board of Education will reconvene the meeting that was recessed without a vote last week after more than six hours of impassioned testimony from principals, teachers, and parents advocating for an all-virtual opening. The board is expected to vote on the new plan at the meeting, which will begin streaming live at 4 p.m. on the District website. People can register to speak at the meeting or submit testimony.

Hite based the original hybrid plan on the responses to District surveys, taken during the spring, of thousands of parents, teachers, and students. Most of them said they would feel at least somewhat comfortable returning to school buildings. But the situation changed rapidly as COVID-19 cases started trending up in the city, and people grew increasingly wary of the District’s ability to adequately sanitize and ventilate school buildings. The fear and doubt burst open at the eight-hour board meeting last week.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers also surveyed its members during that period and came out in favor of a hybrid plan.

Hite made his announcement hours after the PFT changed course and called for a “fully virtual” start to the school year for at least the first quarter.

A news release said the union based its new position on a survey of members taken over the past week. Of the 7,500 survey respondents, the union said in a statement, “73.6% feel personally unsafe entering school buildings. Only 8% said they feel safe. An even greater percentage of respondents, 78%, feel that their students’ safety is jeopardized by entering school buildings. Only 6% felt it would be safe for their students to enter buildings.”

The Commonwealth Association of School Administrators (CASA), which represents principals, has also called for a virtual opening of schools.

CASA argued that schools don’t have adequate staff to “properly implement and monitor social distancing guidelines,” adding that the face-to-face model envisioned in Hite’s original plan would not allow for some of the most valuable instructional practices. Both PFT and CASA cited ventilation problems in schools as well.

“Never in our lifetimes have we seen a situation like this, and there is no road map for how to navigate so many factors,” said PFT president Jerry Jordan in a statement. “We desperately want to reopen school buildings, but unfortunately, there’s been a confluence of events – not the least of which being the virus trajectory itself – that shows that this is simply not possible.”

Jordan added: “The health and safety of our students and educators must be paramount, and we cannot gamble with their lives. Our membership has spoken, and in conjunction with the science of the virus, our research, and what we know now, the District must begin the year in a fully virtual format. Lives are on the line.”

Mayor Kenney said in a statement that the city would prioritize the expansion of internet access and that it is also planning to provide “supervised, connected spaces for those students who can’t safely stay at home during the school day.”

“To be clear, the City cannot replicate a school environment or provide childcare for all School District students, therefore the vast majority of students will be learning at home. But we will prioritize supporting children and families with the greatest needs,” he said.

In an interview, Board President Joyce Wilkerson said that she is very concerned about the most vulnerable students falling further behind in an all-virtual environment and wants to make sure that all students have internet connectivity. Yet, she added, at Thursday’s meeting, the board heard the “concerns-slash-fears” of the community in deciding to postpone a vote.

She also said that some of the safety issues parents were most worried about will continue for students who will need to spend their days in the supervised city locations.

“I worry a lot about the children who are not going to be well-supported through a virtual strategy,” she said. “What we’re saying is … the city will take the lead on opening up facilities, and there will be adults in those facilities,” although not teachers.

Having such spaces where adults and children congregate, she pointed out, “means there will be children at risk. That’s not going to change.”

She said Hite has been meeting with clergy and others and the city to identify the facilities, likely to include libraries and recreation centers, and “brainstorm with people ways of trying to create enriching opportunities so that children don’t drop as far behind as they are at risk of falling.”

Whether school buildings might be included among those facilities is unknown.

Wilkerson also lamented the thought of eager children waiting to start kindergarten and “how this will be their introduction to school, little kids looking forward to showing up with their backpacks, all of that. Instead, it will be ‘Let’s go turn on the TV,'” or sit in front of a computer.

“There are no easy answers out there,” she said.

The revised plan that the board will consider Thursday will be a health and safety blueprint to submit to state education officials and will not include the details of its educational strategies.

Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children & Youth, said that is crucial.

She pointed out that in the Great Depression, many schools closed down for two or three years, affecting an entire generation. “Calamities of this scale take a toll on children,” she said.

She said the District needs to make the best of it and needs to give itself the task of “doing this better than anyone else in the country” and conducting world-class professional development for teachers.

“My dream is that there are 1st-grade learning communities and 2nd-grade learning communities, with teachers talking about what they are doing, [creating a] kind of infrastructure that focuses on how best to do teaching and learning remotely,” she said. “That has to start tomorrow. But I am confident we can do this.”

As parents get ready to make decisions about returning to school, questions abound

2020-07-16T23:27:04+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia school officials on Wednesday announced a plan for reopening schools that gives families a choice whether to send children to school part-time in the fall – two days a week for most students – or choose full-time virtual learning in what the District is calling a Digital Academy.

Superintendent William Hite said that parents can register for the virtual-only option between July 22 and Aug. 4.

District spokesperson Monica Lewis said the virtual town halls and parent and teacher surveys that offered people a way to provide feedback were incorporated into the planning. She said Wednesday that no further details would be available until July 22 about how the Digital Academy will work.

Information released at that time “will include the registration process, descriptions and expectations of students and staff,” Lewis wrote in an email response to a list of a dozen questions.

But since the school-opening announcement, questions have poured in. A crowd-sourced page organized by teachers Zoe Rooney and Emily Simpson accumulated nearly 200 questions in 24 hours, many of then concerning the virtual academy.

They include who will teach in the academy, how they will be supported, how classes will be reflected on transcripts, whether students from the same school who choose all-virtual will be grouped together, how virtual students will stay together with their school community, how “specials” classes like art and music will be delivered, and whether internet access and tech support will be guaranteed.

They also would like to know what the school day will be like; online learning between March and June was a combination of teacher availability for student conferences and actual delivery of lessons. Hite said that unlike that time, when delivery of new material was delayed while the District attempted to provide all students what they needed for internet access, this will be the instruction of new material.

There were also questions about student-teacher ratios, whether teachers from the child’s home school would be teachers in the virtual space, and what would happen if the District is forced to shut down entirely and go virtual for everyone.

“Does your child’s normal school teacher(s) return to instructing your child?” the questioner asked. “Do you as a teacher return to instructing your students?”

There were also concerns about whether the Digital Academy pulls resources from the school in which the child is enrolled and what will happen in cases where courses are tracked – AP or honors, for example. The parents also want to make sure there will be regular feedback, and want to know how services will be delivered to students in special education programs.

Next week’s board meeting

The Board of Education is holding a special meeting on Thursday, July 23, at which it will vote on the health and safety plan for the new school year that is required by the state.

But it will not vote on the full reopening plan, according to board spokeswoman Janice Hatfield. Advocates are saying that the board needs to do that. Hatfield said an agenda will be posted Monday.

“This is major, major,” said Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. “Plus, there is a price tag to this.”

Haver pointed out that Hite put a price tag on the plan of between $60 million and $80 million. “The board has to work on any major expenditures and grants, money in and money out. They need to lay out as closely as they can where this money’s coming from, and is it coming from something else people expect money to be spent on.”

Hite made reference to using up fund balances that the District expected from the end of the 2020 fiscal year and anticipates next fiscal year. But the District’s overall fiscal posture goes south quickly after that, with an $800 million shortfall forecast by 2025, not counting extra COVID costs.

Ideas for improvement

Critiques are also trickling out of the plan itself, which mostly calls for students and teachers to self-monitor their health.

The plan “is a good start, but it’s got to evolve and get better,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY).

Cooper cited 10 areas in which it can be improved, including more explicit social distancing rules – making sure that room capacity is adjusted so that six feet of distance can be maintained between all individuals.

“They have to assure there is never more than X number of people in a room,” she said.

She also called for mandatory temperature checks for all people who enter buildings and she wants to see more sanitizing protocols, including signs similar to those in airports, where someone signs off on the time of the most recent cleaning of bathrooms.

“Based on the challenges the District has faced with ensuring buildings are cleaned regularly, significantly improved oversight and support of all building maintenance staff is a necessary predicate for re-opening,” according to a draft PCCY statement.

Most important, “Schools should re-open for in-person instruction when the science indicates that that opening with reasonable protocols does not put children, school personnel and the families of all students and school personnel at the heightened risk of COVID infection.”

Said Cooper: “We have to overcompensate in this area. It’s literally life and death.”

Other areas of concern where Cooper said there need to be more explicit standards are ventilation and transportation. With many students taking SEPTA, there should be some effort to get guarantees that social distancing on buses and subways will be enforced.

She also said that all contact sports should be banned for the fall semester and replaced by non-contact sports and that football should be cancelled.

District’s hybrid plan provokes questions, concerns among parents and teachers

2020-07-15T22:43:30+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

This story has been updated.

The School District of Philadelphia announced a complicated hybrid reopening plan Wednesday in which most students would attend school two days a week, relying on virtual learning the rest of the time.

Families will also have the option of going all-digital in a District-run “digital academy” and must make that decision by Aug. 4. Teachers can opt out of in-person teaching if they have a medical reason. They will be required to show evidence of being especially vulnerable to the coronavirus due to their own health or that of a family member.

Each school is charged with figuring out how best to implement the plan and still follow all the health and safety guidelines, one of which is to have no more than 12 to 15 students in each classroom at a time.

All individuals are expected to stay six feet apart, including the youngest children; hallways and rooms will be marked. A five-level cleaning plan will be virtually constant, and the District may have to expand its 900-person custodial staff to make sure it is carried out.

Each day, staff and families will need to fill out a health assessment asking whether anyone in their household has tested positive for COVID-19 and whether they have been exposed to someone with the virus. There will not be daily temperature checks or testing of asymptomatic staff members.

All people entering the building, from kindergarten students on up, will be required to wear a mask or face covering that meets prescribed standards. Those who cannot wear a mask for health reasons will need to wear a face shield.

Students will eat lunch either in their classrooms or in socially distanced seats in the school cafeteria.

Under the plan, teachers would work four days a week in the school buildings, with some students attending on Mondays and Wednesdays, and others on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Friday would be all digital for everyone. Some students – the most vulnerable – would attend up to four days a week to maximize their in-person instructional time. These include the youngest children and students with complex needs. (CORRECTION: The four-day-a-week in person option for English learners is not in the final plan, with the District citing cost.)

The District has more than 200 schools, ranging from small, under-enrolled elementaries to vast, overcrowded high schools. Some are in old buildings, and some in newer ones. How this will play out for individual teachers, students and families is still very much a work in progress.

Challenge for working parents

One huge question is how working parents will cope with what is now part-time school. The city’s child care sector is already overwhelmed and facing its own social-distancing guidelines that limit the number of children they can take in. Another big question is how to secure universal internet access so all students can participate in the virtual component of school – something that does not now exist. City and District officials say they have been negotiating with the city’s internet service providers, the largest of which is Comcast. A growing number of officials, including City Councilmember Helen Gym, are renewing calls for Comcast to open its residential hotspots or otherwise provide for blanket coverage across the city at broadband speeds that make doing schoolwork feasible.

“In many ways, the work is just beginning,” said Mayor Kenney as he helped roll out the plan.

Acknowledging that the circumstances are unprecedented, Superintendent William Hite said that a series of working groups focusing on issues including safety, academics, transportation, food, facilities, and overall student and staff support have been meeting weekly since March to finalize the plan, which runs to 28 pages plus 21 appendices covering everything from special education instructional design to food-service cleaning protocols.

“Like districts across the country, our working groups had to reimagine how schools can operate,” he said.

He warned that even if all precautions are faithfully observed, there is still a likelihood that the virus will appear.

“I must say, we are preparing for when, not if, positive COVID-19 cases impact one or more of our school communities,” Hite said. “The unfortunate reality is that infections are rising in many parts of the country, and there is not yet a vaccine. Therefore, we will remain in constant communication with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and work closely with them, following their guidance regarding protocols around when to temporarily close a classroom, a school, or even the entire district and return to fully digital learning.”

Hite estimates that all this will cost between $60 million and $80 million in additional funds. Although the District had attained a period of relative fiscal stability, that was upended by the coronavirus. Based on current projections, the District is forecasting an $800 million shortfall by 2025, due in large part to COVID-19’s impact on tax revenue. And that is without the additional anticipated spending.

“Districts across the country are facing devastating financial projections because of COVID-19,” Hite said. He added that passage of the HEROES Act, which would provide $3 trillion in federal aid to states to help them cope with the pandemic, is crucial to the nation’s educational future.

“There’s no room for politics when it comes to safety educating our children and ensuring that professionals, the adults responsible for this work, can do so without placing their health in jeopardy,” Hite said.

He said the plan was developed with input from the city Department of Public Health, the Mayor’s Office, and the Policy Lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The District also sent out surveys of parents and teachers, and sought feedback in virtual town halls and on their website.

“Safety and science have guided our entire process about how our children will return to school, and it will be safety and science that will be used to implement policies to keep us safe in these challenging circumstances,” the mayor said. Questions and concerns Immediate reaction to the plan showed widespread concern over the District’s ability to implement and oversee such a complex, costly undertaking.

“A better plan would be to start fully virtual until things are safer and then try for a hybrid second quarter,” said teacher Zoe Rooney, adding that she’s “really horrified to read that they plan on giving teachers one cloth mask for the entire year. Combined with small square footage of many classrooms, it is a disaster.”

“Our special-ed classroom assistants work the closest with students who are least able to maintain hygiene and distancing practices,” Rooney said. “One cloth mask for them?”

Officials at the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers say the plan “raises a number of significant concerns.” President Jerry Jordan said in an interview that teachers won’t feel comfortable with the District’s safety plans until they see proof that they’ll be implemented consistently and with rigor in every building.

Three things the union wants to see, Jordan said: a “pandemic chief” to field all calls and concerns about safety issues; ample supplies and rapid delivery of personal protective equipment and sanitizer; and all the necessary upgrades and repairs needed to ventilate classrooms and other spaces.

“We should eliminate as much risk as possible, for all employees and students,” Jordan said. “There has to be a ‘pandemic chief’ in the district. If I walk into the Taylor school and find there’s no hand sanitizer, who do I call? They need to get that sanitizer there literally within minutes. We can’t be waiting all day, like we usually do.”

The ventilation issue is major, said Jordan. Counselors and nurses, in particular, are frequently housed in basement rooms or converted utility spaces, he said, with “no ventilation, no windows.” Teachers need to see those spaces made safe, he said, and budgets need to be ready.

“We can’t do it on the cheap – and that’s the way the District has always operated,” Jordan said. “We cannot gamble with the lives of children and staff.”

Among Jordan’s questions going forward: the role of principals in developing and communicating the details of each school’s plans. Jordan said he does not yet know, for example, whether and when school staff should expect to hear from principals about building-specific issues.

“I really don’t know – that’s one of the things that’s unclear,” he said.

City Councilmember Helen Gym said she’s worried about those building-level capacity issues.

“I am concerned about the District’s reliance on individual schools to ‘self-screen’ for health problems when we have far too few health professionals in our city schools,” Gym said in a statement. “We fought hard to get a minimum of one nurse in every school, but this number is inadequate given the potential health needs that children and their families face.”

Gym has similar concerns about cleaning staff. “It’s clear that it must dramatically expand the number of cleaning positions,” she said. “According to national best practices, the District would need to expand from 900 cleaners to several hundred more in order to stay on track.”

Gym also said that she wanted to see much more engagement from District officials, calling for “a robust public engagement and feedback process including parent and teacher hotlines for reporting health and safety concerns.”

The volunteer group Parents United for Public Education echoed that call, expressing frustration with the District’s largely closed-door planning process.

“We, along with our partner organizations, have been asking for advisory committees made up of students, parents, and all levels of school staff for months, but all we’ve seen is highly structured surveys and one-way town halls,” the group said in a statement. “Getting through this school year will require collective effort, but right now we’re seeing that effort distributed unevenly with the biggest burdens on students, families, and school-based staff.”

Jordan said that the PFT plans to keep working closely with District officials to fine-tune the plan. But he said the biggest factor in its support for any plan will be the progress of the disease itself.

“If the numbers begin to rise here in Philadelphia, our position is going to change. We’re not going to support anything that would send children and staff into buildings that literally risk their lives,” said Jordan.

“The numbers are going to drive it.”

District wants HEROES Act

Hite and Kenney minced no words in dismissing the financial threats from President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as ignorant bluster. They have threatened to withhold federal funds – which they actually don’t have the power to do – if schools don’t open fully for in-person instruction.

Trump can, however, help block the passage of additional aid to schools. The HEROES Act has passed the House, but is stalled in the Senate.

“Now is not the time for threats from the U.S. Secretary of Education or the president to keep money from districts like ours,” Kenney said. “… Unfortunately, Secretary DeVos, while demanding in-person learning, has said that individual districts will have to figure out how to do that safely. How nice of her. This is unacceptable.”

Hite called Trump and DeVos “completely out of touch.”

Kenney also warned that components of this plan can and “very likely will change as we get deeper into the school year, because COVID-19 continues to evolve.”

City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said that in evaluating the impact of school reopening on health and safety, it was necessary to do more than simply consider the potential for spreading the virus.

“Schools, under ordinary circumstances, are crowded, so that’s a situation of risk,” he said, while noting that Philadelphia has not experienced the recent surges seen in other cities and that children have a lower rate of severe infection with the coronavirus. “So we could just consider keeping schools closed, but for their long-term success, including their long-term health, children need to learn. So as a society, we have to try to find a way to balance those risks.”

Barbara Klock, the District’s medical officer, offered reassurance: “We are very prepared to implement an extensive set of safety measures to promote the healthy environments for everyone in the upcoming school year.” But she said this will take cooperation on the part of everyone to strictly follow the guidelines.

Alicia Prince, interim head of facilities and operations in the District, explained a five-step cleaning plan. Hite said that it might be necessary to hire more cleaners.

Over the summer, all school buildings are being “deep cleaned” and will be inspected and re-cleaned if necessary right before they open. And once occupied, Prince said, they will be cleaned and disinfected daily, “sprayed down using an electrostatic backpack sprayer with EPA-registered antiviral disinfecting spray.” On top of that, door handles, bathroom fixtures, railings, and other “high touch” surfaces will be cleaned every four hours. Hand sanitizer stations will be at multiple entryways.

The building staff is also working on making sure that windows are “operable and secure,” she said, and buildings will have humidity control.

Hite said that it is likely that some buildings will have closed-off areas if all the safety protocols cannot be met.

He also said that the District was working with “faith-based” and other institutions to see whether they could provide places for children to go on their virtual days. And he said that the negotiations with internet service providers on increasing access should produce an announcement soon.

Officials offered details and projected confidence that they are doing the right thing, but nobody knows for sure how all this will work out. And much immediate reaction was full of skepticism.

Parents and others posted a barrage of questions on Facebook and Twitter, asking about everything from whether the start and end times for schools will be affected to what the protocol will be for cleaning up after eating in the classroom. Teachers wondered about the fine points of insurance coverage.

Getting texts from friends who are new hires, their district health insurance doesn’t kick in until October. What happens WHEN a new hire contracts COVID in September? #PHLed @SDPHite @PhillyMayor @PhillyInquirer @KendraPHL @HelenGymAtLarge @FixMallory @PSNotebook @PFTLocal3
— Lou Fantini (@LouFantini) July 15, 2020

Confusion is still widespread over exactly how full-time digital learning will work and who the teachers will be. Some called it “the worst of both worlds.”

But as the District’s proposals are just taking shape, the September plans of the city’s 80-plus charter schools remain largely unknown. Individual schools are required to file safety plans with state officials, but there is no deadline. Most charters have said little about their own plans, and regional choice advocacy groups, including the Philadelphia School Partnership, declined to comment on when their plans may appear or how the District’s own reopening strategy may affect them.

And while choice advocates are urging parents to consider new options as District schools struggle to accommodate COVID, Jordan said he’s concerned that charter families and teachers won’t have the information they need to make informed choices. District staff can report problems to the PFT, he said, but charter staff won’t have that option.

“Their employees can be silenced,” said Jordan. “We are the advocates for our members, but most charter teachers have no representation.”

Teachers prefer hybrid reopening model to full-time online or in school

2020-06-29T20:49:56+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

This story has been updated.

A majority of Philadelphia teachers responding to a union survey say that they prefer a hybrid school-opening scenario ー partially online and partially in person ー with most indicating that they favor a week-on, week-off schedule.

However, it was unclear exactly what was meant by “week on, week off.” The approach was described in the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers survey as “one week on, one week virtual, with groups of students alternating.” That would mean, presumably, that teachers would be in school every day, teaching half the students one week and the other half the next week. But only 15% of the respondents showed any preference for full-time, in-school teaching with social distancing in place.

Despite the lack of clarity on what a staggered-week model would look like, the PFT recommended in the survey’s conclusion that some version of this model be adopted. This is the second survey the PFT has taken of its membership since the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of schools.

“Given the percentages of support for a staggered weeks model compared to the others, and given the overall preference for a hybrid model of returning to schools, we believe that some form of the staggered weeks model is likely best suited for the School District of Philadelphia,” the survey notes in the conclusion. “There will be a number of critical steps that will need to be taken in order to utilize this model, including analyzing to whom and how it applies. We know that a one size fits all model will not work, but we also know that district-wide decisions and protocol will be necessary.” Citing its own and other research, the report says: “[T]his is our recommended model at this time.”

Later, the union issued a clarification: “The nuances of the staggered weeks model [are] still under consideration ー there are a number of scenarios that could be implemented. The District will need to gather information regarding educators who are immuno-compromised or have other reasons for needing to work remotely. There are different considerations for how the staggered weeks is most effective from an epidemiological standpoint. Those are discussions we are looking forward to having … with the District. The survey was not meant to be fully conclusive in and of itself.”

Although they favored a hybrid model over either full online or full in-person school, teachers made it clear that they didn’t like a staggered schedule that had some students coming in the morning and a different group in the afternoon. There was somewhat more support for a staggered-days model.

In comments on a proposed staggered-week model, one teacher noted that it would not work at all at the high school level, where a teacher might have five sections and up to 150 students on their roster.

“The one week in school, one week remote seems utterly not beneficial for HS, unless you are cutting class sizes in half — am I teaching half my students one week and the other half the next week?” this teacher wrote. “That doesn’t seem to be what the explanation calls for. And how does having 33 students x 6 (5 classes plus an advisory) every day in my room help keep me or the student safe? And what does giving us a week off from each other do to help us — if we’re the same group in school and at home?”

The survey was conducted June 15-23, and nearly 6,000 of the union’s 13,000 members participated.

The members were asked to rank three choices ー full school reopening, hybrid, or full online ー on a five-point scale ranging from complete agreement to complete disagreement. On that scale, 56% of members agree or fully agree (4 or 5) with a hybrid model.

Nearly 34% think schooling should remain fully online; only about 15% favored full in-person reopening.

In comments, teachers raised a host of questions about cleaning protocols, requirements around wearing masks, and what will happen regarding teachers who have health issues and don’t want to return to in-person teaching at all. And if high numbers of teachers fear any in-person contact, that could cause a crisis ー does the District find substitutes or accommodate that teacher’s concerns? Some noted, as Superintendent William Hite has already said, that the situation may be different depending on the school.

“The schedules cannot be universal,” wrote one teacher. “What works for a small K-5 school will not necessarily work for a large comprehensive high school. Several scenarios not considered in this survey may be options.”

The PFT’s current contract expires on Aug. 30, and the union is in negotiations with the District on a new contract. It is not known whether pandemic-related working conditions will be included in the contract. PFT spokesperson Hillary Linardopoulos said via email that “what goes into the contract is decided by both parties at the table.”

Also not clear is whether the PFT has a formal role in several task forces working on reopening plans. Hite has said the District would share by mid-July a proposal with the public outlining the conditions under which school will open in the fall.

Linardopoulos said that the PFT “has been in conversations with the [School District],” but is “unclear” on how its task forces on re-opening schools are structured. Last week, as part of the Fund Our Facilities Coalition, it sent a letter to the District asking “for clarification on that and a number of other issues.” She said that Hite and PFT president Jerry Jordan are in communication and spoke Monday “about several issues surrounding reopening.”

In their virtual classrooms, students and teachers grapple with recent events

2020-06-10T01:33:28+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Dozens of cities in the United States erupted last week as protesters reacted to the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Those initial protests, which included some looting and destruction of property, evolved into largely peaceful and diverse protests against systemic and institutional racism that spread not only to cities and small towns in every state, but also around the world.

Teachers across Philadelphia have now brought the conversation to their virtual classrooms. Many have allowed students to express their feelings and debate about the protests and rioting. Others have tried to turn the occasion into a learning opportunity, contextualizing recent events within other historical movements.

The Notebook spoke to several teachers and students about the discussions they’re having in the wake of Floyd killing and subsequent protests. Here’s what they had to say:

Teachers facilitate conversations

Sitting on Kristine Morrow’s desk is a quote from the author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Morrow says the words have come to guide much of her teaching on race in her African American history class at Central High School:

“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer them.”

After police killed Floyd on May 25 and protests began across the country, Morrow started her class last Monday by telling students that she didn’t have the answers.

“I asked them why they think this happened,” Morrow said. “They were all very upset, very angry, and there was a real sense of hopelessness around this state-sanctioned violence.”

To contextualize the killing and the protests and to help students make some sense of it, Morrow began rooting through a trove of historical examples to show her students. She told them about white rioters in 1921 destroying a prosperous black neighborhood called Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She wanted to “show them that state-sanctioned violence against African Americans has had a long, long history in this country,” she said.

She also drew a parallel between the present-day protests and the urban riots of 1967 and 1968 that engulfed many cities, including Philadelphia. She said these were “very much an expression of fury about poverty and economic injustice.”

“I wanted them to get the whole complex picture, sort of fleshing out what that concept of systemic racism really means,” Morrow said. “We looked at different aspects of society… ‘Does it exist in the education system?’ And they said ‘Well, of course.’”

Ethan Tannen, a math teacher at Masterman High School, said conversations about racial injustices are badly needed in class, especially with such a diverse group of students who have different experiences with racism.

Tannen doesn’t normally see students on Mondays — since the coronavirus pandemic hit and classes were moved online, his students only have class with him twice a week. But after seeing the Philadelphia protests on the news, he had to make sure his students were OK.

Tannen scheduled an optional video meeting for his students on Monday, where students could voice their opinions about recent events. About 25 students joined in.

“A lot of students expressed their frustration,” Tannen said. “Some supported the looting, but it’s a tough conversation because … a lot of students belong to families that have small businesses or [have] family or friends in the police force.”

In his class discussions, Tannen follows the four agreements for courageous conversation laid out in an essay by author Glenn E. Singleton and educator Cyndie Hays: stay engaged, expect to experience discomfort, speak your truth, and expect and accept nonclosure. The second point is especially important for white students, Tannen said, who don’t understand what it’s like to experience the police violence that minorities are subjected to.

Students of color who have had ugly run-ins with the police make up a large portion of Debra Shick’s class at the Charter High School for Architecture & Design. Shick teaches a social justice curriculum in her English class for her juniors and seniors, and over the many years she’s been a teacher, she has heard some horror stories from her students.

“This is nothing new to me,” Shick said, referring to the killing of George Floyd. “My students tell me, ‘We already know this, we experience it every day.”

One former student told Shick about the time he was stopped on the street by police. The officer pinned him to the ground and began to search him without warning.

“He told me, ‘that boot hurts,’” Shick said.

During one of Shick’s discussions about police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, another student said “Well, what about black-on-black crime?” When Shick asked him to elaborate, he began to cry.

“He told me that his uncle had been shot and killed,” Shick said.

Shick tries to prompt discussions in her class that empower students of color and raise awareness about the oppression they face in everyday society. Recently, she had her students read an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that talked about institutional racism and why black people were protesting nationwide. They’re currently reading There There, a novel about the struggles of Native Americans in Oakland, California.

Alexandra Avelin, an English teacher at Masterman who also had her students read the Los Angeles Times op-ed, said she wants real-world events to inform her teaching. After Floyd was killed and protests erupted in Philadelphia, she tried to springboard off of her 7th graders’ research projects to teach students about institutional racism and police brutality. One student was doing research on the Ahmaud Arbery case. Another researched the disproportionate effect that COVID-19 had on black communities.

“I wanted to give them context with stuff they have learned so they can make sense of what’s going on now,” Avelin said.

But helping students make sense of recent events doesn’t necessarily mean facilitating debates or arguments.

“I didn’t feel like now was the time to debate pros and cons of looting or removing a statue,” Avelin said. “For the people who are passionate I think that’s probably going to be too raw.”

Despite Avelin’s efforts, she said the discussion materials didn’t have a lot of “bounce.” She partly attributes that to class being online and engagement being way down from where it was in the classroom pre-pandemic.

Tannen offered another possibility: “I get the sense that some students are hesitant to speak because they don’t want to say something that comes across as racist or insensitive.”

Students voice their opinions

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of Floyd and the protests that followed, students around the country are taking part in class discussions they’ve never had before. In many cases, they’re taking a hiatus from their normal lessons and focusing mostly on current events.

“We’ve never held these conversations in class before,” said Annetta Yuwono, a sophomore at Masterman. “We’ve definitely learned a lot about … the other protests that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement and black power movement in our African American history class, but that’s about it.”

No one is happy about what’s happening in the world right now, Yuwono said, but recent events have allowed a lot of students to release pent-up political frustration or simply to speak their minds as they’ve never been able to before.

Yuwono is all for the protests because she thinks police brutality is a rampant problem in this country, especially for communities of color.

“If these policemen can just kill innocent people … then no one’s safe,” she said.

But she opposes the property destruction because it harms vulnerable people in the oppressed communities.

“I watched a video yesterday showing an African American man reacting to the destruction of his business and honestly, it’s terrible,” Yuwono said.

A Science Leadership Academy student who wished to remain anonymous for safety reasons attended the protests over the first weekend of demonstrations and said that based on what she saw, much of the rioting and looting was done by white people. A white woman tried to argue with police, and a white man hopped on top of the police car and began stomping on it, she said.

“While I don’t see those incidents as a huge deal on their own, they made me weary because almost all of the people doing this were white. In my opinion, it is not the job of an ally to be the main attraction,” the anonymous student said. “I do not condone the destruction or looting of small businesses or poorer neighborhoods, however … rioting gets heard before peaceful protests do, so I get it. Personally, I will not participate in that, [but] I also do not shame people of color who do.”

Nayanna Fluellen, a sophomore at Central High School, echoed that point.

“I understand that people are angry. I’m angry, too, because I’m a part of the black community and I’m tired of the same situation happening to us,” Fluellen said. “But burning and looting is only going to hurt my community more because some black people used to work in those businesses.”

Fluellen said that her classmates respected her opinion even though many of them disagreed.

“A lot of people in my class do support the riots, because they feel angered towards how police are constantly treating the black community poorly.”

A Central student took a poll of her classmates asking how many of them supported the rioting. Thirteen students voted in favor of the rioting, and three students opposed it.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll released Tuesday showed that 74% of the respondents support the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death and 69% agreed that Floyd’s killing exposed a bigger problem in law enforcement.

These numbers stand in contrast to how Americans have responded in the past. On the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a Gallup poll found that 75% of black respondents and 79% of whites believed the violence to be unjustified, even though just as many respondents opposed the not-guilty verdict for the officers who beat Rodney King.

“In African American history class, we [brought] up Rodney King’s situation and the 1992 riots to show how history is repeating itself,” Fluellen said.

Philadelphia police have killed two unarmed black men in the last five years, according to a database kept by the Washington Post. Since the unrest began, dozens of businesses in Philadelphia were looted or destroyed, most in the first two days.

“Bottom line is that buildings can be fixed, but dead bodies cannot be resurrected,” the SLA student said.

Teacher diaries: Gill Maimon

2020-06-08T15:15:27+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

These interviews for the Notebook’s summer edition about teachers’ efforts to promote learning and stay in touch with students during the pandemic were conducted in mid-May, before the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests.

Gill Maimon – Dr. Gill, to her friends – has been teaching at Powel Elementary School for 21 years, most of that time in first grade, although this year she is teaching second grade.

She says she is managing well teaching remotely. As she describes it, the experience has been at once unsettling and transformative.

For two decades, Maimon has helped train pre-service teachers from the University of Pennsylvania and now works with its Urban Teacher Apprenticeship. The Penn students regularly visit her classroom to learn and observe.

She also teaches classes at Penn in children’s literature, occasionally online. Teaching adults this way, she said, can be useful and effective in moderation.

But, she was convinced, not for seven-year-olds.

“Teaching is human work. Teaching should be a meeting of people.”

Maimon is, if you will, not just a teacher is constantly reflecting on what it means to teach. And a firm believer that teachers must constantly be learning and reevaluating what they do.

So while she describes herself as “a little tech suspicious,” she was always willing and able to learn how to use new teaching tools, like the smartboards introduced in her school a few years ago, but until now says she “never took all the opportunities given to me to get myself really up to speed.”

Soon after schools closed in March, she spent some time learning Zoom, and used it to meet with students. That’s when she got her first taste of how disorienting this could be.

“The hardest thing for me, which I found vain and idiotic, is that on these video platforms, your face is in this little box.” When she is teaching in a classroom, she is not thinking so much about how the students perceive her. In her own mind, “I’m formless,” she said. She found it unsettling “to become aware of one’s own image as children are perceiving that image. For the first time in a palpable way, I had an idea of the kids seeing me.” She chuckles. “It’s crazy.”

When the District banned Zoom for security reasons, she had to bone up on the various features of Google Meet.

Now Maimon does live teaching three days a week on that platform and has mastered several skills, including how to use a plugin that lets her see all the faces at once, like on Zoom, and pulling up an ebook that she and her students can read simultaneously.

She has learned to genuinely appreciate how the technology can deepen the teaching and learning experience. She mentioned a tool called JamBoard, which she described as a smartboard that everybody has contact with remotely. “Using that shared platform for kids to type and post quick responses is a useful way of gathering many ideas quickly and for kids to see each other’s ideas,” she said. “I like that.”

In fact, she has come to realize, the experience has turned out to be a major paradigm shift for her.

“When we moved online, the most basic teaching moves became suddenly unfamiliar,” she said. “Of course teachers, no matter how long they have been teaching, are always learning how to teach. But for the past few months, I have been learning with an intensity I have not experienced for many years.”

Her interaction with students is on many levels, but she conducts classes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m. She has 26 students, and in the beginning, the most she ever had attending the class was 12.

Now, as the semester nears its end, she said the daily number still hovers around 12 to 14, although not always the same students. About 18 have attended live lessons at one time or another, and she has received assignments from another two or three through Google Classroom.

With five students, however, she and the school has not had any contact, despite repeated efforts to track them down, including by Powel’s team of social workers.

“You don’t stop trying, but after a point, what you do is defer until next year,” she said. On May 28, she got an email that the special education teacher managed to contact the grandmother of one of them, “but it’s a different level altogether once you make contact with a family member to make contact with the child. To this day, we are trying to get Chromebooks to kids.”

But there is also an upside.

“I feel with some parents in particular, we are in relationship with each other on terms like never before,” she said. “We are all struggling through this together. I feel it’s been such a great equalizer in such a wonderful way.”

She talked about one parent who she has known for a long time – she has taught six of her children. “We’ve had a bit of a rocky past,” she said. But she called the parent and helped her obtain loaner Chromebooks from the District, informing her that she was entitled to one for each of her children still in school. They bonded over the difficulties of accessing Google Classroom.

“It took us days of back and forth, learning how to log on, we were joking with each other. On the day she finally made it on, I congratulated her. Over time, we started signing emails with our first names. That’s a tiny little thing, but the tech struggle is emblematic of the larger struggle through all of this…we are in this war together.”

As for her students, the ones who participate “are great at coming up with activities for us to do together.” They’ve had a talent show and performed a play.

Still, while she finds it possible for both her and her students to grow through the remote contact, she cannot imagine doing this with young children without having gotten to know them in a classroom first and wonders what will happen if school is forced to be remote only in the fall.

“In a funny way, all this defamiliarization has helped me to think more clearly about issues that are always the main issues, whether we are online or in person. Like how we must never give up trying to include all children in a classroom. Like how we must find ways to listen closely to children’s ideas. Like how we must include families in the life of our classrooms. Of course, I miss so much about the way it used to be. But I like thinking about all the things I’ve been thinking about.”

One thing that particularly bothers her, but, she hopes, will also turn out to be transformative, is how these circumstances have brought into sharp relief issues of inequality of opportunity and inadequacy of resources that the traditional system has long masked.

“The real takeaway from all this is that different families have such very different levels of access to education, and that’s profoundly, profoundly problematic,” she sand. “The current situation is giving us a very literal picture of what is harder to see but just as salient in regular times.”

“I just don’t have the bandwidth”

2020-05-11T14:16:59+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

They say there’s success in routine.

But what happens when all that’s normal has gone out the window?

Parents across America have been learning the hard way, as the coronavirus shutdown has forced most everyone to adapt. Joys, yes, they are there, too. But the headaches are real — especially when it comes to school.

With kids’ classrooms replaced by the kitchen table or living room couch, many parents have been reluctantly drafted into a new role: teacher’s assistant.

For two months now, Pennsylvania parents able to work from home have juggled jobs and domestic duties with overseeing their kids’ attempts at remote learning.

‘Essential’ workers unable to stay home have faced different challenges: trying to keep tabs on their children through text messages and calls at break-time.

In both cases, the added burdens can often make parents feel stressed, overwhelmed and inadequate.

Keystone Crossroads checked in with mothers — who continue to do the majority of domestic work — from across the Philadelphia region on how they’re handling distance learning.

‘I just don’t have the bandwidth’

Jennifer Byiers knows she is one of the lucky ones.

Although her husband has been furloughed from his job as a personal trainer, the 50-year-old Northwest Philadelphia resident is able to do her job as a financial consultant from home, providing enough income to support the couple and their son Jamie, a 4th grade student at Charles W. Henry School in Mt. Airy.

With two parents, no major money stress, and just one kid, they should be able to give him everything he needs to succeed, Byiers said. So why does it feel like they aren’t?

“I feel like we should be doing more. [But] I just don’t have the bandwidth,” Byiers said. “The fact that I am having difficulties managing this is pretty pitiful.”

Jennifer Byiers, 50, at home with her 10-year-old son Jamie, who attends Charles Henry School In Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood. (Courtesy of Jennifer Byiers)

The biggest challenge? Going from managing the vendors of a global firm to helping with math homework and then back again, every couple of minutes, all day.

“My ‘work demeanor’ is very different than my ‘kid demeanor,’” Byiers said. “I used to have that 20-minute commute to switch or decompress, and now it’s a flight of stairs, and I need to be on. That’s really hard.”

Byiers splits the homework help with her husband, and she said her son is handling the change fairly well, all things considered: He’s keeping up with his schoolwork and chatting with his classmates all day online.

Still, Byiers said, she’s looking forward to normal school resuming. She loves being a mom, but highly values her own space — her friends were shocked when she told me she was pregnant.

Now, she’s eager to shake the ‘new normal.’

“I am hoping they come up with a vaccine, she said. “I will be first in line, because I want to get everybody out of the house.”

‘I feel like my kids are missing out’

School days during the pandemic haven’t changed much for Evony Wilcox, a single mother in Chester.

“It’s just like any other day,” she said. “I am at work when they are in school.”

Wilcox, 41, works at a home for adults with intellectual disabilities in Delaware County. Lately she’s been picking up extra shifts, sometimes working seven days a week to save money. That’s made it difficult for her to field the steady stream of text updates coming in from the teachers of her 17-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.

“I wish I could be home because I feel like the rest of the world is spending time with their kids and I am not,” she said. “I feel like my kids are missing out because I have to go to work.”

Considered an “essential worker,” Evony Wilcox, 41, does not get to stay home with her teenage children during the shutdown. (Courtesy of Evony Wilcox)

Wilcox said her daughter calls throughout the day for help with schoolwork. With her son, “you gotta pull teeth,” she said — something that’s doubly hard after a long shift.

Wilcox is skeptical her children are getting much out of remote learning. Their schools — STEM at Showalter and Widener Partnership Charter — were hard up for resources like textbooks and computers before the pandemic, she said. Both schools have low scores on state tests. Now, Wilcox worries that the shift to online learning is leading her kids to fall even further behind students in wealthier districts with better access to supports.

“It’s frustrating because they’re already behind,” she said. “And they are going to be behind two, three times as bad when they go back to school.”

If there isn’t a vaccine for the virus by the start of the next school year, Wilcox said she will look into transferring her kids into cyber schools.

“I can’t have my kids not learning,” she said. “I can’t have you just giving them busywork — I can give them busywork.”

‘I will trust you until you prove otherwise’

Nereida Babilonia has been through this routine before.

Her 17-year-old son Jacob’s high school, Science Leadership Academy, closed for a month due to asbestos in the fall.

That virtual learning experience was never one she expected to feel any gratitude for, but when the pandemic hit, it came in handy.

“We got into a nice rhythm of online learning back in October and November,” said the 44-year-old Northeast Philadelphia resident. “And so when this came back again, it was like ‘Oh, let’s just do the online learning.’”

Babilonia’s husband, a machinist, is still going to work, but she’s able to do her job at a religious nonprofit from home. With one older daughter home from college and another back from a gap year in New Mexico, space in their twin-house is at a premium: Babilonia and Jacob spend each day sitting across from each other at the dining room table.

Babilonia monitors her son’s assignment schedule, but that’s about it. He’s more like a deskmate, she said, than a pupil.

“Because he is older I don’t have to stand over him, I don’t have to sit next to him. I don’t have to coerce him,” she said. “My motto: ‘I will trust you until you prove otherwise.’”

Babilonia said she’s glad they’re having such a relatively easy time with remote learning, but she is looking forward to sending Jacob back to SLA’s newly renovated building next year.

Her son is looking forward to returning, too: “[Working with my mom] can be fun,” Jacob said. “But yeah, it is nice to be by yourself sometimes.”

‘Holding their hands to the keyboard’

The coronavirus shutdown has led Abby Schrader to take on a few new roles: schoolteacher, IT worker and short-order cook.

“I’m making sure they’ve got everything they need to be online,” said the 54-year-old Fairmount resident. “Then lunchtime comes. I just took orders…one kid wants dumplings with corn, the other kid wants pasta. So I am now cooking meals for lunch. And delivering.”

Schrader, who teaches history at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, splits custody of her 11-year old and 13-year old children with her ex-wife, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs. During her weeks with the kids, Schrader said, her life revolves around them: waking early to make their breakfast, checking in on their schoolwork throughout the day, cooking their meals, and then prepping to teach her college classes after they fall asleep, often late in the night.

Schrader said she doesn’t mind the label one of her kids gave her: ‘helicopter mom.’

“Holding their hands to the keyboard is something that it becomes the parent’s job to do,” Schrader said.

The first few weeks of online instruction were rocky, Schrader said, but she’s happy with the quality of Friends Select’s online schooling now. Still, her children are struggling with the pandemic induced-anxiety: her 11-year-old won’t even go into the backyard, Schrader said, because she’s afraid she will get sick.

It’s something that even the most supportive ‘helicopter mom’ struggles to tackle alone.

“That’s the sort of thing that I think, as a group in school, they might be able to talk about,” Shrader said. “There might be programs for them.”

‘I’m trying to help our teachers by educating them the same way’

For Angela Kearney, distance learning has been a humbling experience.

The 50-year-old Pottstown resident has spent the last few years earning an associate’s degree in paralegal science and a bachelor’s in legal studies. She finally landed her dream job as a paralegal in January – only to be furloughed in March. Since then she’s been at home, focused on supervising the education of her four children and grandchildren ages 8 to 13.

“It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have, your third grader may be right,” Kearney said “It’s a struggle.”

Kearney’s house is jam-packed: in addition to her school-age kids, she shares it with her husband, who’s fighting kidney cancer, and her 20-year-old daughter Catheryn, who is hoping to attend Montgomery County Community College when it reopens. Kearney’s grandkids are dropped off every day by another adult daughter, Hope, who is working as the front desk manager of a nearby Holiday Inn.

Angela Kearney’s grandson David, 8, writes a letter to another student in his class. (Courtesy of Angela Kearney)

Each weekday, Kearney tries to recreate a typical day at Pottstown Middle School or Lincoln Elementary as best she can. The morning starts with a reading lesson. Then, a ‘brain break’ for kids to move around. After that comes math, followed by ‘recess’ in the backyard.

“I’m trying to help our teachers by educating them the same way at home,” she said. “So when they go back…normalcy will occur.”

Scheduling lessons can be a challenge: the four kids have just two laptops to share. Still, Kearney said, the students have been able to keep up. What she worries about is getting the call that it is time for her return to work.

“I’m the breadwinner of the household,” Kearney said. “If my job calls me to come back, who is going to school the children?”

Christian Toland, Kearney’s 13-year-old son, said he has struggled in school before, but this year he felt he had finally come into his own.

“Everything was going so smoothly, and then it got ruined,” Toland said.

Toland is not a fan of remote learning. He had some stern advice to offer to the adults not heeding social distancing guidelines.

“Us kids…we are really trying to have a summer,” Toland said, hoping restrictions will lift as the curve flattens. “And I am pretty sure [adults] are too. So I would suggest you stay home.”

Teachers, students in Philly start ‘official’ online learning

2020-05-05T03:02:31+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Taylor, a Masterman High School social studies teacher, had a lot planned before COVID-19 wiped out in-person schooling for the rest of the academic year.

She was about to start the Harlem Renaissance unit in her African American history class. Every year, she looks forward to one specific day in that class. She sets up stations around the classroom as art galleries, literary salons, and clubs, and students get to traverse those stations as if they’re living in the Harlem Renaissance — they read short stories from the time, listen to music, and view the art.

“It’s an academic exercise, but it’s fun to have students move around,” Taylor said.

Those kinds of activities grow out of one of Taylor’s core beliefs: that “learning is building knowledge through experiences.”

“But we just can’t have those same experiences now that classes are online,” she said.

Classes have technically been online for almost two months now, since school buildings closed March 13 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But Monday marked a turning point in Philadelphia’s online learning — grading began and, for the first time since early March, teachers introduced new material to students.

On March 30, the District unveiled a 10-page, four-phase plan for teachers to acclimate themselves and their students to this new reality. The first three phases involved optional virtual classes for students, as teachers learned how to navigate Zoom, Google Meet, and Google Classroom — tools for videoconferencing and delivering online assignments.

The fourth and final phase of the District’s plan, which began Monday, mandates that students attend class, though the consequences of not doing so remain unclear.

Based on several interviews Monday, this phase — when attendance and work start to count — has met with a mixed reception and some continued confusion. Most students have class from around 9 a.m. to noon each day, and teachers hold office hours in the afternoon. To log their attendance each school day, students must log in to a portal on the School District website and mark themselves present for each class.

But on Monday morning, students such as Nutsa Abashidze, a sophomore at Central High School, were already having trouble with philasd.org. Abashidze reported that when she tried to log her attendance for Monday’s classes, the website crashed, and she spoke to many other students who experienced the same problem.

“I think there were just too many people on the website at once, and it was overloaded,” Abashidze said. “I feel like someone should have seen this coming. … I hope attendance isn’t counted today.”

The message on many screens at peak time for logging in to the School District site Monday morning.

Abashidze said teachers at Central didn’t say how they would handle Monday’s gaps in attendance caused by the website crashing.

Jessica Brown, the principal of Masterman, did say in an email to students on Monday that teachers would record students’ attendance if they weren’t able to log it on the District website.

(Megan Lello of the District’s communications office said that there is no plan now to change the process, but that officials and the vendor who assists with the Infinite Classroom system would be watching closely to see what happens Tuesday.)

Isabel Portner, a sophomore at Masterman High School, had no trouble logging her attendance for the day, but she said there was occasional trouble with her teachers’ WiFi connection. Sometimes, a teacher would ask a question on Google Meet, and it might take up to a minute for a student to respond.

“For some teachers, the WiFi is choppy,” Portner said. “I think it makes the class less engaging sometimes.”

But despite the obstacles, Portner and Abashidze said they both find a definite upside to online class vs. in-person class. For one thing, they don’t have to worry about travel time to school.

“I have an hour commute each way,” Abashidze, who’s from West Philly, said. “You also only have class for a few hours a day, and I’ve had time to relax in between. It’s definitely less stressful.”

Confusion over grading

Students have been receiving conflicting information about how grading will work.

Superintendent William Hite has said he doesn’t want students to be negatively impacted because of their circumstances and is following a philosophy of “do no harm.” He doesn’t want students’ grades to go down because they can’t get online or because they must get a job to make ends meet during the pandemic.

Brown said the same thing in an email to the student body.

“Students will not be penalized for attendance problems or given a zero for not completing an assignment,” she said. “However, students can improve their GPA.”

Portner and Abashidze’s teachers have largely echoed that message. Portner said that all of her teachers told her that when grading resumed on Monday, her grades could only go up, not down.

“That’s nice,” Portner said. “It takes a lot of the stress off.”

But she said she’s still confused about some aspects of the District’s policy.

“What if someone just chooses not to show up [to class] for the rest of the year? Will they be punished for that?” Portner asked. “Also, what if I fail a test? Is that not gonna make my grade go down at all?”

District spokesperson Monica Lewis told the Notebook in April that students can still face consequences if they choose not to show up for the rest of the year.

“If they had an A or a B average on March 13, when the schools closed, and then decided to do no digital learning from now through June, their grade average could decline,” Lewis said. “It is possible to fail for the year if they don’t do work for the third marking period.”

Lewis added that students who don’t complete the work will be evaluated by their teachers on a case-by-case basis to determine whether they are excused because of hardship. Still, it’s unclear how much of a student’s grade would be affected by a failing test grade, or whether just attending class and doing the work guarantees a pass for the year.

Hite said the District is still working through this — whether to base grades largely on participation or on the quality of work.

In his weekly phone call with reporters on April 30, he said the District was considering how to grade. Grades could be based “simply on participation, making sure assignments are completed,” rather than on the quality of the content. “The goal is to keep students engaged; we want to introduce new material, but also reduce the regression that is likely to occur if students are doing nothing.”

The goal, he said, “is to create a positive situation for students and not be punitive.”

Some parents have expressed concern that students will lose motivation if their grades can’t go down during online school. Portner and Abashidze insist that’s not the case.

“I want to bring my grades up, and I’m glad I have the opportunity to do that now,” Abashidze said.

“Masterman’s a stressful environment,” Portner said. “Anytime you take away stress, it helps us learn better.”

Communication conflict

With circumstances constantly evolving in the era of COVID-19, especially for closed schools, some important information has slipped through the cracks, students say.

Some Masterman students felt that they were not kept up-to-date on the latest District policies. They said the information they had received from everyone above their teachers has been vague. They feel they were not made to fully understand how they’re supposed to approach online school or how they’re going to be graded.

Portner said she wasn’t informed until Sunday night that students had to log in to the School District website to fill in their attendance. She said she’s not sure whose job it is to disseminate that kind of information, but she should have been informed about that a lot earlier.

“If [attendance] is counted now, that’s kind of important,” Portner said.

Masterman principal Brown said, via email, that she didn’t specify that students should log in by 10 a.m. each day until a day or two before Monday. She didn’t offer a reason why, but she said it’s not a District requirement.

Brown added that she tries “to connect with [her] community about two to three times per week.” She said she sent students robocalls last week to remind them about the beginning of attendance and grading. She also sent The Notebook a couple of examples of reminder emails she sent out to the student body last week about grading and attendance.

Brown and Taylor both say the messaging from the School District has been clear. Taylor said she gets daily emails from officials, and faculty have weekly meetings to iron out any difficulties with online teaching. She thinks the conflicting messages students are receiving are likely due to the constantly changing situation.

“This has been such a difficult time, with people sick and losing their jobs, that I really appreciate people in our school community and District trying to reach out and be flexible and understanding,” Taylor said. “I hope this can be over soon so we can see our students’ faces again. I really miss them.”

Neena Hagen, a Notebook intern, is a student at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated from Philadelphia public schools.

What will school look like in September?

2020-05-01T03:38:54+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

When and if school buildings open in the fall, what will education look like?

Will students go to schools on alternate days? Will schools need to buy plastic shields for desks? Will buses do double or triple shifts so they can carry fewer students? Will there be staggered schedules?

Will schools need to install more hand-washing stations? Will teachers and students have to wear masks? Who will pay for all this?

What about recess? Lunch? Sports?

Will it be safe?

Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that he has a group from the District working with the city, health, and transportation officials in an effort to figure out answers to questions like these.

The working groups “are looking at all the contingencies,” he said during a conference call with reporters.

Hite said that few things are certain now, except that he has pretty much written off any chance that there will be face-to-face summer school.

“Virtual is more of the likely option, given where we are,” he said. But something will be necessary for “vulnerable” populations, including those with special needs and high school seniors who need more credits to graduate.

Come fall, he surmised, high school students might have more flexibility than younger ones.

“The technology gives us some ability to think differently where children need to be every single day at a given time now that they all have access to information and content,” he said. “It’s a little different for elementary students. Their families have to go to work, so we’re working through all of those considerations as we think what those plans will look like.”

At the Board of Education meeting Thursday night, a few board members expressed concern that the District should not move forward with planned classroom modernizations this summer due to the uncertainty about funding as well as uncertainty over whether students will actually be in classrooms.

“Who knows what school configuration will look like when all this is settled?” asked one board member.

Hite said that there were also concerns about the health of staff members who might be particularly vulnerable to the worst effects of the coronavirus.

“We have to think through how to work with those individuals and how those with technology can remain available for student instruction” without direct contact, he said.

The District’s unions are or will be part of the working groups trying to figure all this out, Hite said.

The two major national teachers’ unions have made public statements this week that they would vigorously protest reopening schools without all the proper health measures in place, including the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that the federal government must make sure funds are available for equipment and necessary health measures and that employees need to feel free to speak up about their concerns.

If schools are reopened without proper safety measures, “you scream bloody murder,” Weingarten said, according to POLITICO. “And you do everything you can to … use your public megaphones.”

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers – which is now negotiating a new contract with the District – is part of the AFT. Its current contract expires at the end of August.

The president of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen García, said teachers could strike if they felt schools were being opened prematurely or without the proper health measures in place, POLITICO reported.

During Thursday’s media phone call, Hite also spoke to another issue that remains the subject of some confusion for teachers – grading between now and the end of the year.

Teachers will begin introducing new material and grading work on Monday, after weeks of offering students materials for “review and enrichment.” Hite has decided that these grades will fill out the third marking period instead of beginning a new one, and he has reiterated that the District is “still figuring out” how exactly the grading will work – whether the grades will be based on participation or on the quality and content of the work.

Hite says he wants the grades to “do no harm” because of the unprecedented nature of this situation. He doesn’t want students to be penalized for circumstances beyond their control, such as lack of internet access or the need to take care of younger siblings. On the other hand, some students need to make up credits or finish work in order to graduate.

And there is always the tricky question of motivation – will students who are satisfied with the grades they have now be able to avoid participation without concern?

Hite said that the “whole point is not to be punitive with grades.” He noted that some districts have gone to pass/fail, as have some local charter schools. Some schools, he said, are simply ending the year now. The goal of instruction now until the end of the year on June 12 is to “prevent regression” and make sure students are prepared to move on to the next grade.

All of this, he said, “is hard to figure out. … We’re doing the best we can not to be overly punitive for things that could be completely outside a student’s control.

“For students on the fence, in danger of failing, or in danger of not being promoted, I do expect them to make up assignments and do the work. But those grades should simply be for participating. I don’t want to harp on traditional grading in a nontraditional pandemic.”

The Diary of Ms. B.: Tears and triumphs inside a Philly teacher’s virtual classroom

2020-04-28T15:29:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

WHYY and The Notebook will be periodically checking in with two teachers for the rest of the academic year to see how they are coping with the move to virtual learning. We hope to recount their successes, discoveries, and frustrations. This is the second story in the series. On a Wednesday afternoon, sixth-grade teacher Lauren Ballester stared into an empty video call and laughed to herself.

The Google Hangout screen in front of her stated the obvious:

“You are the only one here.”

“Yes, Google,” the second-year teacher said, with mock annoyance. “I know.”

Ballaster, a reading and social studies teacher at William H. Ziegler School in lower Northeast Philadelphia, was halfway through her first week of online education. Each day brought a cocktail of conflicting emotions: frustration, triumph, loneliness, hope.

At the moment, Ballester was stewing in self-deprecation and a touch of dark humor.

She was a young teacher in strange waters — seeking validation or at least some signal that whatever lines she’d cast into the digital ocean hadn’t simply sunk to the bottom.

But, the emotional tides of teaching can switch quickly — they had all week.

In this instance, a breakthrough was near, logging on from a computer 11 miles away.

***

As you read this, teachers across Pennsylvania are relearning how to do their jobs.

With physical schools closed through at least the end of the academic year, education has gone virtual. Teachers are quickly trying to master the technological tools needed to salvage a pandemic-wrecked school year.

For about a month, Philadelphia schools sat in different states of limbo — as the district distributed 75,000 Chromebook laptops to students who lacked home devices.

On April 20, the district officially opened up a “review and enrichment” period for teachers to test-drive their online classrooms. By May 4, the district says teachers will be expected to grade student work and hold daily classes online.

This will not happen by magic, but instead through the experimentation and persistence of educators.

Lauren Ballester, 26, is one of thousands trying to make it work.

With humility, humor, and abundant heart, Ballester allowed WHYY to chronicle her first week as an online teacher through interviews and audio diaries. This is her story.

The lead-up: Fear, fury, and fonts

On the Friday that became the final day of in-person school, Lauren Ballester was frantic.

She got word around 2 p.m. that Pennsylvania public schools would be closed for at least two weeks. She quickly went online, purchased a $4 work packet on figurative language, and ripped off enough copies for the 44 kids in her two class sections.

When she arrived back in her classroom, her sixth-graders were cheering “like it was two-weeks-worth of snow days.” But Ballester knew from conversations earlier that day that many of them weren’t as happy as they appeared.

“Some of them straight-up said, ‘Ms. B, I’m really scared,’” Ballester recalled.

Ballester had long wanted to be at a school like Ziegler, where 70% of students needed district-provided laptops in order to do online work from home.

She’d grown up in the Germantown section of Northwest Philadelphia with her mom, a teacher and part-time waitress. Scholarships carried her through private school K-12 and eventually the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the only Latinx person in her engineering program.

“When I was growing up, I always felt marginalized,” Ballester said.

Hoping to make the path easier for the next generation, Ballester was drawn to teach kids who “grew up like me, and kids who would find meaning in having a teacher who looks like them and comes from places like them.”

When Ballester first heard the district would mandate online learning, she was upset. Furious, really. She felt the last thing her kids needed in a global pandemic was to worry about schoolwork.

“I was so paralyzed with principled anger,” Ballester said.

Ballester had posted a few optional assignments when schools first closed, but the response rate was paltry. Of her 44 students, only three did the work.

She felt it was a sign that there were more important things in her kids’ lives than school. Even her check-up messages to the families felt, at times, intrusive.

When her anger subsided, she decided there was no point in half-measures.

“I’m gonna do it right,” she decided. “And I’m gonna do it in a way that makes me proud.”

So she burrowed into the planning process, meditating on the smallest details.

In class, she always used a template called “Marina” on her Google slides. She made sure to use that same color-font combination for each of the new slides she was now building.

“This is probably me being extra,” Ballester said. “They might not notice. But it’s comforting, even for me.”

Ballester’s empty classroom. (Courtesy of Lauren Ballester)

‘Keep it 100’

Through “a lot of Google-ing and trial and error,” Ballester crafted a weekly assignment plan.

An app called Screenflick allowed her to create daily videos of her reading a book called “Inside Out and Back Again” aloud and going through slides related to the text. Another service called Epic! provided free online access to the book for her students.

Each day, the students had a reading prompt related to that day’s chunk of text.

Social studies class would revolve around daily journals the students would keep. They were, Ballester said, creating the “primary sources” future historians would use to learn about the coronavirus crisis.

The journal prompts changed daily, but they began with a series of check-in questions.

How are you feeling?

What did you do today?

What are you grateful for today?

What (or who) do you miss today?

Finally, as required by the school district, Ballester would hold online “office hours” for 90 minutes each day. Students could log onto her Google Hangout at any point during that window and chat with her.

Normally, Ballester liked to host “community circles” where students could share their feelings. Afraid that her kids were growing isolated, she wanted the journals to become that space for them to unload emotional burdens.

When the break first began, she’d sent a letter to her students. In it, she asked them to keep one simple thought at the center of their writing.

“Whatever you do, remember: Be true to yourself. Keep it 100. Speak your truth.”

Lauren Ballester is a 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Monday: ‘Weirdly nervous’

Jitters ran through Ballester’s fingertips as she flipped open her laptop on Monday. It was like walking into her classroom on the first day of school and wondering if anyone would even be there.

“I’m feeling weirdly nervous,” she said.

As an emotional hedge, Ballester decided to review student work during the window she’d designated for virtual office hours.

“That way, it’s not too depressing if nobody comes,” she explained.

Nobody came — so she started marking up the handful of assignments already submitted.

As she read through the responses, Ballester started to cry.

There were tears of relief — relief that more than three students had at least done the work. And there were tears of frustration, stemming from the fact that several students had written their reading responses about the wrong book.

It was the kind of error she could have corrected in 30 seconds on a normal day. “But now I feel like I’m grasping at straws just to be in touch with them all,” Ballester said.

About five times throughout the day she heard from families with some sort of log-in problem. It was inevitable in a world where assignments and materials were scattered across so many platforms: Google Drive, i-Ready, Lexia, BrainPOP…

At one point Ballester couldn’t get into her own account for a classroom management tool called ClassDojo.

Slowly, she worked through each hiccup. By 9 p.m. she was still at her laptop, watching assignments trickle in. She wished she could turn her brain off.

In all, 17 of 44 students completed the reading assignment and 18 did their social studies journals.

“Ok,” Ballester said. “I did a thing. And they did it.”

It was something — even if that something wasn’t quite school.

Earlier that day, one of her students had posted a public comment on the class portal that seemed to capture the moment.

“I miss everyone,” the student wrote. “I miss the teachers. I miss classmates. And I miss you 10,000 times every day.”

The view looking out Ballester’s classroom window. (Courtesy of Lauren Ballester)

Tuesday: ‘Still a sixth-grade teacher’

The drama eased on Tuesday, and the realization set in: This is what school will be like for a while.

“The first day I was all nervous and had a lot of anticipation feelings,” Ballester said. “And now I’m like, ‘If this is gonna be my life for the next two months, I’m gonna get really bored.’”

Ballester was “thrilled” when she found a screen view on Google Classroom that allowed her to see, in one snapshot, how many students had turned in a given assignment.

“This is what my life has come to,” she said jokingly.

With school starting anew, Ballester and her colleagues found themselves questioning some of their most basic practices. On grading, for instance, she wondered if there should be two different marks — one for overall mastery of the subject and another just for effort.

Effort seemed to count for a lot right now.

In terms of participation, little had changed. She got 19 social studies assignments and 2- reading responses.

The quality varied.

One student wrote almost nothing about the book the class was reading. Instead, the student said she was “cracking up” at the names of two prominent characters: Ha and TiTi.

“Ok, I’m still a sixth-grade teacher,” Ballester thought upon reading the response.

Another student wrote in her journal that little had changed about her family’s life during quarantine “except that we can’t go to Coldstone Creamery and I’m really mad.”

Ballester could relate.

A social distancing notice on the fence of William H. Ziegler Elementary school in Northeast Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Wednesday: Peaks and valleys

Ballester woke to a text message from one of her students. Apparently the reading videos for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday had no sound.

“I’m so angry I could scream,” Ballester said to herself in one of her audio diary recordings. “In fact, I have screamed.”

She didn’t know what exactly had gone awry, but the error forced her to spend the morning recording three different 20-minute videos for a second time.

Eight students turned in the assignment before she’d had the chance to correct the audio, which added to the misery. Was any of this even necessary?

“I’m feeling kind of defeated,” Ballester said.

When 1:30 p.m. arrived, for the third consecutive day, there were no students at online office hours. Google taunted. All Ballester could do was chuckle.

As she started to look through the day’s assignments, a face popped up on the screen. A girl named Iliana Rosa had logged on.

She didn’t have any questions with the work. Iliana was a diligent student. The girl just wanted to talk with her teacher. So they did — about the coronavirus and the magic tricks her brother was teaching her.

The conversation ran over an hour. It was the most meaningful interaction she had with a student in more than a month. When the call ended, Ballester struggled to describe the surge of emotion.

“I just…”

Sigh

“…continue to feel like it’s very hard to be a teacher. But it’s also very rewarding for moments like that.”

On nice days, Philadelphia teacher Lauren Ballester takes her laptop outside to teach. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Thursday: Cranky days

Ballester spent Thursday in a funk. It wasn’t for any particular reason — just one of those glum days.

Normal school was like a performance. You had to put out good energy for the kids — even if you didn’t wake up with it.

Online school was different. Grumpiness could linger.

“I have cranky days at school, too,” Ballester said. “But it’s just really different to be stuck in your crankiness.”

The days weren’t as intense as hour after hour of managing live classes, but they dragged. Ballester found herself dialed into her laptop checking on student work late into the night.

Iliana Rosa provided a needed ray of sunshine when she showed up for office hours again. This time, she turned the tables on Ballester and asked her to answer the daily check-in questions the students had been asked to complete.

“Tell me, Ms. B, how are you,” Iliana asked. “How are you feeling?”

Ballester wasn’t sure how to answer.

Iliana Rosa, a 6th grade student at William H. Ziegler Elementary school in Northeast Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Friday: The “little organizer”

Ballester was running a couple of minutes late for office hours when she got a text from Iliana.

“Where are you?”

Iliana was running the show now. She’d convinced a friend from class to attend office hours with her.

“She’s like my little organizer — doing turnout for me,” Ballester said with a laugh.

As usual, the conversation didn’t revolve around work. The trio chatted about life and played a version of the spelling game “hangman.”

During one of their conversations, Iliana blurted out:

“You’re one of those teachers I’m never going to forget.”

When Ballester said the same, Iliana seemed shocked.

Sixth grade is a “transitional age,” Ballester said. Her students were somewhere between “Yeah, mom, I’ve got it” and “I need a lot of help.” They wanted to prove their self-sufficiency, but many of them also missed the instant validation that once came with being a cute, little kid.

For some, like Iliana, that added up to a need for “connection and consistency,” Ballester said. She’d been like that when she was a student — always searching for reassurance and familiarity. In fact, Ballester was thinking about Iliana when she decided to use the same “Marina” template for her online slides that she’d used for her in-class presentations.

She wondered how the rest of her students were filling that need for connection.

Through conversations with her kids over the past month, Ballester realized that few of them were talking directly with one another. She sensed that — in lieu of phone calls or even text messages — many of them used apps like TikTok and Instagram to communicate.

“They’re interacting via these videos that they post,” she said. “That’s how they talk.”

The post script: Iliana’s slideshow

Each day, student participation was relatively stable.

On Friday, 17 students did the reading assignment (same as Monday) and 19 students completed social studies (one more than Monday).

For the week, 28 of Ballester’s 44 students (63 percent) completed at least one assignment. Within that subset, 14 (32 percent) did everything assigned.

“In real school, if half my kids weren’t doing their work it would be a disaster. I would be fired, probably,” she said.

If you thought of these assignments as homework assignments, though — it was different. This was actually a better return-rate than what Ballester usually got. She knew that, outside of school, her kids faced tougher circumstances than many.

“What does it look like for the student to be sitting at home doing their learning right now?” she said. “What are their conditions?”

For the most part, the students who did the work were self-starters, kids with strong support systems at home, or those with whom she’d forged strong relationships. Ballester prized relationship-building — and the week felt like validation of that approach.

“I think the biggest incentive is relational,” she said.

There was no academic incentive in place yet. She wasn’t allowed to enter official grades for any of the work done this week.

Ballester suspected, though, that things wouldn’t change much when grading and formal attendance begin on May 4.

Across the state, with standardized tests cancelled for the year, attendance is one of a few objective criteria remaining to evaluate schools during the shutdown: Did students and parents feel the education offered was worth the effort to log-on?

For Ballester, it’s a question that only opens the door to other, more complicated queries.

Looking at the list of 16 students who didn’t do any of the work, she couldn’t be sure why they hadn’t chimed in. But she suspected few of them would be motivated by grades or attendance.

She and the school administration were still trying to suss out which students — if any — were being held back by technological challenges. But if students were truly uninterested in the work, Ballester didn’t want to browbeat them into coming just so she could crow about her participation numbers.

“If they all come and don’t get anything out of it, then who is that really for?” she said. “It’s just for show. It’s for the outside. And it’s not really for them.”

A few weeks from now, Ballester thought, she’d probably be more hung up on the kids who didn’t do their work. Right now, she was still celebrating that fact that kids did come — far more than the three who’d logged on for the first batch of optional assignments.

“[Online teaching] won’t be my favorite thing to do,” Ballester said. “But it will be possible. And it will happen.”

The next week began much as the last one ended.

On Monday, Ballester logged on to office hours for another chat with Iliana and her friend.

Again, Iliana came prepared. She’d brought online games for the trio to play together.

Iliana presented them on her own set of Google slides — just like Ms. B would have done.

Avi Wolfman-Arent

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A roundup of education news - last one before Chalkbeat Philly launch Avi Wolfman-Arent

Is it true that Philadelphia students’ grades can only go up, not down?

2020-04-24T18:08:21+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Since the rollout of the School District’s online learning plan for the balance of the school year, students have been getting conflicting messages about how grading will work.

Superintendent William Hite has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want students to be “negatively impacted” for “things they can’t control,” such as a lack of online access, the need to take care of siblings or other family members, or the need to keep a job that is paying the household bills. Some principals have sent out the message to students that grades can go up, but they can’t go down.

Parents have expressed concerns that students may lose motivation to do any work if they feel that they cannot be “negatively impacted” as the District works through its procedures and guidance for this unprecedented situation.

The District began formal online instruction on Monday, April 20, what it is calling “enrichment and review,” and told teachers not to give out grades for that work. Some teachers, to motivate students, said they would get extra credit for completing assignments.

Hite has repeatedly explained that the District will not hold students accountable until May 4, when new material will be introduced. Teachers will take attendance by tracking who has logged on to work posted in Google Classroom and noting who participates in any virtual group sessions. And they will be able to grade work that has been assigned through Google Classroom.

Hite has also said that there will be no fourth marking period, but rather an extension of the third marking period.

So, does that mean the student who has all As will maintain those grades even if he or she does no work between now and the end of the school year on June 12?

No, said District spokesperson Monica Lewis. When Hite said that students “would not be negatively impacted,” what he meant was that “the goal is to keep them learning, so they won’t regress.”

“We’ve gone from four terms to three,” she said. “If they had an A or a B average on March 13, when the schools closed, and then decided to do no digital learning from now through June, their grade average could decline. Not doing any work will contribute to the third marking period grade.”

Individual teachers and schools will determine whether students are not doing work because they are suffering from real hardship, she said.

Teachers can also take into account to what extent students participated in activities and completed assignments this week and next, she said, before the formal introduction of new material.

“The buildings are closed, but schools are still in session,” she said. “Students are expected to log in and check in and do assignments this week and next week. Starting May 4, students will be graded on assignments. Their grades will be impacted whether they do the work or they don’t. If, as of March 13, they had a failing grade, if they engage in the work and submit it properly and well, they could bring the grade up. If they don’t do the work, his or her average could go down. It is possible to fail for the year if they don’t do work for the third marking period.”

The determination of what constitutes circumstances beyond their control will be reviewed case by case, she said.

That said, “By no means are we now saying that someone will be penalized if circumstances at home are preventing them from getting instruction.” If students are not logging in, teachers and other staff are supposed to be reaching out “to make sure the child is OK and has the resources to be healthy and well and then get into the academic portion of it.”

Online learning resources you may have missed

2020-04-22T17:00:56+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

NEW UPDATE 4/22

Thursday is Shakespeare’s birthday, and England’s Globe Theatre is streaming his plays free on YouTube. Romeo and Juliet is available until May 3. The Two Noble Kinsmen will be next, starting May 4, with more to follow.

For Earth Week, National Geographic has a new hub, NatGeo@Home, which includes Neighborhood Safari, a collection of art about animals made by people staying at home, and it encourages readers to contribute their own. Many of the magazine’s online offerings are being provided at no cost.

NEW UPDATE 4/19

A series Mondays With Michelle Obama, in which the former First Lady reads children’s books aloud, will premiere as a livestream at noon EST on Monday, April 20, on the PBS Kids Facebook page, PBS Kids Youtube channel and Penguin Random House Facebook page. This Monday she will be reading The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, a book about a mouse taking a walk in the woods. The reading will also be available for on-demand viewing later.

For parents watching the series with their children, the Read Together, Be Together website is offering optional activities and resources to accompany each book.

Future selections: April 27, noon, There’s a Dragon in Your Book, written by Tom Fletcher and illustrated by Greg Abbott

May 4, noon: Miss Maple’s Seeds, story and pictures by Eliza Wheeler

May 11, noon: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

NEW UPDATE: 4/17

The Alliance for Watershed Education (AWE) has virtual programming that allows families to connect with nature while staying at home. Children (and parents) can learn about migratory birds and butterflies, meet the animals that live in our forests and rivers, and learn how rain barrels in your backyard can help reduce stormwater pollution.

Highlights:

Hunt for a bear with Shannon at the Heritage Conservancy as she discovers and identifies all sorts of animal tracks in the woods.

Learn about the creatures you can find in and along the Delaware River, including a mayfly nymph, a giant swallowtail butterfly, and fly-fishing lures pretending to be creepy-crawly river friends as you color them on these awesome coloring sheets offered by Independence Seaport Museum.

Learn about the nature that’s right in your backyard, some Lehigh Gap history, and meet Maize the Snake through a series of videos from the Lehigh Gap Nature Center.

Meet a turtle and a crayfish with Park Rangers Kelly and Bri at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge Center.

Meet a plated lizard at the Center for Aquatic Sciences at Adventure Aquarium

This is just a sample of online activities and educational videos offered by AWE Centers. Check out the full list by CLICKING HERE.

NEW UPDATE 4/14:

The American Writers Museum is bringing its newest exhibit, My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The exhibit is free and features more than 30 authors who explore what it means to be an immigrant in the United States today. It runs through May 2021 and is designed to prompt conversation on a wide variety of issues, such as the refugee crisis and the perception of immigrants in our country. Parents, teachers, and students can view the exhibit HERE.

Public Citizens for Children & Youth (PCCY) has created an online arts education guide, called #ArtsEdAtHome, with a curated selection of free arts education resources organized by artistic discipline: general art/virtual field trips, visual arts, music, dance/movement and theater/poetry. All resources are available now on the PCCY website.

– Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 4/9:

Mount Airy artist Kim Soles has a popular summer camp called Indigo Nature Arts, and during the school shutdown she has created an online program for children primarily between the ages of 6 and 12 called “heart + spirit.”

The 28-day program has begun, but you can access information on her website, and it is fine to join in now as each day offers a new activity. Click on heart + spirit and register to access the program. There is no cost to register, but to participate there is a nominal daily fee. “Registration is important for me to know who is participating so I can stay in touch,” said Soles. You can read more about the program in this article in the Chestnut Hill Local.

NEW UPDATE 4/8:

College Board, the company that writes the SAT and PSAT, has teamed up with Khan Academy to create personalized instruction for students practicing for these standardized tests. Based on students’ PSAT and SAT scores, which they can send from College Board, Khan Academy will develop a learning plan that targets students’ weaknesses and delivers practice questions in those areas. Khan Academy will also create a personalized learning schedule, so students can keep track of their progress.

Students can create an account by clicking “sign-up” on the homepage and entering their name and email address. After that, Khan Academy will prompt students to log in to their College Board account and send over their test scores. If a student hasn’t yet taken the PSAT or SAT, they can simply take a diagnostic test on Khan Academy and receive personalized instruction from the results of that test.

Curriculum Associates offers free printable activity packets in math and reading for K-8 students looking to bolster their skills at home. The packets are broken down by grade level; math packets range from counting for kindergarteners to pre-algebra for eighth graders; reading packets range from kindergarten-level to eighth-grade-level reading comprehension. Each packet also comes with an answer key for teachers and parents. Students, families and teachers can find the packets HERE.

–Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 4/7:

Class Central offers thousands of free college-level courses in subjects such as business, the humanities, social science and computer science. Many are taught by professors at Ivy League universities. Students can filter through classes by clicking on a subject, which pulls up a variety of course offerings. Examples of courses include: The Ancient Greeks, Introduction to Psychology and Data Analysis with R. Once you’ve identified the class you want to take, simply click on the class and follow the sign-up instructions. Most courses will ask you to enter your name and email address, but exact instructions vary by course.

The 2020 Parents’ Guide to Google Classroom by Tanya Bratton, M. Ed., teaches parents how to navigate Google Classroom to ensure that their kids are staying on top of home assignments during the COVID-19 crisis. The slideshow goes through the process of signing into Google Classroom and viewing classes and upcoming assignments. Parents can access the slideshow HERE and log in to Google Classroom HERE.

—Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 4/3:

The News Literacy Project (NLP), a national nonprofit that teaches students how to distinguish between credible and misleading news sources, has removed all paywalls and other barriers to its resources in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and educators can now use Checkology Virtual Classroom for free, which includes 13 lessons on topics like misinformation on the internet, the First Amendment, and the role of the press. The virtual classroom comes with quizzes and challenges that help students practice their news literacy skills. NLP has also added a special section to its website for COVID-19 content to help individuals tell the difference between credible coverage and false information. Students, families and teachers can access the site HERE.

National Geographic also offers a set of free resources for students. A tab on the website, called “Learn at Home,” offers online lessons that help K-12 students develop skills in social studies and science. The National Geographic Resource Library also offers lessons and videos for a wide age range. Parents and kids can access the National Geographic website HERE, or visit the links above for specific services.

– Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 4/2:

Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education has gathered stories, activities, and tips to address issues facing educators and families during the COVID-19 outbreak. One article, titled “Connecting in the virtual college classroom,” offers tips for instructors transitioning from a classroom to at-home teaching. Another entry links to a YouTube presentation by a Stanford lecturer in which she provides advice for parents on how to make online learning productive for K-12 kids. Parents can also browse the site’s collection of resources by age group, which are split up into the following categories: preschool to age 8, elementary, and middle and high school. Students, families and educators can view resources HERE.

Mom’s DESK provides links to online learning resources for children of all ages. If you go to the site and click the “Expand Categories” button, a drop-down menu appears where you can filter the site’s resources by subject (i.e. math, science, social studies, etc.). The site links to Mathantics, a YouTube channel that provides basic math videos, and GeoGuessr, a geography guessing game, to name a few offerings. Families, educators, and students can access the site HERE.

– Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 4/1: EARLY CHILDHOOD LEARNING

Vroom, a global program run by the Bezos Family Foundation, offers a free series of brain-building exercises for children under 5 years old. The exercises are designed to enrich the minds of young children through simple, everyday activities at home. Once parents sign up, they’ll find a sample activity on their dashboard each day. If the child doesn’t like the sample activity, the discover tab on the Vroom website features a range of activities, from “Fun With Chores” to “Everyday Routines,” that teach parents how to turn chores like doing the dishes into fun games and conversations. Parents can view sample Vroom activities (called “tips”) HERE, and they can sign up for the full Vroom service HERE.

Early Learning Nation also offers a free series of brain-building exercises for young children. The home page features a slideshow of articles that teach parents about the ins and outs of early childhood learning, including “The Ooh-and-Coo Duet of Babies’ Language Learning” and “7 #StayHome Brain-Building Activities from First Book.” Parents can visit the website to view articles or subscribe to Early Learning Science by entering their email address and clicking the subscribe button.

– Neena Hagen

NEW UPDATE 3/31

The National Constitution Center has a series of online offerings, and this Friday, April 3, at 1 p.m., renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns will join Jeffrey Rosen for a session on “The Constitution in Times of Crisis.” They will look at “moments in our history during which constitutional battles emerged amidst moments of crisis, including the American Revolution, Civil War, World War II, and the Great Depression, as well as what constitutional issues may arise out of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Parents, teachers, and students can register for the class HERE.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, the center has a series of free daily online courses for students in middle school, high school, and college, offered via Zoom. Full details of the program, including weekly schedules and topics, registration details, and information on the program structure, can be found HERE.

In addition, PBS Learning Media has launched a new platform called “Ken Burns in the Classroom” aggregating all of its teacher resources for Burns’ films into one destination.

Springboard Collaborative, a nonprofit founded to aid families in helping their children with reading and literacy after school and during the summers, also has a trove of online resources. It has a six-week at-home coaching plan. Its website resources page can be found here.

NEW UPDATE 3/30

Charlie McGeehan, a teacher at Philadelphia’s the U School, with Harrisburg teacher Adam Hosey, has created a poetry class via Instagram called Iamb Staying Home. It’s designed for high school students, but anyone can participate. Each day at 2 p.m., they are posting a short lesson focusing on a poem they selected, followed by a prompt for students to write their own poems. They are, McGeehan said, “centering the voices of Black Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC), women, and queer folks in the poetry we select.” You can access the course via Instagram.

The folks at the Free Library, who are organizing the citywide Read by 4th campaign, have a list of resources for families to keep young students on the path to proficient reading and writing while they are at home.

UPDATED 3/28

The Notebook is collecting online learning resources that teachers and parents may not know about. We plan to update the list as we become aware of more worthwhile resources – with your help.

Draw the Lines PA , devised by the Committee of Seventy, was designed as an online teaching tool about elections and gerrymandering. Since the coronavirus outbreak has closed schools, the Committee of Seventy has created a new activity packet for teachers and professors to make it easier to use. They are available for classroom Zoom sessions and are now hosting webinars for interested educators. Draw the Lines meets Pennsylvania’s new mandate for civics education.

The educational services organization Foundations Inc. has curated and vetted a series of online sites, broken down by area of study. There are links to virtual field trips, artists leading doodle sessions, and suggestions for physical activity, as well as more traditional sources of reading and math lessons.

This year is the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. “Suff Buffs,” run by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, is providing educational materials to help commemorate the milestone – as are many other entities, including the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, and the National Education Association. The fight for women’s suffrage is not told in much detail in most American history textbooks. For instance, did you know that women were arrested for holding peaceful protests in front of the White House (the Silent Sentinels) and force-fed in jail when they went on a hunger strike? While many of us have heard of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, some suffragists in the later generation whose pressure led to the passage of the 19th Amendment have never become household names. Ever heard of Alice Paul? Ida B. Wells? Lucy Burns? Inez Mulholland? It is a great story. More resources at from The Alice Paul Institute and a daily lessons for various ages on social media at #AlicePaulHomeschool. More resources at the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and the 2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative.

Please send recommendations for additional resources to dalem@thenotebook.org or laurenw@thenotebook.org as you come across them. Include a short summary of how you used the resource and why it is worth sharing.

Philly students will not be penalized for absences or missed work during virtual school

2020-04-21T13:19:06+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Public school students in Philadelphia will soon begin a more official version of online school — and the details of that experiment are taking shape.

Starting May 4, teachers will be expected to hold three hours of “daily instruction,” according to a School District of Philadelphia “continuity of education” plan sent to staffers and shared with WHYY. That daily instruction is supposed to include live video chats between students and teachers as well as “small group instruction.”

Students are expected to participate in these daily lessons “to the extent possible,” according to the plan. The assignments handed out from May 4 until the end of the academic year on June 12 will be graded and counted as part of students’ third-marking-period scores.

Crucially, however, any grades students receive in the third marking period can only improve their overall grades, according to the District’s “continuity of education” plan. Students will effectively not be penalized if they don’t complete assignments.

Student attendance will not be recorded and monitored, the plan says. But teachers are told to “track who is participating and who is not participating and communicate to those students who are not participating to offer support.”

On Monday, Philadelphia’s public school system officially began “Phase 3” of its online learning plan, which includes review assignments and more structure for students and teachers. This middle step in the District’s weekslong virtual ramp-up does not include grades or new material, and asks teachers to hold 90 minutes of virtual “office hours” every day.

The hope, District leaders have said, is to use the next two weeks to troubleshoot any problems that might arise.

Then, on May 4, the more rigorous learning is supposed to begin.

“School is still in. We might not be in the buildings, but school is definitely in session,” said District spokesperson Monica Lewis.

“We worked really hard to put together a comprehensive plan,” she added. “This is obviously not the ideal situation. But we are working diligently to make sure our students have access to the best education possible.”

Here is the complete plan that District administrators sent to school staff about the next phase of student instruction.

Advocates and parents have pushed Philadelphia to provide a more comprehensive virtual education for its public school students. But the District faces tremendous hurdles that have slowed its speed, including the fact that many of its 130,000 students did not have a home laptop or tablet.

To remedy that, the District bought tens of thousands of Chromebooks for students and distributed them over the course of two weeks.

The District has also had to coordinate a massive meal plan for low-income students that would normally receive free- or reduced-price lunch in schools. As of last Friday, the city had distributed 1.1 million student meals.

In the meantime, five weeks elapsed without formal instruction in Pennsylvania’s largest school district. Plans moving forward for the roughly 70,000 students who attend charter schools in the city have been determined on an individual school basis.

Hite explains how online learning will work starting next week

2020-04-16T17:18:46+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that the experiences of students and parents in connecting with their schools “should see and feel very different” starting Monday as online learning formally starts in the Philadelphia School District.

In his weekly call with reporters, Hite said that up until now, teachers had been encouraged to contact students and offer assistance with the learning packets that students were provided, but as of next week, “everyone is required to reach out to children,” he said.

From April 20 through May 1, what Hite called “digitized learning” will begin. He said it would be “teacher-led,” but still “enrichment and review.” Essentially, a new set of learning packets that had been available for two-week spans over the last month will be online. And teachers and other school staff will be required to start implementing the guidance they received March 30 regarding daily office hours and reaching out to a designated group of students at least once or twice a week. Some teachers and schools have already been doing this, while others have not.

On May 4, “planned instruction” will begin, with the introduction of new material. The District will begin tracking participation by both students and teachers. Teachers will begin giving out grades.

However, he said, details of grading are still being worked out.

“We are still determining what to grade and how,” he said. “I suspect some will be more about participation than actual content,” and failure to participate will have consequences. He noted that some high school seniors will be required to complete some classwork in order to graduate.

But there are still many unknowns. Some states, he added, are actually prohibiting grading due to concerns over not penalizing students who do not have access to the technology required to do schoolwork online.

On that front, the District is “hyperfocused on getting the technology out.” Over the next two weeks, it will complete distributing its Chromebooks and working to make sure that all students have online access. Hite said that while some schools have successfully given laptops to all students who need them, a few schools have been unable to track down up to 15% of their students. He cited one school with an enrollment of 380 that was unable to reach 70 students. That’s part of the “challenges of where the schools are located and the circumstances surrounding some housing situations,” he said.

At the end of Friday, after all schools have conducted their Chromebook distributions, Hite said he would have a better idea of what percentage of students had failed to pick up their laptops. Another yet-to-be-scheduled opportunity will be provided to those families at a centralized location next week, he said.

He also said that the District is continuing to work to provide internet access to all students and is procuring hotspots to distribute. He said he anticipated that at least “a couple of thousand” students will require something other than a “typical cable connection” in order to go online so they can complete their work.

Hite also said that he is confident that all teachers were either already using Google Classroom or took the voluntary training that the District provided. Of 9,600 teachers, 7,000 were trained, and 15% were already using Google Classroom. Assuming that all the teachers who already used Google Classroom are among those who didn’t take the training, that leaves well over 1,000 teachers, but it is not possible to know whether these teachers already knew how to use the technology.

“That is pretty good saturation, but it’s never as good as we would like it to be,” he said. “We had to make sure we were providing support [so they could] get better at it.”

Hite also said that the District is planning a citywide “virtual graduation” for sometime in June. “We are fully committed to celebrating … [so that] students can hear their names called. We are exploring ways to give students some kind of celebratory atmosphere.”

Individual schools may plan individual virtual graduations, and the District is also looking into holding a virtual prom.

“We want to do something for the class of 2020,” he said.

He promised that students who paid fees for proms and graduations would get their money back, but might have to wait until the District gets back deposits that it already gave to venues. “We’re asking people to be patient around that,” he said.

The superintendent also disclosed that 14 School District employees have self-reported that they tested positive for COVID-19. None of them worked in either distributing food or in distributing Chromebooks, he said.

Asbestos and lead remediation is proceeding at several schools, work that was initially planned for the summer. The District got permission for this being an “essential” construction project. He mentioned McClure, Richmond, and Nebinger Elementaries as being among the schools where work is being completed.

Hite said that the District has distributed more than a million meals to more than 100,000 students at its 49 locations. Meals are now distributed twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. On Wednesday, he indicated that the District is looking into reducing the distribution to once a week to minimize the need for families to go out. Students and families would still get the same number of meals for the week.

Gimme structure: Why some Philly parents are eager for online learning to begin

2020-04-13T14:18:30+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Every night before bed, Andrea Clark and her husband have a little ritual where they recap all the things on their kids’ agendas for the next day.

Usually, it’s a long list. These days, not so much.

“Every night, I look at my husband and I go, ‘Tomorrow we have … nothing,’” said Clark, who lives in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia.

Clark is a per-diem physical therapist who hasn’t gotten called into work in nearly a month. Her husband was recently laid off from his job as an engineer.

Their four kids — who attend three different Philadelphia public schools in three different parts of the city — have received a smattering of unofficial assignments over the past month. Their commitment to completing those assignments has been uneven, at best.

After closing down “indefinitely,” Pennsylvania has made it official: K-12 schools are closed for the rest of the academic year. Here’s what’s next.

Her oldest child, age 13, became less motivated when she realized her teachers weren’t allowed to grade the work she posted online. Her youngest, age 6, doesn’t care about grades. He also doesn’t sit still for more than an hour — and that’s on a good day.

“I couldn’t imagine being a kindergarten teacher,” said Clark, with a long pause. “Like, I … I …”

That pause — that “how-does-anyone-possibly-do-this” pause — sums up how a lot of Philadelphia parents feel right now. But relief could be on the way.

With school buildings closed for the remainder of the academic year, Philadelphia and many other public school systems are going virtual. The district has distributed tens of thousands of Chromebooks and, by April 20, all teachers are supposed to post review material. On May 4, schools are allowed to start grading assignments and requiring participation.

In other words, something that approximates actual school is on the horizon.

The District offered some guidelines for how this grand educational experiment should look. But most of the details have been left to individual schools.

What many parents say they want is a version of school that establishes new, predictable routines — an actual schedule around which they can shape their days.

“It’s important for the kids to have the structure,” said Clark. “I just wish things would go back to normal.”

Clark’s family — with two homebound parents and two personal computers at the ready — is relatively well-positioned to make the online transition. But even families like hers have found it difficult to adjust.

Take Temwa Wright, a West Philadelphia mom who works from home. Her two boys attend a middle school that gives every child a laptop at the beginning of the school year. Wright admits, it’s the perfect situation for online learning. Yet she’s found that — unless she’s in the room monitoring her kids — work rarely gets completed.

“They’re all over the place,” Wright said of her sons. “They’re going to the kitchen every so often, getting snacks. Like, ‘Hello?! How many times have you eaten?’”

She even overheard one of her sons mildly dissing her education skills on a video call with one of his teachers.

“He said, ‘I wish I had more than one teacher. Right now, I just have my mom. And she’s doing the best she can,’” Wright recounted.

Wright hopes the dawn of official online instruction brings “predictable structure and consistent structure.”

Evette Gordon, a mom of two in Northeast Philadelphia, agrees wholeheartedly. Her youngest is a fourth-grader who has autism.

“With autistic children, the key to them is keeping them on a schedule,” she said.

That’s been especially difficult with school out of session. Her son usually learns in a small classroom with the assistance of an aide, and, at times, an occupational therapist who helps him with tasks like holding a pencil or using scissors. He’s not getting that kind of hands-on help anymore.

Remote visits are essential to reduce the spread of the virus. After COVID-19, which populations might still benefit? Where might digital medicine fall short?

Over the past month, Gordon has been thrust into a role typically filled by several professionals. She’s balancing her “mom-as-teacher” role with her full-time job as a medical claims examiner — plus the classes she’s taking to become a nurse. She can’t get much help from her husband because he works as a forklift driver for a hardware store and continues to work outside the home.

That leaves Gordon stretched thin as she attempts to keep her son engaged.

“Sometimes he has a breakdown, and he’ll cry for an hour,” she said. “I don’t like putting him through that.”

The School District says it will meet the needs of every special education child “as feasible.” However that looks, Gordon hopes it’s enough support to make sure her son can actually use his new, District-provided laptop.

“Success for me would be if my son would not give me any problems and go online and do his schoolwork,” she said.

Gordon and other parents say they need this new version of school to be consistent, predictable and substantial enough to keep their kids occupied for a significant chunk of the day.

Some said they’d prefer online classes where students and their teachers gather in a video chat — like actual school without the bricks and mortar. But they’d settle for something less, as long as it involves real work, accountability and a sense of normalcy.

Evette Gordon said she’s using the start of virtual school as a way to reset routines in her house. On April 19, she’s enforcing the usual bedtimes, and on April 20, she’s waking her kids up at the same hour they’d rise on a typical school day.

She wants her children to feel like school is back. For her son especially, she’s worried that a six-month absence from school could cascade into bigger issues come September.

“He’s gonna say, ‘No mom, I don’t wanna go to school,’” Gordon said, “because he’s used to being home now and not doing anything.”

Online equity would require more than Chromebooks

2020-04-07T21:18:45+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Some well-funded school districts in Pennsylvania have barely missed a beat as they’ve transitioned to virtual education after schools were closed due to COVID-19. Students have devices; families have internet access; schools have well-established online classes and resources.

Not so in Philadelphia, where a month into the shutdown, some students still can’t even get online.

Some of those are almost certainly in Mattie Davis’ 1st-grade class at William Dick Elementary School in North Philadelphia. Of her 23 students, a good number of them live in Raymond Rosen Manor, run by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. She knows that many families do not have access to the internet.

“I’m going to be on them about that,” said Davis, and by “them,” she meant the city, the Philadelphia School District, and the region’s internet providers.

Davis grew up in North Philadelphia, still lives there, and has taught in its schools for 29 years. She’ll soon be calling her councilman, who happens to be City Council President Darrell Clarke, with a message: Because traditional schooling is quite possibly finished for the year, all of the city’s students must have the opportunity to learn online.

“We have to find a way,” she said.

Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the Philadelphia School District has been trying to rapidly close the technology gap that separates it from its plugged-in suburban peers. The sudden closure of schools left thousands of students with little or no access to computers and triggered widespread calls for an equitable solution.

In response, at its March 23 meeting, the Board of Education approved $11 million to buy up to 50,000 Chromebooks to distribute to students. Schools also loaned out laptops that they had on hand for in-classroom use, and private donors stepped in to help defray the cost.

Teachers were trained last week on Google Classroom and other tools, and next week is for uploading materials and making other preparations.

Superintendent William Hite says online learning will start in earnest in the District on April 20.

Hite acknowledged that online learning will be harder for some students than others. Some may need to take care of siblings while their parents work, Hite said. Others, he acknowledges, may not have internet access, even after getting Chromebooks.

“There could be multiple reasons, and we want to understand all the variables families are dealing with before we start grading,” Hite said. “There are lots of things to figure out.”

The crisis is not only laying bare the educational inequity in Pennsylvania – and elsewhere, for that matter – but is also likely exacerbating it, according to educators and advocates.

Some area districts have been able to keep classes going and students learning. A recent survey by Public Citizens for Children & Youth found that 37 school districts in the five-county Philadelphia area “have already given out laptops or comparable devices to all or most of their students, and instruction is commencing.”

But the same survey found that dozens of other districts have just begun the online transition. Some are distributing laptops and organizing classes; others are surveying families to see what is needed.

And the differences can be seen not just between Philadelphia and more affluent districts, but among schools in the city as well.

In a media call with reporters Friday, Hite said that 43 District schools had received laptops for distribution, and many had already given out computers to all their students. But he said the effort would present monumental challenges for many schools, particularly those with large numbers of low-income students and English learners such as Northeast High School, where 3,400 students speak dozens of languages and hail from cultural and demographic backgrounds of all kinds.

Similar inequities are evident in the city’s charter schools, which educate more than 60,000 students, and in private schools, which range from the tony and expensive to those just scraping by.

“Moving 240,000 students to virtual instruction is an immense endeavor, but it is a worthy effort to ensure students are able to continue learning,” said a statement from the Philadelphia School Partnership, which arranged for the donation of $4 million to buy Chromebooks for students in charter and Catholic Independence Mission schools. “The digital divide is an immediate and expansive obstacle.”

District officials did not provide a complete breakdown of schools’ digital capacity or the status of their laptop distribution. But among the District schools with shorter distance-learning timelines is Science Leadership Academy, a special admission school that already had a one-to-one student-to-computer ratio as part of its project-based instructional model. To ensure that the laptops are useful to students, principal Chris Lehmann said, the school has connected all SLA students with Comcast’s offer of two free months of Internet Essentials, the company’s $9.95-a-month basic broadband service.

Carver High School of Engineering & Science, another special admission school, has also distributed its laptops or otherwise made sure students have computers that they can use to access online work.

But in other schools, the process has just begun, and students have little idea what distance learning will look like.

At Bartram High, a neighborhood school in Southwest Philadelphia that ranks as one of the city’s most beleaguered, laptop distribution has just begun. On Monday, a steady trickle of students and parents showed up to pick up their new Chromebooks. They said they were glad to get the computers, but hadn’t been told what they would do with them.

“When you go in, they make you stand six feet apart, and they do one at a time. You sign papers, they give you a Chromebook and then you leave,” said Bartram student Sabrea Newman.

Newman and two friends, all sophomores, said they weren’t told anything about what is on the computer or what programs they would be using for classes or instruction.

“It’s just a regular Chromebook,” Newman said.

Students and parents are also unsure who to call if they have questions or technical problems, or if they have to pay for anything they lose or break.

Also at Bartram was parent Kisha Booker, who picked up two Chromebooks for her sons, ages 15 and 17.

She said the boys are not yet bored and are “actually happy to be home.” They like that they’re not dealing with the distractions of traditional school. Her family has internet access and a couple of laptops in the house already, Booker said, but she needs to use one for work, and her younger daughter needs one for her own, so the two new ones will help the boys focus.

She hopes that the online learning will be effective, she said, but so far hope is all she’s got. Asked whether she’s received any guidance or instructions from the District, Booker laughed ruefully: “Nope.”

Booker said that she planned to keep tabs on the District’s website and wait for phone calls or emails, but that she’d reach out on her own if she had to. Communication with the District is always a challenge, Booker said, and she hopes it improves. Officials “should definitely keep in contact and keep everybody on the same page about what is going on,” she said.

Shifting approach

The fact that many suburban students are already online should be no surprise, said Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children & Youth. It’s been 10 years since Lower Merion School District decided that every student needed a laptop. Since then, as Philadelphia has struggled through funding crises and charter school controversies, some suburban districts have been quietly integrating online learning with the traditional classroom experience.

That leaves the students who are already online with a massive – and unjust – advantage, Cooper said.

“They had a 10-year head start on urban and poor districts that didn’t have any money to buy technology,” said Cooper. “That’s the root of the problem.”

The sudden shutdown laid Philadelphia’s online shortcomings bare. The District tried to pivot quickly, but its effort got off to a rocky start. Within days of the coronavirus shutdown, Hite told teachers not to offer virtual instruction due to concerns about equity – it wouldn’t be fair to teach just those children who could get online, officials concluded. An immediate outcry followed, and since then, the District has gradually “evolved” in its approach, Hite has said.

First, teachers were told they could offer basic online instruction and support, but not grades. Then, District officials began cobbling together a comprehensive distance learning plan.

But even as that plan has started to take shape, the exact digital needs of Philadelphia’s students has remained unclear.

It is widely believed that thousands of students do not have reliable access to the internet, and without it, a Chromebook is useless. But there is no reliable estimate of exactly how many students fit this profile.

The District issued a detailed directive for engagement when schools have completed Chromebook distribution. Last month, it started giving out learning guides at sites where students can pick up meals. The guides, also posted online, cover about six weeks of “review and enrichment.”

Hite said that when online learning formally begins, the first two weeks will continue “review and enrichment.” New material could be taught and graded as early as May 4, Hite said, but that remains a target, not a promise.

“We are working on that plan right now with teachers and students,” Hite said. “This is new to a lot of people. If students are going to be graded, we don’t want them to be punished … due to circumstances that are essentially out of their control.”

As the city’s deputy chief information officer for innovation management, Andrew Buss is in charge of internet connectivity issues. He said that the most recent estimates show that between 20% and 28% of Philadelphia households do not have access to broadband.

He thinks Comcast’s offer of free Internet Essentials for two months “is a good one,” but acknowledges that universal access to online learning for students will be a “challenge” even with the “herculean” effort to make Chromebooks available to all.

A wider solution, such as a citywide broadband network, is not feasible in the short term or perhaps even the long term. Right now, Pennsylvania law precludes a municipality from taking that step, even if they could, Buss said.

“We need to revise this law, and hopefully this pandemic, one of the things that comes from it is to do away with the law and start encouraging broadband deployment, because now it’s obvious that it’s part of the social safety net,” said Devren Washington, policy director of the Media Mobilizing Project, an activist group.

Inequity comes into focus

As the shutdown drags on, the depth and breadth of inequities in the education system are becoming more obvious, and not just regarding internet connectivity.

“Suburban districts have had a greater ability and facility to use online learning, because it is used more in their day-to-day instruction,” said PCCY’s Cooper. “Those teachers are more proficient in the utilization of technology than those in districts that don’t have two dimes to scrape together” for much beyond the basics.

So the current crisis, she said, shows that the wealthier districts had options that poorer districts didn’t – and that the poorer districts’ students are effectively receiving an obsolete education as a result. “This says to me that day-to-day instruction in the poorest districts is antiquated due to resource starvation, and that is harming our students,” said Cooper.

The resource deprivation is at its starkest in the ability to adequately serve students with special needs. Advocates who first raised that issue sent another letter to Gov. Wolf and state Education Secretary Pedro Rivera on Friday asking for “clear, detailed guidance” to school districts “that can ensure equitable access to education and compliance with federal protections for vulnerable student populations” during the COVID-19 school shutdown.

Those populations include students with disabilities, as well as English learners and those living in poverty.

The letter from the Education Law Center, a follow-up to one sent last month and signed by more than 70 organizations that work for equal rights, detailed promising practices in other school districts – including both wealthier suburbs and some urban areas.

The letter cites examples from some districts’ plans, including the North Allegheny district, a well-off suburb of Pittsburgh, where online learning started March 23.

These programs and “innovative strategies” can “provide needed support to students and parents, and deliver individualized programming and a free appropriate public education for students with disabilities,” the letter said.

Concern about whether it was possible to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to all students, as mandated in federal and state law, caused the Philadelphia School District and some others to initially shy away from trying to provide any organized online instruction, or “continuity of education.” Ultimately, federal and state guidelines were modified, and Rivera offered guidance that “strongly encourages” each district in Pennsylvania to make a “good faith effort” within its means to meet the needs of all students.

The advocates have made it clear that their concerns for the rights of all students should not stymie any effort to provide education during this unprecedented situation. At the same time, they remain vigilant about what school districts should at least be attempting to do, regardless of their circumstances.

It notes, for instance, that the current guidelines allow districts not to accept any new students, which can leave some highly transient students, including those in foster care, with no place at all to receive an education.

“As LEAs (local education agencies, including school districts and charters) increasingly move towards online learning platforms for the delivery of continuity of education plans, the Department must issue guidance regarding the need to consider the multifaceted ‘digital divide’ that exists for students living in poverty,” the letter says. “Providing a Chromebook or laptop alone will not solve digital access issues for students living in poverty. LEAs also need to assess and ensure reliable internet connectivity for students.”

Davis, the teacher at William Dick, is doing her best to make sure her 1st graders, who are in the crucial stages of learning to read, are kept engaged. Earlier this month, she went around to all their houses to push the printed packets through mail slots – keeping her distance, of course – to make sure they had work to do.

She has taken the training and is working to master the elements of virtual life that she hasn’t used before, such as Zoom, the online meeting platform. In addition to giving her students work over Google Classroom – she has already posted the Langston Hughes poem “April Rain Song” to read – she wants to use Zoom “so I can see their faces.”

In the Raymond Rosen complex, the community center has internet availability, but that is not a good option due to social distancing requirements. There needs to be a better solution for her students, Davis said.

Families from William Dick Elementary picked up their Chromebooks on Tuesday, April 7, and Davis was appreciative that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and his family donated $5 million toward their purchase.

“The donation was very nice,” she said. “But besides the $5 million, what about making sure we have accessibility for all the children so when they get the Chromebooks, they are not just a cute, shiny toy, and they can actually use them?”

UPDATE: Comcast Vice President for Communications Jennifer Bilotta reiterates its offer of free Internet Essentials for two months and that it is waiving back balances through May 13. That includes people who have had service discontinued due to nonpayment, she said.

A morning at Comegys: Food, homework, and a cloud of uncertainty

2020-04-02T22:59:32+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

For 4th grader Shanice Williams, the coronavirus shutdown hasn’t been too stressful so far.

“I’m worried, but not too worried,” said Shanice as she stood in the chilly sunshine outside Comegys Elementary in Southwest Philadelphia. “I’m just going to stay in my house all day, so I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

But when Shanice looks more than a few weeks down the road, she starts to wonder and worry.

“I feel like they’re going to put us back a grade,” she said. “If I go to school in the summertime, I’m going to be mad. It’s going to be hot, too hot in the classrooms.”

Shanice and her mother, Tish, came to Comegys to pick up her latest academic packets. They were among about 20 people who stopped by the school over the course of an hour on Thursday morning to collect homework packets and boxes of food. Parents and grandparents, some with children in tow, stood in a short line outside the school cafeteria, as District workers helped them keep a healthy distance from each other.

With the coronavirus shutdown soon to enter its fourth week, the Williamses and other families at Comegys say that they’re managing reasonably well, but that a cloud of uncertainty hangs over everything. Students could very well be finished with traditional schooling for the year, they say. What that means for them and their households is unclear.

“I don’t think they’re going back,” said Tamika Smith, a parent of two charter school students. “No one knows what’s going on.”

For students, these families say, the shutdown’s signature feature so far has been boredom. For parents, the challenge is planning. With the future of both school and work equally cloudy, no one can tell families exactly what to expect and when. Parents are wondering how long they’ll have their children at home. Students are wondering whether they’ll get enough instruction to pass on to the next grade.

The families at Comegys say they’re hoping for the best, but starting to plan for a spring without school.

Tish Williams said that Shanice is diligently working on her homework packets – she’s on her fourth set of them already. She will “hopefully” get a laptop from the District soon, but exactly when, Williams doesn’t yet know.

Likewise, she doesn’t know whether Shanice will be home for another month, or two, or until September.

“They’re uncertain, just like everybody else,” Williams said. “They’re not sure. First it was April, then it sounded like May, now it sounds like they may bring their school year to an end.”

She doesn’t expect the District to have every answer now, but Williams said she does expect officials to do better at keeping her and other families abreast of the rapid changes.

“They need to communicate better with people, period. It hasn’t been good in a long time, even before all this,” she said. “They need to have a better plan … to let people know what’s what.”

Hungry for clear communication

Other families at Comegys made the same point: They’re prepared for uncertainty, but they want clear and consistent communication.

Nadirah Shaqar has a granddaughter at Comegys and a daughter in the 9th grade at Parkway West High School. Having everyone cooped up at home hasn’t been easy, but the family is doing its best, Shaqar said.

“We try to keep them occupied, play games,” she said. “The kids are bored, but there’s nothing we can do about it, but follow the guidelines.”

Her granddaughter, a kindergartner, has handled the transition relatively smoothly. But her daughter, the high school freshman, is already worried about the shutdown’s impact on her high school career.

“Now she’s like, will she have to repeat the same grade over next year? Which is not good,” said Shaqar. “A lot of students are going to be frustrated.”

Shaqar sees an unpleasant choice looming for students: either they’ll be forced to repeat a year or they’ll be promoted without being ready. Her daughter is getting academic packets from Parkway West, but how useful and effective they are remains to be seen, she said.

“The packets that they’re given, when I gave it to my daughter, she’s like, ‘We didn’t even get to this part yet!’” Shaqar said.

Superintendent William Hite said on a Facebook Live post on Wednesday that the transition to online learning will begin the week of April 20, but Shaqar knows little about how rigorous or effective that will be. Without a solid daily structure for learning, Shaqar said, students like her daughter run the risk of falling off track.

“It’s kind of horrible for them,” she said. “If they’re not in school learning every day, or they don’t give them something to do every day to keep them on a curriculum, how can they pass them to another grade?”

Sheila Holman, grandmother of two Comegys students, said she’s trying to stay on top of their schoolwork. She makes sure they complete their academic packets and supplements it when she can with online programs like ABC Mouse. The boys – 2nd and 3rd graders – don’t have laptops, but she has a computer that’s old but functional. So the family cobbles together what it can to keep the boys engaged when they’re not doing “flips and jumping jacks” in the house, she said.

“Whatever works,” said Holman. “They have to be educated, regardless of what virus comes in or out. They have be educated. That’s the main thing.”

Not everyone in the neighborhood is getting that education right now, she said. Students have to depend on their parents and grandparents, not all of whom are able to provide the same level of support.

Likewise, students need more depth to their education than the packets can provide, Holman said: “What about gym? What about science?” And she worries that the work students do now won’t end up on their formal transcripts.

Hite also said Wednesday that the District has shifted the year from four marking periods to three, leaving the unfinished third marking period open until the end of the school year. He added that officials will share more details about grades later this month.

Holman said that if children work hard and make progress, they should be rewarded for it.

“Whatever way you look at it, they still got to be credited,” she said. “I don’t care how they do it, you’ve got to be credited.”

Families in charter schools are facing uncertainty, too. Tamika Smith’s two children are in Inquiry Charter School, which she said has been riding the same wave of confusion as everyone else.

“When the District said they would be closed, [Inquiry] said they’d be open still. But then it changed … first it was one week. Then it was another week,” said Smith. “Now, I don’t even know. It changes every single day. You call and sometimes they don’t even answer the phone!”

Smith doesn’t hold it against Inquiry; the coronavirus took everyone by surprise, she said. “It’s a good school, but I don’t think they were prepared for it,” said Smith.

But the charter isn’t providing much in the way of online instruction, she said, so she’s supplementing with the District’s offerings. “I use those packets – and I’m really grateful for them,” she said.

Without them, her children would be even more restless than they already are, she said. “The video games are good, because that’s all they do all day, but after a while they get bored of that,” said Smith. “It’s ironic – when they’re in school, they want to be outside, but now that they’re home, they want to be in school.”

Chromebooks seem promising

The promise of District-provided laptops gives these families some optimism.

“I know they’re talking about the Chromebooks and stuff, and I’m waiting for when they start passing them out so they can do a little bit more,” said Holman.

“I hope that when these Chromebooks come out, that they get [students] back on track,” said Shaqar.

But the families at Comegys were not clear on how the laptops will be distributed or what kind of academic programs or family support would come with them.

“I don’t know about the homework, how they’re going to install it,” said Shaqar. The District needs to offer “some parent guidance, so they can follow the curriculum.”

For now, the parents who visited Comegys say they’re ready to stay flexible. They say they want to do the right thing, maintain social distancing and keep their families safe. They’ll lean on family and friends for help with academics and child care, and hope for the best at work.

Smith has been laid off from her job at a restaurant; Williams has lost her work in a beauty salon. Both said they can file for unemployment or public assistance, but neither relishes that prospect.

“It’s still not the same as getting up and going to work every day,” said Williams.

As for 4th grader Shanice, she said that studying at home isn’t all bad. There are fewer distractions from other kids, and help from her mother is only a holler away.

“It’s not hard – it’s helping me,” said Williams.

But she’ll be glad to get back to a normal education.

“I miss my teachers. I miss my friends,” she said. “Yesterday my friend texted me, and I was like, ‘I wish I could come over.’ But I’m not trying to get out of the house.”

Universal charter schools unveil online learning plan

2020-04-02T16:44:32+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Universal Companies Family of Schools is distributing 2,500 Chromebooks to its students Thursday as part of its plan to switch from using printed learning packets to using fully online instruction.

This came as the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP) announced the formation of a fund that would supply 15,000 laptops to students in charter and Catholic schools.

The Jump-Start Philly Schools Fund has been started with $3.8 million in pledges, with a goal of raising $6 million or more. The Susquehanna Foundation of Janine and Jeff Yass is giving $2.6 million, the Lenfest Foundation $1 million, and the McCausland Foundation, based in Lafayette Hill, $200,000.

PSP said that beyond a “device gap,” schools said in a survey that they needed help to transition to online learning and to prepare for “academic recovery.”

“More and more we expect the shutdown to last all through, and we know there’s going to be unevenness in what students are going to be able to accomplish during this prolonged closure,” said PSP executive director Mark Gleason. “Schools will have to figure out what that means in terms of transitioning to a new grade or new school year in the fall. We don’t know what they will need, but we do know it will be different than the typical opening of school.”

Universal’s new program, titled Virtual UC, will use Google Classroom as the primary platform for assigning homework and distributing video lessons to students. It will use Zoom for live lectures and office hours with teachers.

The schools plan to begin online instruction April 13, the same day that the Philadelphia School District plans to roll out virtual classes, but assignments for each course are already posted, officials said in a statement.

The laptops distributed today included Chromebooks that were already in schools, as well as 1,750 that were purchased at a cost of $487,599, according to an organization spokesman.

The Jump-Start fund will fill any remaining gaps that Universal has in making laptops available to all students, Gleason said, and encourages other charter and Catholic schools to “reach out to PSP staff” for help.

At Universal, virtual instruction will operate on a “truncated schedule,” said Blanchard Diavua, principal of Universal Audenried High School. Students will receive live lessons from 9 a.m. to noon, and teachers will be available from 1 to 3:30 p.m. for office hours. Diavua said he wants to give kids ample time to connect one-on-one with teachers. That way, students will have the opportunity to go over material that wasn’t drilled as thoroughly, since they’ve missed several weeks of school.

Over the last four weeks, Universal schools have provided students with printed packets to catch them up on missed class time. But Diavua and his team of administrators, teachers, and counselors have spent the past month checking in with families about their access to technology, to prepare for the switch to online learning.

“We had our leadership team call every single family to gauge technology and internet access,” Diavua said. “As we begin online instruction, teachers are going to be calling families again.”

Universal plans to ease students into online learning with a few review sessions, but the schools will jump into new material several weeks before the School District of Philadelphia, which has ordered teachers to only teach “review and enrichment” until May 4.

Since students have different levels of access to technology, grading will be a bit more flexible this year. Diavua said students will be evaluated more on a case-by-case basis, and grades will be adjusted if a student is unable to watch all the lessons or turn in assignments.

He said that supplying Chromebooks to students in this difficult time is crucial to equalizing the education landscape in the Philadelphia area.

“It’s critical that we as a city continue to make sure that our scholars have the same type of access as our suburban peers,” Diavua said. “We need to do everything in our power to find ways for them to interact with their teachers, friends, and administrators, and get back on the right track with their education.”

Universal operates seven schools in Philadelphia that enroll about 4,000 students total.

The Philadelphia School District purchased 50,000 laptops to distribute to its students, a project that it expects to complete next week so that online learning can begin on April 13. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and his family contributed $5 million toward the $11 million cost.

The Jump-Start Fund is also working on ways to expand internet connectivity for families. It is alerting households of Comcast’s offer of free Internet Essentials for two months. The cable giant is also offering free data packs so that families can use their smartphones as hotspots to get internet access.

Additional reporting by Dale Mezzacappa.

District guidance says teaching of new material will not begin until May 4

2020-03-31T15:26:38+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

UPDATED 2:15 p.m.

A detailed memo from the Philadelphia School District that lays out plans for completion of the school year online tells teachers to keep in daily touch with students for both academic and emotional needs, but specifies that all instruction will consist of “review and enrichment” until May 4, when new content may be introduced.

The nine-page document says that, as of now, all teachers and school counselors should be holding “office hours” for an hour-and-a-half each day “for student questions about enrichment activities and to check-in with their students.” In addition, principals should assign each adult in the school an advisory-like group of students to contact regularly, at least once or twice a week.

Office hours should include “a variety of activities,” including help with skills and problem-solving “aligned to lessons,” feedback to students’ work, additional support for students with special needs and English learners, and general family contact of students who have not been engaging via Google Classroom, which is the District’s means for conducting the online teaching.

The plan for instruction calls for teachers to follow the learning guides that are available online and also were distributed in packets to families. So far, two sets have been distributed, each covering two weeks. Beginning on April 15, the document says, teachers will have access to the next set of “review and enrichment” learning guides that they can upload to Google Classroom so they can begin online instruction on April 20.

“Specifically, for now, the District will be focused on review and enrichment activities,” the memo says. “During academic review and enrichment time, new content should not be taught. Review and enrichment activities should be related to content from before March 1st.”

The one exception to this is project-based learning, which can continue “without grading.”

If the closure extends into May, the document says, “we will then engage in a hybrid model of enrichment/review and planned instruction (new learning for students, graded assignments, etc.) beginning the week of May 4th. This infusion of planned instruction is to provide students with opportunities to obtain necessary skills and content for end-of-year requirements as well as to address the unique needs of specific populations of students (e.g. credit recovery for seniors). Prior to implementing any planned instruction, specific guidance will be shared with teachers, principals, assistant superintendents, and families for whom this is relevant.”

The memo gives teachers flexibility in organizing their time while emphasizing the expectation that “our teachers and other school-based staff [will] be participating in work activities and available during their traditional schedule.”

It offers an example: “For instance, one teacher might want to hold office hours for students from 9-10:30 am Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and from 12-1:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Another might want to have them from 8:30-10 am every day. The important point is that, whatever the schedule, that families know and understand when and how they can interact with the teacher through office hours.”

This week, teachers and other school personnel are being offered virtual training, while “additional professional development and review of materials will also be provided by principals.”

Counselors are being asked to prioritize 8th, 11th, and 12th graders and to review and update the Individualized Education Programs (IEP) of special education students, among other tasks. There is also a list of potential activities for other instructional staff, such as school-based teacher leaders, to analyze data, answer student questions, and develop “culture-building” activities for teachers and other staff.

But for all its detail, the document leaves many issues up in the air, including whether the school year will be extended to the end of June to make up for lost time, how third-quarter grades will be determined, what will happen with fourth-quarter grades, how seniors will meet all their graduation requirements, and whether there will be regularly scheduled online classes that students will be expected to attend.

“We know that this effort, which is the central focus and purpose of our work as a District, will look different from our traditional work but must continue in service and support of our students and our mission to serve the children of this city,” the document says, adding: “As the situation is not static, we also know that some of this guidance will change over time.”

The issue of whether the District can offer mandatory instruction and grade work if all students do not have access to the online learning tools has been a concern since the school shutdown started. Longstanding state and federal rules have required that any district offering “continuity of education” provide students with disabilities and English learners all the services to which they are entitled. Saying they could not do so, some districts said they would provide no instruction. Philadelphia initially took that stance, but then quickly shifted its approach as this unprecedented situation continued to unfold.

Those state and federal regulations have since been modified, with the state setting the standard that districts make a “good faith effort” within their means. The Philadelphia Board of Education decided to spend $11 million to buy laptops and distribute them to all students who didn’t have them.

But there is still concern and uncertainty over universal access, with many educators and advocates saying that the crisis has only exacerbated educational inequity in the state and the nation. The schedule that the District laid out assumes that by April 20, all students will have the Chromebooks that the District is now distributing, as well as access to the internet, which is not now available to all families.

UPDATE While the major internet service providers are all offering various discount and low-cost plans to existing and potential customers with limited means, there is as yet no details on a coordinated effort to make sure all students have access to online learning. “We are working thru these issues with the School District, the first step was the distribution of the Chromebooks,” City Managing Director Brian Abernathy said Tuesday.

Through April 30, Comcast is offering two months free to new customers “with limited means” through its low-cost Internet Essentials program; Verizon also said it will offer low-cost plans and waive some charges and fees. Comcast and AT&T say they will make their WiFi hotspots open to everyone, not just their own subscribers. More details are available here, including where to find the hotspots.

The School District also issued a statement saying it is “working with the City of Philadelphia and Comcast to help as many Philadelphia families as possible have free or low-cost access to the internet, saying that its intention is to provide a comprehensive list of low-cost Internet options or details on accessing free WiFi mobile hotspots to ensure that our students can use the Chromebooks we’re providing.”

END UPDATE

The Notebook will continue to follow the plans for online learning as the District updates its guidance.

Comcast’s Roberts family donates $5 million for Chromebooks

2020-03-28T00:14:24+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The founding family of Comcast is paying for nearly half the cost of providing laptops to all students in the School District of Philadelphia.

Aileen and Brian Roberts have given $5 million to the District’s philanthropic arm toward the $11 million price tag of the District’s purchase and distribution of Chromebooks for all students who need them.

Giving all students access to technology is a step toward allowing the District to proceed with a structured online learning plan while students are out of school due to the COVID-19 virus. Although the guidelines have since been modified, federal and state rules have required that districts offering “continuity of education” must provide it for all children.

A major concern has been services for students with disabilities and English learners, but the question of access to all the tools of learning is also a big issue. Many educational advocates, including some members of Philadelphia’s Board of Education, have drawn attention to how this crisis is shining a spotlight on the digital divide and unequal educational opportunity in Pennsylvania.

“We’re living in an unprecedented time, and COVID-19 is presenting our society with new challenges every day,” said Aileen and Brian Roberts in a statement. “When we heard that many Philadelphia students weren’t going to be able to learn from home without laptops, we quickly decided we wanted to help and provide these teachers, parents and students with the technology they need to begin learning online within just a few weeks. In good times or bad, now all of our Philadelphia students will have access to technology to help them succeed.”

The Robertses cited a 2019 District survey in which only about half of 3rd- through 12th-grade students reported that they have the computers at home and online access.

In addition to the 50,000 new Chromebooks that will be supported by the Robertses’ gift, the District will distribute some 40,000 laptops usually used only in schools. Superintendent William Hite said he would roll out a more detailed timetable and plan for that this week. The plan is for students and teachers to begin online learning on April 13.

“The generous gift from Aileen and Brian Roberts and their family will help to transform the learning experience for thousands of Philadelphia’s public school students, who will now be able to access online educational resources from home,” said Hite. “Our public schools belong to all of us, and this is a great example of what’s possible when we work together to improve educational supports for all of our young people. I am grateful for their generosity.”

The donation was to the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, which raises money to support education in the city, connecting philanthropic interests with projects and schools.

“The Fund is delighted to be the recipient of this most generous gift,” said Donna Frisby Greenwood, president and CEO of the fund. “We will do our part to implement this much needed and appreciated gift.”

Comcast is currently offering low-income families two months of free service through its Internet Essentials program.

Brian Roberts’ father, Ralph, founded Comcast; Brian Roberts is now the CEO.

Chalkbeat

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Some cyber charter schools struggle to perform

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The help he needed to stay on track

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Philly school enrollment continues decline, while cyber charters see surge

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Money matters: A positive balance for now

Reopening: Principals’ plans due soon

Four charters to try ‘hybrid’ learning

Black Lives Matter resolution uncertain

Consultants for antiracism training

Request on Keystone Opportunity Zone

City launches program to provide free internet access to 35,000 families

Hite promises all students will have internet connection by the start of school

With the revised all-online school opening, advocates call for more action on expanding internet access

Hite says learning to be all virtual at least until November

As parents get ready to make decisions about returning to school, questions abound

Next week’s board meeting

Ideas for improvement

District’s hybrid plan provokes questions, concerns among parents and teachers

Challenge for working parents

District wants HEROES Act

Teachers prefer hybrid reopening model to full-time online or in school

In their virtual classrooms, students and teachers grapple with recent events

Teacher diaries: Gill Maimon

“I just don’t have the bandwidth”

‘I just don’t have the bandwidth’

‘I feel like my kids are missing out’

‘I will trust you until you prove otherwise’

‘Holding their hands to the keyboard’

‘I’m trying to help our teachers by educating them the same way’

Teachers, students in Philly start ‘official’ online learning

Confusion over grading

Communication conflict

What will school look like in September?

The Diary of Ms. B.: Tears and triumphs inside a Philly teacher’s virtual classroom

The lead-up: Fear, fury, and fonts

Ballester’s empty classroom. (Courtesy of Lauren Ballester)

‘Keep it 100’

Lauren Ballester is a 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Monday: ‘Weirdly nervous’

The view looking out Ballester’s classroom window. (Courtesy of Lauren Ballester)

Tuesday: ‘Still a sixth-grade teacher’

A social distancing notice on the fence of William H. Ziegler Elementary school in Northeast Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Wednesday: Peaks and valleys

On nice days, Philadelphia teacher Lauren Ballester takes her laptop outside to teach. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Thursday: Cranky days

Iliana Rosa, a 6th grade student at William H. Ziegler Elementary school in Northeast Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

Friday: The “little organizer”

The post script: Iliana’s slideshow

Avi Wolfman-Arent

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