When I asked the subscribers to my how they felt snow days should be approached, I received a variety of answers, ranging from approval to frustration to constructive criticism.

For some, a snow day was greeted simply as a welcome break. 

“Kids need to be kids,” wrote Jessica Feinstein, an Upper West Side mom of elementary and middle school children. “Many in politics have forgotten this. Playing in the snow with family and friends is more than just a childhood pastime. It’s important for social-emotional health.”

The majority were relieved that they didn’t have to navigate remote learning while working from home. 

“A real snow day should be with no remote instruction,” Greenwich Village mother of three Kaya Heitman said. “Parents are still required to work remotely on a snow day, and assisting multiple children with remote instruction is awful for parents also juggling their own meetings.”

“It is particularly unreasonable to ask children under the age of 6 to participate in synchronized remote learning,” said Harlem mom Maria McCune. “During the January storm, the school expected my 4-year-old to participate in two Zoom meetings. It was necessary for me or my husband to participate, given that she wasn’t capable of navigating on her own. Despite the school’s best effort to make these sessions educational, they were an absolute disaster. I am confident my child learned nothing essential during that time.”

“If I have to take time off my own work because staff and/or kids can’t get safely into school, which is understandable,” added Amanda, “don’t make me try to be a teacher, hovering over my kid, fighting with them to do work in an environment that is not conducive to the effort. This is miserable for all and does not result in meaningful strides forward in their education.”

On the other hand, some parents said remote learning made their lives easier.

“My husband and I both needed to work from home on Monday,” said Amber, mom of a second grader. “It would have really helped if remote school had been in place. It allows us to focus on work while our daughter stays in her normal routine and logs in virtually.”

Marie D. agreed. “If closure becomes necessary, there should be remote classes available, along with learning packets that each child can complete independently.”

Nearly everyone who responded to my query was sympathetic to the needs of those who rely on public schools for child care and meals. They offered a variety of solutions.

SW suggested, “All grades should be given an option to drop in to any school location in-person if child care, a warm location or a meal is needed. Before the start of each school year, schools need to take a poll of staff willing to come in on snow days at bonus pay. If there is not enough staff that volunteer to be available, then that school is physically closed on snow days. If there is enough staff to open the location on a snow day, then that school gets listed as a Snow Day Location where students can go regardless if that is their regular school location. DOE should publish a list of Snow Day Locations on their website by the end of November so people, staff and meals can be planned for such an emergency.”

Regardless of how they are handled, all agreed that snow days must be built into the school calendar so as not to lose class time NYC students cannot afford to go without.

“My 10-year-old self would hate to hear me say this,” Brooklyn’s Melinda LaRose admitted, “but I think the February vacation should be eliminated. It’s too close to the winter break. If Presidents’ Day was kept as a long weekend, that would give four snow days to play with and/or end school a little earlier in June.”

McCune concurred: “I would be willing to lose the midwinter break so the schools can have more flexibility for a return to traditional snow days in the future. Navigating precarious sidewalks and streets is not worth it if it ultimately puts people in danger or in unsafe situations. Perhaps giving the city and property owners an additional 24 hours after a snowstorm for cleanup (without school) can help. There is the consideration of children who need a hot meal and can only access these through school resources, but I think this can be resolved in a way that does not involve the nonsense of navigating crosswalks that are not appropriately cleared, or walking on the street instead of a sidewalk because the sidewalk is not appropriately shoveled.”

As with anything, it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. School closures and free play will always be preferable for some, while others would rather their children be engaged in remote learning, and still others will need in-person child care no matter how brutal the commuting conditions. 

Just as I advocate for school choice in selecting the optimal learning environment for every family, snow days should also be a matter of personal preference, with schools offering a variety of options, depending on a given family’s needs, and no penalties for whichever choices they end up making.

Three times a week, the young students struggling the most with reading at each of Milwaukee College Prep’s four campuses go to a dedicated classroom, don their headphones, and log into a virtual tutoring session.

For the next 30 minutes, each student gets one-on-one attention from a certified teacher who might ask them about their dog or their baby sister before diving into the lesson.

Virtual tutoring — in this case through a provider called OpenLiteracy — is the only way Milwaukee College Prep could provide so much tutoring for so many children and from such experienced educators, said Erica Badger, director of curriculum and instruction for the 2,000-student charter network.

“We have a hundred kids on at once,” she said. “Being able to have that many adults come into the school building? I can’t even imagine.”

For these reasons and others, virtual tutoring has remained part of the toolbox of American schools long after students returned to in-person classes. It costs less than in-person tutoring, scheduling is more flexible, and providers aren’t limited to hiring in the surrounding community.

But it doesn’t always work smoothly.

Two studies from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator released Wednesday used natural language processing technologies to review transcripts from tens of thousands of hours of virtual tutoring sessions. Their goal: to better understand exactly what happens between tutors and students in these sessions.

as revealed through tutor comments, such as “You can’t see me? I’m not sure why you can’t see me” or “Sorry. Did you say something? It was hard to hear.”

Researchers found that 19% of available time was lost to disruptions, whether from technological issues, distracted students, or background noise. Time lost to disruptions was even greater when tutors were working with more than one student, especially if one of the students entered the session late.

The with students in one-on-one sessions and in sessions with two students.

Students were randomly assigned to either an individual tutor or to work with the tutor and another student. Tutors spent more time talking overall when they were working with two students, but only about 21% of tutor speech was individualized content instruction, compared with 65% one-on-one sessions. The tutors in the one-on-one sessions also used more phrases associated with motivation and relationship-building.

Both studies involved young students working on early literacy skills.

High-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, emerged as one of the most high-profile and effective interventions to address pandemic-related learning loss. .

The new studies shed light on why virtual tutoring in particular has a mixed track record, according to studies. They also suggest ways schools and tutoring providers can make these sessions more effective. That’s especially important now that federal pandemic relief has expired, and schools have less money to spend.

“There are specific features that effective tutoring programs tend to have, but what is actually driving effectiveness is kind of a black box,” said Carly Robinson, a co-author on both papers and director of research at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative, which runs the National Student Support Accelerator.

The emergence of virtual tutoring provides new opportunities to provide answers, because new technology allows audio and video from these sessions to be analyzed at scale, Robinson said. Previous research using similar techniques found, for example, that tutors tend to , unless that student was a girl paired with a higher-performing boy. In those cases, the boy still got more attention.

Robinson said the research findings shouldn’t deter schools from using virtual tutoring or even from using small group sessions. That 81% of tutoring time was productive even when working with very young children is a “positive finding,” Robinson said.

Students experienced more disruptions when they worked in the corner of a classroom than in dedicated tutoring spaces. Small schools experienced more disruptions than large schools did as they added tutoring sessions. And the youngest children, kindergartners, experienced significantly more disruptions than second graders.

Researchers suggest that schools find a quiet dedicated space for children to work if possible; have an adult on hand to handle tech issues; and be realistic about each school’s capacity to host a lot of video calls at once.

The study on one-to-one versus two-to-one tutoring suggests that tutors may need different techniques, including strategies from in-person small group instruction, to ensure both students get the most possible from each session.

OnYourMark Education, the tutoring provider that was involved in that study, has already overhauled its 2:1 tutoring, CEO and founder Mindy Sjoblom said. Some of these changes were subtle, just as having tutors ask a question and then call on a child, so that both students have to pay attention to the question and think about the answer.

The study took place in OnYourMark’s second year of operation. Now in its fourth year, OnYourMark still offers one-to-one tutoring in , but when districts are paying out of pocket, they’re mostly opting for two-to-one sessions, she said. The company has lost some clients who decided they could no longer afford tutoring.

OnYourMark is piloting a program that has students work independently on an adaptive tech platform three days a week and meet with a tutor twice a week. If it’s successful, it would cost about 60% as much as two-to-one tutoring.

“If schools can’t afford to implement it, we’re spinning our wheels,” Sjoblom said.

Thinking beyond a tutoring ‘gold standard’

A lot of research on tutoring points to a “gold standard,” said Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, an advocacy group, and the author of “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.” But schools might also be interested in what a silver standard or a bronze standard looks like.

The two new studies help identify trade-offs in a granular way that can shape training and program design, she said.

“It’s really important research because a big part of making tutoring more effective is figuring out how to scale it and make it more affordable,” she said. “That means figuring out how to make the most out of the tutor’s time.”

But Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said perfecting tutoring programs won’t have much impact if schools don’t also pay attention to their core instruction.

“What does it mean to do high-impact tutoring in a school system where the classroom instruction has not been optimized?” she said. “This is a huge liability. We optimize too much on these design-based studies without thinking about the system as a whole.”

Milwaukee College Prep originally targeted a small group of fourth graders for extra reading help, but Badger said the network school realized that was too late and not enough. A donor approached the school about wanting to fund something that would really move the needle on student outcomes. A gift of $500,000 a year over three years allows the network to provide one-on-one tutoring for 30 minutes a day, three times a week to 200 first and second grade students.

Sarah Scott Frank, CEO of OpenLiteracy, the tutoring provider at Milwaukee College Prep, said she believes strongly in one-to-one tutoring. When students don’t work at the same pace, it can be “crushing” for the slower student, Frank said.

“One kid would be zooming along, and the kids are very perceptive, and they see that, and they think ‘see, I can’t do that,’ and it reinforces that negative identity,” she said.

One-to-one tutoring costs more up front, she said. But she believes it’s more cost effective because it works.

The charter network already had a classroom aide providing small-group instruction in addition to the lead teacher in every classroom. The charter network has also upgraded its literacy curriculum to add more phonics. Tutors and classroom teachers use the same curriculum and can share data easily.

Teachers practice the transition to the tutoring room and do trial runs with the platform so that students can log in smoothly two minutes before the session is supposed to start. An adult is on hand to troubleshoot tech problems. Attendance is measured in minutes.

“It’s not a quiet environment,” Badger acknowledges. “But it’s this hum and excitement of learning.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

As President Donald Trump has ramped up deportations, some immigrant students across New York have been too afraid to attend class in person. In response, some school districts have turned to virtual learning, a move the state’s Education Department is sanctioning, officials revealed last week.

“I will tell you in the sense of a crisis, we do have some districts right now … that are taking advantage and providing virtual instruction to our children who are afraid to go to school,” Associate Education Commissioner Elisa Alvarez .

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Alvarez shared with the board a the state Education Department issued in March clarifying that districts have the flexibility to offer online instruction to “students who may be unable or averse to attending school, including during times of political uncertainty.”

The memo further specified schools can tap online learning for immigrant and migrant students “who may be affected and reluctant to attend school in person due to concerns about their personal safety and security.”

Alvarez didn’t disclose how many or which districts were using the approach and for how many students. A state Education Department spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions.

New York City public schools already have virtual options available and aren’t doing anything different for immigrant students fearful of attending school, a spokesperson for the city’s Education Department said.

Still, the disclosure from state officials highlights the ongoing fears some immigrant students are facing four months into the Trump administration and raises fresh questions about how their school experiences are being affected.

Shortly after taking office, Trump barring federal immigration agents from making arrests at “sensitive locations” including schools.

Migrant families staying in New York City shelters expressed acute fears during the week after Trump’s inauguration in January and , likely contributing to lower citywide attendance rates that week (though Mayor Eric Adams later ). Some city educators said they’ve seen attendance for immigrant students rebound since that first week.

City policy prohibits federal law enforcement agents, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, from entering schools without a warrant signed by a judge, and Education Department officials have for how to respond.

At the state level, the Attorney General’s office and Education Department issued in March reiterating that state and federal law both compel districts to only permit federal law enforcement to enter schools under very limited circumstances.

Many school leaders have worked hard to communicate those policies and reassure anxious families. And immigration enforcement inside of schools has remained rare.

But some high-profile raids have targeted school-age children, including one in the upstate New York hometown of Trump border czar Tom Homan that swept up three students in the local public schools, . And there have been across the of parents detained by immigration agents right outside schools during drop-off time.

Under those circumstances, virtual learning could give schools a way to keep up some connection with students or families who might otherwise completely disengage.

But some New York City educators said they’re still working hard to convince fearful immigrant students to come to school in person, noting that virtual learning was especially during the COVID pandemic.

Lara Evangelista, the executive director of the Internationals Network, which oversees 17 public schools in the five boroughs catering exclusively to newly arrived immigrant students, said none of her schools have made the “purposeful choice” to engage fearful students through virtual learning.

“Virtual learning for [English Learners] was really challenging during COVID,” she said.

Alan Cheng, the superintendent who oversees the international schools as well as the city’s dedicated virtual schools, said he hasn’t seen any significant changes in enrollment or interest in online learning due to fear of in-person attendance among immigrant students.

And while virtual learning might be able to offer a version of the academic experience of in-person school, it’s harder for it to replicate some of the other services that schools provide families.

“Our schools serve much more than just the academic environment,” Cheng said. “They are really community schools, they provide health care, they provide plenty of other resources.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Rachel Hodge worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and was earning an online degree in social work when schools shut their doors due to COVID. Spending hours in front of a laptop with a 5-year-old just didn’t fit into the picture.

But in the fall of 2020, her daughter Vanessa was set to start kindergarten at KIPP Upper Roseville Academy in Newark, New Jersey. With Hodge working and school still remote, Vanessa spent her days with a babysitter, who cared for multiple kids and struggled to manage the technology for virtual learning.

By November, Vanessa was one of 24 kindergartners in Newark’s KIPP charter network listed as missing from remote school.

That’s when KIPP staff created the , a condensed school day that accommodated parents’ upended schedules. The program, which ran weeknights from 5:30 to 8 p.m, remained in place until the end of the school year.

“It was really a sad and scary time,” Hodge said. “But I was like, ‘The kid’s got to learn.’ ”

As Hodge worked on her own assignments from Rutgers University, kindergarten teacher Meredith Eger led Vanessa and classmates in songs and games, and through the reading and math they’d missed since August. 

“It was fun and it was kind of weird,” Vanessa, now 9, recalls. “When class was over, I didn’t have to pack up, because all my stuff was at home.”

The program is a rare example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school — a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil. 

But nationally, many students who missed out on a normal kindergarten are still feeling the lingering effects of that lost year. released this month documented how the pandemic’s youngest learners experienced significant declines in general knowledge, cognitive development, and language and social skills compared with their peers before COVID. Academically, these students are still performing below pre-pandemic math and reading levels. 

Five years later, Vanessa is one of 11 night-school kindergartners who still attends KIPP Newark schools. She “writes up a storm,” Eger said, and often draws during lunch. Others prefer math. Parents notice their kids sometimes keep to themselves at home — a preference they blame on a shortage of playtime with peers during lockdowns. The educators who ran the program, which served students up to third grade, enjoy a special bond with the kids they nurtured through that trying period, grabbing hugs in the hallway or cafeteria when they can. 

“They were falling drastically behind,” said Rebecca Fletcher, the charter network’s director of school operations. “It was a bright spot in such a dark time.”

‘They weren’t coming to school’

Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University who tracked in kindergarten enrollment during school closures, called KIPP’s night school “a creative way to meet the needs of parents during the crisis and one that wasn’t common in traditional public schools.” Such flexibility may have also kept families from pursuing options, like pods or private schools that were in-person, he said. 

KIPP leaders didn’t compare the performance of the evening kindergartners to students who logged in during the day, making it difficult to measure student outcomes. But the program was born of necessity, Fletcher said: The abbreviated school day was better than no kindergarten at all. 

“They weren’t coming to school,” she said. “It was about meeting families where they were.” 

Parents turned to night kindergarten for a variety of reasons.

Nateesha St. Claire had just had her third child and couldn’t juggle an infant daughter and online school for Omari, her kindergartner.

“At night, there were really no distractions,” she said. The baby was asleep. But it was still a struggle to keep Omari focused on his teacher. If St. Claire didn’t sit close, he’d walk away from the screen. He frequently asked why he couldn’t go to school.

Now in fourth grade, Omari is “thriving” in math, growing in reading and getting help in speech class to pronounce words more clearly, his mother said.

‘A labor of love’ 

One advantage of the evening sessions were smaller classes, which allowed staff to identify students who had learning delays or qualified for special education services. Such needs might have gone undetected in a larger online group, said Kaneshia Clifford, who was principal of the program. 

Two children were on the autism spectrum and others, she said, were nonverbal or “mildly verbal.” She recruited special education teachers to the team who broke lessons down into smaller segments and organized separate Zoom groups for more targeted support. But keeping the kids’ attention while trying to assess their skills proved daunting. Teacher Adrienne Rodriguez Liriano rewarded students who focused on lessons by putting her dog Harlem on her lap in front of the camera. 

“Teachers had to keep a lot of things on their brain,” said Clifford, who had her own kindergartner at home at the time. “They’re looking at screens, asking kids to hold up white boards. They’re trying to monitor engagement in a virtual space, while also collecting data.”

And that was after a full school day of teaching online and sometimes delivering laptops and hotspots to students’ homes. Fletcher described the schedule as “grueling,” but also “a labor of love and devotion.” 

Because of the late hour, some students showed up on Zoom with wet hair and wearing pajamas. Others ate dinner during class. Some nodded off.

Beatriz Warren, who worked during the day as a home health aide in New York City, welcomed the evening option, which allowed her to attend to her son Josiah.

“It’s a mom thing, I guess,” she said. 

Ear infections and surgeries caused Josiah’s learning to be delayed. He received therapy at home before the pandemic, but as kindergarten approached, Warren worried about whether to put him in a general or special education class. Night kindergarten offered a welcome mix of individualized support and as-close-to-normal a classroom experience as possible. 

“He bonded with the kids and the teachers,” she said. And when schools reopened, Warren enrolled him in KIPP Upper Roseville Academy, where Liriano, his teacher, worked — even though it was a half hour away. Liriano now teaches outside of the KIPP network, but still Facetimes with Josiah and his mom.

“He asks about my daughter,” Liriano said. “We became invested in each other’s lives because of the environment we set for them.”

‘He lost a year’

With their children nearing the end of elementary school, parents continue to see the ripple effects of a year without in-person learning. 

Josiah has overcome most learning delays and “does not stop talking,” his mother said. But he often spends time alone rather than playing with friends or toys. And Hodge described Vanessa as a “hermit” who often retreats to her room.

“The kids were so young, they were conditioned to be inside because of COVID,” Hodge said. “I feel like a lot of the kids still are behind socially … because they couldn’t have normal interactions.” 

Aminah Cooley’s grandson Ayden, also part of the evening kindergarten program, didn’t hold a pencil correctly until nearly second grade, she said.

“They were looking at the screen. A lot of times, they weren’t using a pencil,” she said. Now a fourth grader, Ayden loves math and enjoys the popular Dog Man series of graphic novels by Dav Pilkey. But academically, he’s not where he should be.

“He’s behind,” Cooley said. “He lost a year.”

In the fall of 2020, Ayden often missed out on daytime virtual school. His mother was looking for work, internet access was spotty and the “dynamics of the household,” Cooley said, weren’t conducive to keeping a 5-year-old in front of the computer.

Cooley shopped on Facebook Marketplace for a table and chair set so he could do his work and called his house every evening to make sure he logged into class. 

“I knew I had to step in,” she said. “He’s in the fourth grade, and I’m still stepping in.”

When KIPP opened an optional hybrid program in March 2021, Ayden was there.

“He recognized me, and he was like ‘You came to my house!’ ” Fletcher said. “To this day, I’ll see him in the hallway, and he’ll just give me a hug.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Education on Wednesday denied an application for a controversial cyber charter school that uses artificial intelligence called Unbound Academy, which was seeking to operate in Pennsylvania.

The proposed school would have been part of a multi-state network of schools where classes are led by AI tutors and human staff serve as “guides.”

“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 Department of Education’s decision said.

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Human teachers’ unions and advocacy groups applauded the decision.

“AI can help teachers, but it can never replace a teacher guiding a student’s learning in a classroom,” Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin said in a statement. “Pennsylvania’s students are better off because the Department of Education rejected this cyber charter school application today.”

Susan Spicka, the executive director of Education Voters of PA, a nonprofit advocacy group, called Unbound Academy’s cyber charter application “egregiously deficient.”

The to reject the application cited multiple issues with Unbound Academy’s initial proposal. Those included concerns about unrealistic projections for enrollment growth, whether the school could attain insurance and its ability to support special education based on the proposed budget and tuition rates.

The Department of Education also said Unbound Academy’s application failed to provide sufficient information about the curriculum, courses and planned student activities.

“The department finds multiple, significant deficiencies,” the decision read. “These deficiencies, individually, collectively, and in any combination, are cause to deny the application. “

The for 2 Hour Learning, the company that provides the AI model Unbound Academy hoped to use, says their students “crush academics” at an accelerated pace with only two hours of academic instruction per day, based on data from their flagship “Alpha School.”

“Traditional school is broken. It’s outdated, full of busywork, and sadly for our kids, often a waste of time,” Mackenzie Price, the co-founder of 2 Hour Learning, says in a promotional video on their website. She said students at schools using their technology can learn “twice as much in two hours per day as they would in six hours of traditional school.”

The company says their program is already being used in schools in Texas and Florida, with more set to open in California and Arizona this fall.

Since it was announced, the proposed cyber charter school raised red flags with critics of cyber charter schools, as well as lawmakers in Harrisburg.

Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny), the minority chair of the Senate Education Committee, said she plans to introduce a bill calling for a moratorium on the approval of new cyber charter schools, citing Unbound Academy specifically. said operators of schools like Unbound Academy “perceive our state as ripe for profiteering off of Pennsylvania’s children and taxpayers.”

The proposal is backed by Education Voters of PA.

There are currently 14 cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania, and they’ve experienced since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. The schools are funded with taxpayer money, taken in part from the budgets of local school districts where their students would have otherwise enrolled. Though last year’s changes to the school funding formula eased that burden by providing reimbursements for some of those lost funds.

This week, Education Voters of Pennsylvania , Commonwealth Charter Academy. They found that hundreds of thousands of dollars were used on vehicles, dining, travel, entertainment and retail purchases.

Commonwealth Charter Academy’s chief branding and government relations officer told the Capital-Star that the findings were “cherry-picked” and the expenditures were “well within what is customary for organizations of like size that have a statewide footprint”

A 2019 Department of Education found that students at cyber charter schools typically performed worse or the same as those in traditional public schools based on academic tests. However, cyber charter students typically had higher rates of attendance and graduation.

A contact listed on Unbound Academy’s application did not respond to a request for comment.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

Bridget Bolder sent her daughter, Mia, to kindergarten at a neighborhood public school. After all, it seemed the “normal, regular thing to do.”

But Bolder started to worry that some of her daughter’s classmates were exposing her to inappropriate topics. Early in the school year, Mia had to tell a teacher about a boy groping some of the other girls.

“I’m like, she’s a baby,” Bolder said. “Bring her home a little while longer before I throw her to the wolves.”

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Brian Wilson and his wife homeschooled three of their children last year. They struggled to juggle home life, both parents’ jobs and teaching the kids.

The family briefly switched to in-person school, but Wilson said it only validated the parents’ theory that the individual attention the kids got at home had been working.

“They seemed like head and shoulders above all the other kids when it comes to learning,” he said. “My son, Aaron — he’s the youngest — he was actually helping kids in his class.”

Both families have turned to the new Brookside Virtual Academy so they could keep their kids at home and still rely on professional teachers to lead their schooling.

The academy is attached to Brookside Charter School and bills itself as Kansas City’s only virtual program where teaching happens on live, interactive video calls.

Online school isn’t widely popular. It’s been blamed for some of the learning loss that set kids back during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kansas City Public Schools closed its virtual academy for kindergarten through fifth grade this year because of shrinking enrollment, district spokesperson Shain Bergan said in an email.

But for a girl with severe social anxiety? A boy with leukemia? A young athlete with a rigorous training and travel schedule?

Leslie Correa, who helped design the KCPS program, said certain students and families need the option. So she found a home for the program at Brookside, where she’s now the virtual academy principal.

“The students that virtual works for, it works really well for,” she said. “We cannot close the door to them for having a great education.”

Who succeeds in virtual education?

For some students, the computer screen provides a layer of distance that makes them braver, Correa said. Learning from home can also reduce distracting for some kids with autism.

For example, loud or persistent background noise, visually busy environments or other students bumping into them could overwhelm some children.

Other students might need virtual school for logistical reasons.

That could include students who are barred from in-person school for disciplinary issues, traveling athletes, kids going through intensive medical treatment like dialysis or chemotherapy, or parents who struggle with transportation.

Some families identify as homeschoolers but want professional help teaching reading and math, Correa said. Since virtual school is more concise, it leaves more flexibility in the day.

Parents’ fears can also push them toward keeping kids at home.

“Anytime that there has been a violent occurrence in one of our schools in Kansas City, I get a big uptick in enrollment,” Correa said. “They feel scared and they’re looking for an alternative.”

When virtual learning doesn’t work

To figure out if it’s a good fit, Correa starts by asking parents why they’re interested in virtual school.

“If it’s, you know, ‘I don’t have day care and I need my 12-year-old to be home to watch my kid,’ it’s kind of an alarm,” she said. “I’m not the one to judge what their decision is, but I am the one to help arm them with information.”

The virtual academy serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Because Kansas City-area charter schools can only operate within the boundaries of KCPS, its students have to be from that area.

The virtual academy doesn’t turn students away based on their reason to enroll, Correa said, but it monitors their progress. If a student isn’t thriving, she meets with a parent to make a plan, like tutoring or switching the child to in-person school.

Schools can deny virtual education if they document that it’s not in the student’s best interest.

“My goal before getting to that point is always to have the parent make that decision for themselves through very hard conversation,” Correa said. “But it does happen.”

Problems can arise when the virtual school doesn’t think it can fulfill an individualized education program, or IEP, often used to support students with disabilities.

“The parent has the option to return to in-person learning or waive the IEP, and then their student does not get that support,” Correa said. “They almost never waive the IEP.”

Students can also get removed from virtual school, and referred for truancy, if they stop signing in or engaging at all for too many days.

Correa said she’s also attentive to offering ways for virtual students to get more comfortable with in-person interaction.

Virtual school students can attend optional in-person events and participate in Brookside clubs and sports.

“If they want to kind of test the water, the opportunity is there,” she said. “If a student is saying to me, ‘I am ready to go in a building,’ then OK. But then also, if a student is saying to me, ‘I need out of the building,’ OK, I’m here. I just don’t want to disrupt their education.”

How virtual learning works 

Right before the school year started, Brookside Charter School’s STEAM lab was set up for virtual academy orientation.

Teachers and school leaders passed out laptops, hot spots for internet access and school supplies.

The supply bags include books, basics like pencils and glue, whiteboards and dry erase markers (extra for younger kids, who tend to leave the caps off), and individually packaged science kits for lessons on the solar system, geology or density.

But first, families settled in for a presentation to learn the basics.

Brookside Virtual Academy starts at 9 a.m. with a lesson on leadership.

Most days, students then launch into reading class, followed by math. Wednesdays are for science.

Students spend about two and a half hours in live virtual lessons each day, and another 90 minutes online working through a task list that includes social studies and science.

Live classes use video calls and technology that lets teachers monitor what students are looking at and control their screens.

Parents aren’t responsible for teaching their kids, but they’re expected to keep in touch and generally make sure the students are online and on task.

Connecting with families

For some parents, being extra involved in part of the draw.

Wilson, the parent of three kids in the program, said he appreciates that it cuts the school day down to essentials, allowing parents to be more strategic about where they put time into their kids’ education.

Bolder, the parent of a first grader, said she’s looking forward to more easily monitoring what her daughter is learning so she can help supplement that.

Virtual education makes it easier to connect with families, said Tina Duvall, a reading and math interventionist for kindergarten through fourth grade.

“I get to be in their home with them. It takes away a whole lot of anxiety for kids,” she said. “I thought in my years past teaching that I knew — really, really knew — my students’ families, but not like this.”

Duvall will be working with breakout groups of students, grouped by grade or ability level.

With about 100 students as of Aug. 20, two or three grades are combined under each of four virtual academy teachers. But staggered schedules and help from interventionists like Duvall will allow each grade to learn separately.

The biggest challenge, Duvall said, is not being able to sit by a student to point things out or hand them what they need.

“You just want to reach through the screen and help,” she said.

Bolder and Wilson said they have their kids in in-person activities so they can socialize. But they’re not sure if they’ll ever go to in-person school.

“There shouldn’t be such a thing as a bad school,” Wilson said. “But because there is, until we’re able to put our kids in a good school … then we feel like we’re more suited to teach our kids at home.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

An expected vote on a bill that would raise new barriers to remote schooling was deferred Thursday amid a wave of opposition that left lawmakers scratching their heads.

would limit most instances of remote schooling and levy new hiring requirements on districts still struggling to staff up their classrooms. The bill’s supporters said regulation is needed amid an uptick in remote instruction following the pandemic, which saw as some districts moved to virtual schooling for months at a time.

But the numerous opponents who assailed the bill to the Senate Education Committee warned it would restrict district staffing amid a longstanding shortage of teachers and cut student offerings by requiring state approval for remote instruction that a district can’t provide in person.

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“We certainly can appreciate some of the concerns that prompted the drafting of this bill, but the approach that was taken really, for lack of a better description, is a sledgehammer when a scalpel will be more appropriate,” said Jennie Lamon, assistant director of government relations for the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association.

The bill would require the state’s education commissioner to approve students’ individual requests for virtual options of classes their schools can’t offer in person, like advanced foreign language courses serving handfuls of students.

Critics say they worry the bill’s hiring requirements, which mandate schools to directly employ everyone whose job requires a certification from the State Board of Examiners, would exacerbate existing staffing shortages and could limit the sorts of classes taught at a given school.

“Contracting out for personnel may be the only way that a district can offer certain classes or services to our students,” said Jessie Young, legislative advocate for the New Jersey School Boards Association. “Restricting the ability to contract out may have the unintended consequence of limiting educational opportunities for students when a district cannot find personnel to directly employ.”

Exceptions in the bill would allow districts to bring some workers — like substitute teachers, instructors providing individualized lessons, and those involved in special education services — on as contractors.

Francine Pfeffer is the associate director of government relations for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, which supports the bill. Pfeffer warned that when new technology like virtual learning is introduced, it “starts getting used without bounds.”

“There are no guardrails, there are no limits to virtual instruction anywhere in law or in regulation, and we need those guardrails to prevent it being used in ways that are inappropriate,” she said.

Under current law, Pfeffer said, there is no guarantee companies contracted for virtual services, however limited, are employing people qualified to teach remote courses. She warned that, while advanced virtual courses serving a small number of students could work when taught remotely, most students would suffer if virtual schooling became more common.

“When you have three kids to take AP German, you can offer that virtually, but for the vast majority of students, students need to have that teacher in front of the room who can address their concerns right away and is on top of it,” Pfeffer said. “You cannot do that through a screen.”

The opposition to the bill, which was introduced in the Assembly on Monday and in the Senate on Thursday, surprised lawmakers.

“I think all of us who’ve spoken so far don’t really understand the level of the opposition, even though everybody spoke, said their reasons,” said Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Middlesex). “We’re confused.”

Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer) wondered whether some of the opposition stemmed more from cost than it did from the difficulties of hiring. Independent contractors do not receive the same benefits as public employees.

Though the panel’s members indicated they generally support limiting the prevalence of virtual classrooms in favor of in-person instruction, most backed holding off a vote. But one could come as early as next week, said Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the education committee’s chairman and the bill’s prime sponsor.

“I understand the concerns, so we will go through and I think we will work it out. I think everyone is, in theory, in agreement that virtual learning can have a negative impact on a child,” he told reporters after the meeting. “A teacher has to be in the classroom.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

If you asked most families with young kids whether they’d do virtual schooling again after the shift to online classes during the pandemic, .” But for Lia Carlile, it’s not a hypothetical — it’s a choice she’s made for her four kids.

Her youngest, 7-year-old Samuel Carlile, met his first-grade classmates in person for the first time at a class field trip to the zoo. His sister, 16-year-old Caroline Carlile, said he came home bursting with excitement about meeting the other students.

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“He was like, ‘oh my gosh, I got to meet so and so, and we had such a great time,” Caroline said.

“It’s amazing to me the community that these teachers have been able to build with students that have never met face to face,” added Caroline, who goes to , an online school through Quillayute Valley School District. The district is headquartered in Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula, but the Carliles live in Curlew, a small community in eastern Washington near the Canadian border.

Lia Carlile spent years teaching at a brick-and-mortar school before switching to teaching math and science at Omak School District’s , which Sam and her other two kids attend. Now, she’s the assistant principal there. Carlile said virtual education is a “really good compromise” between homeschooling and public school.

“I get a job that I love and the kids go to a school they love,” Carlile said.

But amid a rise in online schooling in Washington and other parts of the country, some experts are skeptical that virtual learning matches the benefits of an in-person environment – especially for the state’s youngest learners. Data also suggest virtual schools aren’t preparing students for college or other education beyond high school.

Although standalone K-12 online schools have been around for years, the rise in virtual learning during the pandemic. In recent years, districts have opened and expanded online program offerings, even as COVID receded.

As of 2022, there are 267 online schools in Washington state approved by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Although they are all authorized by public schools, others are publicly run. Four schools offer virtual learning for preschoolers and 140 for elementary school students.

Virtual school administrators say parents often choose online learning for their young kids to allow the family more flexibility, to prevent bullying, or to remove barriers for kids with disabilities and mental health issues like anxiety or depression. Elementary school parents in particular are often more hands-on, administrators say, and choose online school because it allows them more control over their child’s education.

“For us, we travel. We have family all over. The flexibility of online school, it was a necessity,” Carlile said.

Here to stay

were enrolled in at least one online class each year. During the 2021-2022 school year, , according to state reports, with just over 2,000 kindergarteners and first-graders enrolled in at least one online class. K-12 students in Washington state.

Data isn’t yet available for how many kids stayed in online schools during the 2022-2023 school year. At two of the state’s largest online schools, Insight School of Washington and Washington Virtual Academies, enrollment has started returning to pre-pandemic levels, school administrators said.

But , the agency approved 48 new single-district online school programs and seven new multi-district online school programs in the 2021-2022 school year. At least 33 of those new programs serve elementary-aged students, according to Rhett Nelson, director of learning options at OSPI.

“Online learning continues to grow as an enrollment option across Washington,” the report said. “As schools adapt to the assorted needs of their students, online learning will continue to be an important element of public education.”

Insight School of Washington, one of the largest online schools, expanded to elementary and middle school levels during the pandemic. Administrators say they plan to keep it that way.

“Online education may have gotten a bit of a bad rap through the pandemic because so many districts were trying to rush into that process,” said Jillian Ralston, an academic counselor at Insight. “But what we have is something that’s been around for a long time.”

“We know how to support these students,” Ralston added.

‘Virtual recess’ and ‘camera-on’ policies

In the Carlile household, recess is on the computer.

“[With] virtual school, people say, ‘how do kids connect, and how do they make friends?’” Lia Carlile said. “So we have this program this year called the K-12 Zone, and it’s virtual recess.”

The launched at Washington Virtual Academies and Insight School of Washington this year. Kids who use the K-12 Zone can move between online “rooms.” There are games in the zone and the whole space is moderated by an adult, similar to an in-person school’s recess monitor. Carlile said it’s largely used by middle school and older elementary students.

Every child enrolled at the two schools must also have a “learning coach,” an adult — usually a parent or grandparent — who supervises the child. The coach is much more involved with the younger grades, said Myron Hammond, executive director of Insight School of Washington.

Hammond said K-12 online school is much more interactive than an average online college class. At Insight, for example, the school has a “camera-on” policy for all students and encourages teachers to use web-based tools that allow students to work together.

Still, some online schools will offer occasional in-person events, like the zoo trip Sam went on, in acknowledgment of the benefits of in-person interaction.

“The only thing I miss in person that I can’t do virtually is give the kid a high-five,” Carlile said. “Pretty much everything else we can replicate.”

‘Just missing out so much’

Carlile believes “any student can be successful in a virtual environment,” as long as they have the right support.

However, experts are skeptical. Joy Egbert, a professor of education at Washington State University who studies technology use, said that while it depends on the student, in general, the younger a student is, the less likely they are to learn effectively in virtual school.

“I think some people think the online environment gives children access to everything they need and it doesn’t,” Egbert said.

There’s a higher learning curve for younger students. For example, Carlile’s son, Sam, had to learn how to use a computer before switching to online school. Egbert said that can be a challenge some young kids can’t overcome.

Caroline Carlile said she doesn’t know if online school would have worked for her when she was young, especially because she has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Still, she’s confident it’s working for her younger siblings.

“Because of Samuel’s teachers, he loves it,” Caroline said.

University of Washington professor Soojin Oh Park, who focuses on early education and child development, said she thinks young students cannot learn conflict resolution and other important skills in an online setting.

“By being solely reliant on virtual learning or [an] online schooling platform…they’re just missing out so much,” Park said.

Park said that if a child has consistent, in-person interactions outside of virtual school with kids their age and supportive adults, such as social groups for homeschooled kids, then “maybe it will be okay” for them learning online. That said, as a parent of a first grader, she’d approach any virtual learning environment with caution.

“I can’t imagine myself enrolling my own child in a fully online, virtual environment,” Park said.

Outcome gaps

At many of the largest virtual schools in Washington, most students are well behind state standards, particularly in math. And at Insight School of Washington, one of the largest for-profit online schools, only 7.6% of students met math standards in spring 2023, compared to 39% of all Washington public school students.

Hammond said the numbers reflect that many students come to Insight for credit recovery, and said Insight measures success based on parent feedback and increasing graduation rates.

“When I’ve met with families at graduations or even when I’ve made phone calls with families, it’s not uncommon for them to say ‘thank you,’” Hammond said. He added that families also frequently say they feel like they have more one-on-one support from their teachers in an online virtual program compared to at brick-and-mortar schools.

In a state audit report, they kept offering online school after pandemic restrictions ended because the programs were popular enough to become self-sustaining, even as districts lost access to temporary funding.

Walla Walla’s district officials said some students “thrived” in an online environment and Northshore School District, which covers an area around Bothell, said students who moved online “continue to do well compared to previous school years.”

But Park, the UW professor, pointed that found brain activity decreases when interacting on virtual meeting platforms like Zoom, as opposed to in-person interactions.

Park said virtual learning can offer easier access to resources like bilingual teachers, but she’s also worried about the ways it might increase disparities. Wealthier parents, Park pointed out, will likely have more access to extracurricular activities and other services that help enrich a child’s educational experience beyond a virtual classroom.

Egbert, at WSU, said that a common misconception is that virtual school offers more freedom than in-person school. In reality, Egbert said, it is often more difficult for teachers to adapt a standardized curriculum to fit a particular child online than it is in person.

If a parent is dedicated to putting their child in online school, Egbert said they need to make sure the particular program they choose fits with the way their child likes to learn. Overall, kids who are more oriented to learning through listening may do better in a virtual program than those who are especially social or like to learn through physical activity.

“My advice for parents is: It’s not just what you want,” Egbert said. “If you want your children to learn, think about how that can happen best for them. Not just because you need to take them out of school often.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

Snow days, a nostalgic rite of passage for generations of students across the northern United States, might seem destined to be a memory of school days past. For nearly a century, schools have canceled or delayed classes because of heavy or dangerous snowfall that creates hazardous travel conditions. School calendars would include a number of “makeup” days, when any missed time could be rescheduled.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools transitioned to remote learning to keep teaching when it wasn’t safe for people to gather. With students already learning at home, chose to forgo traditional snow days and proceed with remote learning during the pandemic. Those choices, and improvements in online education, led several to predict the end of the snow day.

However, policy data collected from the 35 states with suggests that while more schools are using remote learning days instead of canceling classes, the traditional snow day is far from extinct.

Snow days seem to be sticking around, thanks to nostalgia, lingering concerns about the effectiveness and accessibility of online learning and a sentiment that families and children need these unscripted, unplugged breaks.

A new option becomes available

When schools close because of inclement weather, it affects students’ learning.

For instance, research in Colorado, Maryland and Virginia has shown that led to less continuity of learning, which in turn made it less likely that elementary school students would pass math assessments.

Even before the pandemic, 14 states had policies that allowed schools other options besides closing for inclement weather. Beginning in 2011, , , and allowed students to work on preassembled packets that had been prepared and sent home instead of calling a snow day.

As technology improved, schools replaced take-home packets with online assignments and instruction.

In 2017, authorized five e-learning days a year. . In Pennsylvania, can take advantage of a 2019 policy that allows five days of remote instruction.

During the pandemic years, more schools got better at teaching online and saw opportunities to reduce school closings during winter storms. With nearly all states authorized on public health grounds to provide remote instruction during COVID-19, schools began doing so for inclement weather, too.

In 2022, the New York Board of Regents authorized the state’s public schools to class on snow days. Days earlier, anticipating the decision, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks : “If a snow day comes around, we want to make sure that our kids continue to learn,” adding, “so, sorry kids! No more snow days, but it’s gonna be good for you!”

Seven other states updated their laws to allow remote learning. For example, Maryland now allows up to eight days a year of remote learning – so long as five of those days include live sessions with a teacher – and Virginia’s new law allows 10 days.

By the start of the 2022-2023 school year, over three-quarters of snowy states had policies in place to significantly curtail school closures, keep students learning and prevent makeup days from stretching the school year into the summer. That’s up from half of them in the 2018-2019 school year.

For now: A wintry mix of snow days and remote learning

Within those states that allow remote learning for inclement weather, schools have actually followed three different patterns: full online transition, preserving traditional snow days or a combination of both.

Relatively few school systems – typically in metro areas like or – have followed New York City’s lead in announcing plans to move completely online during what would otherwise be snow days. There are also many school districts in very snowy locales – like New York’s snowiest district of – that will not be using remote learning days.

However, the most common approach across the nation will be a mix of remote learning and snow days depending on local conditions. For example, in , the superintendent announced that remote learning would be used under the new Maryland policy only “as a last resort” after the five makeup days in the calendar were exhausted. In West Virginia, schools will use a portion of their allotted nontraditional instruction days but reserve an “old-fashioned snow day” for students.

The nostalgic sentiment for preserving the snow day tradition was epitomized in a viral post from Jefferson County, West Virginia, Superintendent Bondy Shay Gibson, who on the first snow day of last year that school would be “closed for students … closed for virtual … closed for staff.” She said, “For generations, families have greeted the first snow day of the year with joy. … It is a time of renewed wonder at all the things that each season holds. A reminder of how fleeting a childhood can be. An opportunity to make memories with your family that you will hold onto for life.”

For many families this winter, the possibility of a snow day remains. When the first major storm of the 2022 winter season bore down on western New York with as much as 6 feet of snow, students in the region waited anxiously for pending school decisions: Buffalo Public Schools chose to , but neighboring Niagara Falls canceled.

The day may well come when remote learning replaces snow days. But for now, children can continue with rituals to – and hope not only for a snow day, but for a day without remote learning too.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

This spotlighting interesting academic work, originally appeared at The Conversation. 

The big idea

In virtual classrooms, math teachers deem Black students as less capable than white students. They also view girls as less capable than boys. That’s what we found after we with 1,000 teachers in schools throughout the United States.

For our experiment, we had teachers evaluate student answers to various math problems. Those answers were accompanied by images of different students online. We asked them to tell us how correct the students’ answers were. We also asked them to tell us how capable they thought the student was and how likely they would be to refer the student to be tested for a special education program to get extra help, or a gifted program, which would enable them to do more advanced work. We randomly changed the images of students presenting their solutions in Zoom classes to show Black and white girls and boys. However, the solutions stayed the same.

We found that teachers more often thought the student needed to be tested for special education when they saw a screenshot of a Black student explaining their answer rather than a white student. The teachers more often thought the student was gifted if the screenshot showed a boy rather than a girl.

Furthermore, our study showed that when teachers work in schools that serve higher concentrations of Black students, they often assumed that Black students had less math ability than white students. They also considered them more in need of instructional support. But in schools with virtually no Black students, teachers were more likely to say that white boys should be tested for a gifted and talented program than white girls.

Why it matters

Our experiment suggests teachers are identifying Black students as potentially having disabilities more often than white students who produced the same answers to math problems. Further, girls are not being given equal chances to be placed in gifted programs even when they give answers identical to those given by boys.

As virtual instruction is expected to become than before the pandemic, our study warns that virtual classrooms may perpetuate the that exist in traditional school settings.

What other research is being done

are still trying to understand whether the overrepresentation of minority students in special education is the result of systematic racial bias.

As we found in this study and in , teachers assumed boys had a higher ability than girls when both gave answers that were not fully correct. Such blind trust in boys’ math ability can boost their confidence and may than girls, who are not seen by teachers as having as high a math ability.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Kristy Maxwell realized something had to change the day she picked her son Levi up from school and found out his teacher had left the autistic kindergartener alone crying and throwing pencils from under his desk.

The Michigan mom switched her son to a school that had a good reputation serving students with disabilities, but things didn’t improve. Because Levi was a “math whiz,” staff ignored his trouble socializing and his difficulty handling the cafeteria’s loud noises, Maxwell said. Meanwhile, she was unsuccessful in lobbying the school to screen her child for autism, a way to secure the extra services required by law for students with disabilities. The mother worried her son might never get the learning support he needed.

Then, in March 2020, the pandemic shifted all classes at his school online and forced the family into an accidental experiment in a new model of education. 

During remote school, Levi could get one-on-one attention sitting next to his mother, who had to temporarily stop her work as a massage therapist due to COVID. His younger sister, who struggles with anxiety, could take breaks to pet the family’s dogs.

“When everything shut down and we were forced to go virtual … my two younger kids did really well,” Maxwell said. 

“We decided after doing that, since the younger two kids did so well outside of a brick-and-mortar [school], keeping them virtual would be the best way to help them academically.”

The Maxwells, whose three kids are now 9, 11 and 15, are among the thousands of families across the U.S. that tried virtual learning for the first time during the pandemic and are now staying with it.

New data indicate that online schools have had a staying power beyond the pandemic that few observers suspected. While some virtual academies have operated for decades, they saw a well-documented in 2020-21, the first full school year after COVID, as many virus-wary parents looked to protect their children from infections and anti-mask families sought a way out of face-covering requirements. But in the following year, even as brick-and-mortar schools fully reopened and mask mandates fell, remote schools mostly maintained their pandemic enrollment gains — and in many cases added new seats.

On average across 10 states, virtual school enrollment rose to 170% of its pre-pandemic level in 2020-21, then nudged up further to 176% in 2021-22, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ��. 

The new figures contribute to a more far-reaching understanding because, while have documented the uptick in new fully virtual schools and standalone remote academies offered by districts, scant analyses have provided a national picture of student enrollment in those schools.

‘Looks like it’ll stick’

The trend reveals that for many families virtual learning has become more than a temporary model to get through the pandemic — but rather a long-term option preferred in increasing numbers.

“It looks like it’ll stick,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “In some states, the numbers went up temporarily and came back down a bit. But overall, if [families] are staying for a couple of years, I would expect that they would keep it going.”

Six states in the dataset — Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina — saw consecutive year-over-year virtual enrollment increases, while four — Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming — saw dramatic upticks in 2020-21, then a slight dip in 2021-22.

“We didn’t know what to expect after the [mask] mandates were lifted, but we maintained our enrollment and we continue to grow,” said Jodell Glagnow, attendance administrator at Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

In Iowa, an extreme case, virtual school enrollment swelled to 373% of pre-pandemic levels in 2020-21 and notched up even further to 388% in 2021-22. The growth corresponded with an increase in the number of approved online schools in the state from three to nearly two dozen over that span, a state Department of Education spokesperson explained.

The data represents K-12 students enrolled in standalone online academies and excludes students taking remote classes offered by their home brick-and-mortar school. The scope, however, varies slightly state by state. For example, the Florida numbers reflect enrollment in the statewide Florida Virtual School, while the Arkansas figures come from its two approved virtual charters and the Michigan tally encompasses students at all 88 providers approved for online instruction.

Oregon was the lone state to provide , revealing white students were overrepresented in the state’s virtual schools in 2020-21, while students with disabilities, those navigating poverty and English learners were underrepresented. Overall, enrollment rose to 172% of pre-pandemic levels that year and reduced slightly the next year. 

GeRita Connor runs Lowcountry Connections Academy, a virtual school in South Carolina. Her school opened last year to accommodate the overwhelming demand for online schooling once capacity was reached at its partner academy, South Carolina Connections, which contracts with the same for-profit provider, Connections LLC, an offshoot of publishing and testing giant Pearson. 

The families who were newcomers to online academies like hers in the fall of 2021, she said, often hadn’t even considered remote schooling before COVID.

“I think that what happened during the pandemic is that families became more aware of the option of virtual learning,” Connor said. “[It] really opened the doors for those opportunities to exist.”

For the Maxwells in Michigan, Levi stayed in the online option his school maintained through the 2020-21 year, then in the fall of 2021 switched to the statewide Michigan Great Lakes Virtual Academy. His younger sister, Aria, briefly returned to school in person, but switched back to a district-run online option in January 2022. In September, she was able to join her brother at Great Lakes.

Rotten apples?

Experts caution the emerging trend could translate to poor academic outcomes. Virtual academies far predated COVID in some states, often with lackluster track records. And during the pandemic, students who spent the most time away from in-person classes suffered the largest learning setbacks.

Research from the using pre-pandemic data shows students at online schools score far worse on academic tests than their peers learning in-person, even when controlling for factors like race, poverty level and disability status.

To now see more and more families enrolling in online learning worries Heather Schwartz, a researcher at the Rand Corporation who has during the pandemic.

“Until we have proof the virtual schools can perform just as well — for at least some students — as traditional public schools, yeah, I’m concerned,” she said.

Participating families and administrators, however, attest to a positive impact on student learning at many virtual schools. Levi Maxwell, for example, has seen his grades improve dramatically while learning online, his mother reports. Last year, he wrote his first story by himself, after struggling for years in English.

But Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University and outspoken critic of virtual academies, believes the negative experiences outweigh the positive ones and is frustrated to see student enrollment continue to rise.

“It defies market theory,” he said. “You’d think consumers would wake up and say, ‘I’m not going to buy these apples. They’re rotten. I’m going to get another producer.’ But they’re not.”

He also warns that many virtual schools — including Connections Academies — have nonprofit “shells” that contract with for-profit management organizations. Those contracts often include costly management fees and six- or seven-figure salaries for top executives, he said. 

“Those so-called nonprofits are just incredibly profitable,” Miron said.

Connections Academy spokesperson Chantal Kowalski countered that schools in her organization are public and, like traditional brick-and-mortar schools, are governed by boards that “make all material or budget decisions and publicly post board meeting minutes online.” She added that they “contract with Pearson for online education products and services like curriculum and technology.”

Still, GAO education director Jacqueline Nowicki remains concerned about oversight.

“To the extent that the sector grows and becomes larger, I do think the risk to the federal government grows in terms of accountability,” she said.

Virtual schools, real relationships

The primary concern for Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, is whether students enrolling in online schools lose out on facetime with teachers. Many remote academies rely heavily on asynchronous lessons and offer fewer hours of live instruction than traditional schools.

“Virtual learning can be a great option, but it isn’t a substitute for connections with adults,” she said. “You have to make sure that the virtual program is providing a lot of student-teacher interaction.”

At their Michigan virtual academy, the Maxwells feel like their needs are being well met. The school has provided more specialists to accommodate her children’s special needs than their brick-and-mortar schools ever did, Kristy Maxwell said. But she admits the energy required to keep her children on task through the school day can be considerable.

“It is a lot of work on my part,” the mom acknowledged.

In a nearby Great Lakes state, seventh grader Helena Warren has also felt satisfied with a recent pivot to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. She transferred in January 2022 and appreciates how much one-on-one time she gets with her teachers through Zoom breakout rooms or phone calls when she needs extra help.

The middle schooler made the switch because the work at her old school was too “basic and easy,” she said, causing her to tune out and get bad grades, including some C’s and D’s. Now her grades are better and the assignments are more challenging. When she demonstrates mastery of a concept, her teacher asks her to help explain it to her peers, which she enjoys.

“She’s doing higher-grade stuff than she would be doing at a regular brick-and-mortar school,” said her proud mother, Melody Warren, who plans for Helena to stay online indefinitely.

“I think she’s gonna go through high school,” Warren said.

Nearly half of all adolescents surveyed said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted learning, but a sizable group grew more distant from classmates and teachers than they were in February 2020. A strong majority also said they wished school would be delivered fully in-person from now on.

, released last week by the Pew Research Center, pointed to some of the same trends that have been on display in other public opinion data released over the last two years: A plurality of parents said they were “very satisfied” with the way schools handled online learning, but a large minority were also concerned their children would fall behind academically. Teenage respondents generally did not share that concern, but were also more likely to describe themselves as unhappy with virtual instruction at their school.

Colleen McClain, a Pew research associate and one of the report’s lead authors, said the findings offered a “complex picture” of how the pandemic affected teenagers’ academic and social realities.

“I think it really paints a nuanced perspective of what teens have been through during the pandemic, what they’re still going through, and how it varies depending on a lot of factors.”

The survey, conducted between April 14 and May 4, queried over 1,300 pairs of U.S. teens (between the ages of 13 and 17) and their parents about their experiences at school and attitudes toward learning. Responses were disaggregated by both race and family income to show how families of different backgrounds were weathering the late stages of the pandemic.

Somewhat surprisingly, only about 80 percent of students in the nationally representative sample said they had attended school fully in-person over the previous month (i.e., between mid-March and early April). Conversely, in a public letter circulated in May, “more than 99 percent of schools and colleges are open.” Both statements could simultaneously be true, with K-12 schools remaining “open” for in-person learning even as significant numbers of students studied remotely during a time of . But the large group of students either learning completely online (8 percent) or in a hybrid model (11 percent) indicates a wide variety of school experiences in the spring of 2022.

The persistent, if periodic, absence of teenagers from school campuses could help explain the impact that the pandemic has left on their personal relationships. On the positive side, fully 95 percent of teenagers said they felt as close, or even more close, to their parents or guardians as they were before the pandemic began — a notable development after long months spent in much closer proximity than was previously the norm. 

But even as it gathered household members closer together, COVID also seemed to wall off teenagers from their more peripheral social ties. This was especially true in school communities, where about one-third of respondents said they felt less close to classmates and teachers than before the coronavirus outbreak.

Across all categories of relationships, McClain reflected, most students said they were “about as close” as they were three years ago. “But when you get to friends, extended family, classmates, teachers — people that teens probably wouldn’t have seen quite as much during the pandemic — you do see these larger shares saying that they feel less close to them.”

The growing feelings of isolation from school peers are perhaps unsurprising, given the exigencies of remote instruction. Still, they are notable in the context of child socialization: The early teen years are when children typically become more free of their immediate families and more dependent on relationships with their peers. Earlier pandemic research has indicated that while depression and anxiety increased among young adults in 2020 and 2021, many found solace in connecting with their friends on social media.

The study authors did note “modest” differences in these trends, with African American students being somewhat more likely than whites to describe themselves as becoming more distant from friends.

Among the report’s other findings:

• Asked what kind of schooling they would choose in the wake of COVID-19, about two-thirds of all students said they wanted to attend classes entirely in-person. Nine percent said they would prefer completely online coursework, and 18 percent would opt for a hybrid. 

• Black students were the demographic group least likely to favor a full return to in-person schooling, with just 51 percent backing that option. Over 40 percent said they would welcome either a hybrid or fully online experience.

• A plurality of parents — 39 percent in all — said they were either “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their local schools’ approach to virtual learning. By comparison, just 28 percent of students themselves said the same, while 30 percent said they were “a little” or “not at all” satisfied.

• Just one-in-six teenage respondents said they were very or extremely worried about falling behind in school, compared with 28 percent of parents. Hispanic respondents were the most likely to voice this concern, with 28 percent of Hispanic teens and 42 percent of Hispanic parents saying they were very or extremely worried.

It will take roughly six months before New York City schools can add remote learning options, Mayor Eric Adams told elected officials Wednesday morning.

The timeline, which effectively means no virtual instruction through the end of the 2021-22 academic year, represents a stark rejection of the concerns of students, parents and teachers worried for the safety of in-person learning as the Omicron variant continues to cause roughly 40,000 new COVID cases per day in the city. 

On Tuesday, thousands of students walked out of class, protesting what they said were unsafe conditions. In the first week of January, over two dozen city and state legislators signed a to Mayor Adams calling for a temporary pivot to remote learning through Jan. 18 to slow the spread of the virus.

Adams’s estimate that it will take about six months for city schools to include virtual options came during a call with officials responding to their request for a virtual option. 

New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport was on the call and is one of the officials who co-signed the letter. 

“At first, the talking point (from the mayor) was that they would get back to us later at a future meeting about the remote option,” Brisport told ����Ӱ��. “Near the end, when pressed again on a remote option, the pushback was that he wanted to do it the correct way and have as many stakeholders involved as possible, and make sure it works the best for students and teachers and that that process will probably take six months.” 

Adams has repeatedly said that he does not want to close schools or revert to remote learning in face of the current upheaval, but has not said publicly before when a remote option might be viable.

When asked about his statements Wednesday, Adams’s spokesperson Amaris Cockfield told ����Ӱ��: “Today the mayor held a private question-and-answer session with lawmakers to discuss existing plans to keep children and teachers safe and keep schools open. He’s committed to working together with lawmakers in pursuit of the best outcomes for students and staff.”

Dora Chan, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School and an organizer of Tuesday’s New York City student walkout, said the mayor’s stance feels “hypocritical.” Adams cited wanting time to engage with stakeholders, she said, but in her mind, the stakeholders have clearly spoken: the students by walking out this week and the teachers by rallying for a temporary remote option.

“We can’t wait six months. Six months is going to be in June,” added Samantha Farrow, another walkout organizer and Stuyvesant High School junior. “The mayor should be more empathetic and should be more timely with these decisions because what’s happening right now is happening right now.”

Studies have generally shown that remote learning has led to compared to in-person instruction. Numerous political leaders have maintained their emphasis on keeping schools open for in-person learning, including President Joe Biden, who announced Wednesday that his administration was sending millions of COVID-19 tests to schools to weather the Omicron surge.

Chan and Farrow acknowledged the flaws of virtual learning, but argue that, temporarily, it’s the only safe choice.

“When people … say remote learning is bad, I totally agree. I’ve been through it,” said Chan, who spent her entire junior year online. “But we’ve reached that point where it’s absolutely necessary to go back to [virtual instruction]. Obviously, we’re hoping that this is just for a bit until we get these COVID cases under control.”

This month, the high schooler said she’s stayed home from school because she lives with her grandparents and does not want to bring COVID home.

Farrow has returned to classrooms, but said the lax virus protocols worry her. Recently, her desk-mate in French class left halfway through the school day after learning their COVID test had come back positive. Farrow only found out about the exposure, she said, because that student texted her directly. On Monday, she said six separate friends told her that they were positive for COVID.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education declined to comment on Adams’s position, telling ����Ӱ�� that they prefer the mayor’s press office explain his remarks.

Brisport, himself a former math teacher in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said he supports Adams’s vision for community input into how best to structure remote learning. But he doesn’t think that plan needs to be mutually exclusive with an immediate, temporary virtual shift.

“I think this is an area where we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. “I would support having an imperfect remote option now, and then having this really well thought-out one in six months.”

In the first week back from holiday break in the nation’s largest school district, the daily attendance rate never topped . On Monday, rates rebounded slightly to 76 percent, but a large share of students remained absent, indicating widespread hesitation over safety conditions.

“A temporary remote option needs to be available to parents while infections continue to rise,” State Sen. Jessica Ramos wrote in a Jan. 6 explaining her letter to the Adams administration calling for temporary virtual learning. “Children are a critical unvaccinated population & families need to be able to make choices without fear of truancy.”

“People are coming to school positive,” said one student, explaining their COVID fears.

Students who walked out of class Tuesday that they were given mandatory detention for their choice to protest.

“As a former teacher,” Brisport said, “if all my students walked out of my classroom citing safety concerns, then I would take that to heart and see if there was something I could do differently as opposed to doubling down, which is not what we’re seeing from the current administration.”

A little while later, the man had to climb into the attic, where he looked out a window and saw the waters rising further. Just then, a fire department rescue boat arrived and urged the man to let them send up a rescuer to bring him down. The man yelled out the window, “No, you go on ahead to the other neighbors. I have faith God will save me.”

The waters rose still further, and the man had to go up on the roof. Not long after, a helicopter came by with a rescue worker dangling from a ladder to hoist the man up. “No, no!” the man said, “I’m going to be fine. God will save me. You go help the other neighbors!”

Soon, the man was swept away in the flood and he died. When he got to heaven, he was sad, dejected and a little angry.  

When God asked, “Why the sad face?” the man replied, “I prayed for you to save me, and you didn’t!”  

God replied, “I sent you a canoe, a rescue boat, and a helicopter! What more did you expect?!” 

The analogy describes the crisis many schools are encountering now as they face a flood of school disruptions, students in quarantine, and a growing number of students being left behind academically.  We’ve been given a technological canoe, boat, and helicopter, but we aren’t using them.

In spring of 2020, schools across the nation scrambled to implement the hardware, systems, long-neglected tech infrastructure, software, and online curriculum to serve students in any location.  It was the worst possible way to deploy online learning on a national scale, but our nation’s educators had no choice. Dedicated teachers moved mountains to get resources, however imperfect, into the hands of their students and families. District leaders, committed to their teams, did everything in their power to resource and support their staff. 

It was messy and monumentally frustrating, and it was a wake-up call to schools and districts everywhere to systematically design for resilience through digitally supported options and alternative learning models. 

How is it possible that now, in the fall of 2021, we are nearly back where we started? Nationwide, schools are again being forced into rolling closures, not only because of COVID but also because of teacher shortages, compounded further by legislated mandates regarding face-to-face learning. When it comes to tech infrastructure, content solutions, and teacher readiness, schools are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were pre-pandemic. That’s why it is almost surreal that many schools, facing yet another round of closures, are actually prohibited from leveraging the very infrastructure they built precisely for this purpose. 

Teachers are frustrated and exhausted. Both the and released recent data indicating that as many as 32% of teachers in the workforce are considering leaving the profession earlier than anticipated.

An “either/or” polemic has arisen that is hurting our children and our schools. If we have a bucket full of tools in place to help students learn in a wide variety of circumstances and for a wide variety of learning needs, why would we not use them? 

In the early years of pioneering online learning in Florida, long before Florida Virtual School emerged as it is today, one of the objections we would hear is that online learning isn’t for everyone. Many believed it was just a solution for advanced students who had the discipline to work independently and that for everyone else, it would be a bust. We found that idea, which we ourselves believed at first, over the years. Online learning programs, like any school option, are as effective as the evidence-based practices they adopt and the organizational commitment they hold regarding excellence and compassion. 

To the notion that online learning isn’t for every student, we actually agree. A fully online experience is not ideal for every student, though it works for many, but the argument entirely misses the point. Today, we can take the best of the benefits that well-designed learning technologies offer and put them to work in a wide variety of learning models—whether in a fully online, face-to-face (using a blended approach), a hybrid situation where students attend school on certain days and stay home on other days, learning pods where students learn in small neighborhood groups, work-based learning centers—truly our imaginations and our self-imposed boxes are the only limit. 

If it is true that all students learn differently and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and I believe it is, doesn’t it follow that educators and leaders should provide multiple learning avenues to give students and families options when one model fails to support a student’s progression? We have the ability to do this now; there are no excuses, but like the foolish homeowner, we have put our entire faith in one traditional school model as the end-all solution.  

We must stop the either/or thinking that says students should learn fully in-person or nothing. That’s not a solution. In fact, it is a myopic approach to a complex issue, which leaves parents’ hands tied and students with learning gaps through no fault of their own. 

We are bordering upon education malpractice, robbing our children of the opportunity to enjoy continuity in their learning during a time when they need it the most. We need a mentality that embraces multiple models, pathways, and instructional delivery mechanisms. This is a mindset that respects the multiple differences of our students. 

I implore leaders everywhere to imagine and strive for an education system that offers our students not just one path to post-secondary learning but many. It takes courage and patience to wade through the funding, legislative, logistical, and pedagogical challenges, but we should not be like the foolish homeowner who, caught in his own image of the “ideal” solution, failed to put the real tools right in front of him to work.

Julie Young is the managing director of ASU Prep Academy and ASU Prep Digital. She was previously the founding president and CEO of Florida Virtual School, the world’s first virtual statewide school district. 

“He looked at me [and said], ‘Mama, I’m ok. You can leave now. This is no different than my other school. I’m good,’” said Larson, who is raising him.

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She gives Avarian’s Head Start program in Racine, Wisconsin, a lot of the credit for his self-assurance, despite the fact that interaction with his preschool teacher from the program last year often took place through a screen. Like many preschoolers nationwide, children in the Grand Avenue center spent much of the 2020-21 school year at home. It’s a period that set young learners back academically, socially and emotionally. But a on Acelero Learning, the New York City-based company running Grand Avenue and 43 other Head Start centers in four states, offered a more hopeful outlook.

Preschoolers who attended the centers in person most of the year made significant gains in three areas of school readiness, but those in the virtual model kept pace with their peers, showing strong progress in two areas — early reading and math skills. In addition, the infants and toddlers served in Acelero Learning’s Early Head Start programs developed language skills beyond what is expected for their age.

“We serve a population that is typically struggling when there’s not a pandemic,” said Cate Smith Todd, Acelero Learning’s vice president of monitoring, systems and analysis. “We were super proud to see that the kids were learning at home.”

The study doesn’t compare children’s growth to that of their peers before the pandemic. But in a year when many preschool programs operating virtually saw a in participation among families, the results provide some direction if classrooms need to close again, said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and a co-author of the study.

The findings, she said, show “the importance of in-person educational experiences for young children, but when those are not possible, other approaches including virtual classes, can support child development, particularly if coordinated well with families.”

Serving over a million low-income children annually, Head Start has long been the subject of partisan debates over whether the program lives up to its promise. Skeptics point to showing any academic benefit children gain from the program disappears once children attend elementary school, and have often voted in favor of cutting funding to the program. , however, shows there is a long-term, positive impact on participants that can last into adulthood.

Deborah Bergeron, deputy director of community engagement and innovation at the National Head Start Association, added that Acelero’s response to families reflects Head Start’s whole-child approach.

“Head Start is certainly about school readiness, but we get to that through comprehensive family support,” she said.

Acelero staff delivered meals and baby formula, and it wasn’t unusual for staff meetings to start with a tally of how many diapers the centers had distributed to families, Todd said. Avarian’s center provided Pull-Ups training pants, which Larson said were as hard to find in the early days of the pandemic as toilet paper.

They followed up with tablets and hotspots, dry erase boards and bags of crayons, paper and small pompoms for counting activities.

Reflecting Head Start programs overall, released in June 2020 showed that 93 percent of programs were still in touch with the families enrolled in their programs, 73 percent were interacting with children online for at least an hour per week and 53 percent had organized virtual groups for parents.

Head Start’s connection to families during the pandemic is one reason why Bergeron — a former high school principal who led the Office of Head Start during the Trump administration — has stayed involved with the program.

‘A huge value’ to K-12

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Head Start has received $2 billion in , which grantees could use for an array of costs related to enrolling children, meeting families’ basic needs, implementing COVID-19 mitigation measures and supporting staff. Acelero, part of what Loeb called a “research-practice partnership” with the Annenberg Institute, also used relief money to fund the study. Victoria Ankrah, a vice president who oversees 16 Acelero Learning centers in Camden and Philadelphia, said despite the disruption, leaders felt it was still important to assess children’s progress.

Congress is now considering a budget reconciliation bill that includes additional funds for Head Start as part of a $200 billion plan to move toward universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. calls for $15 billion to increase pay for Head Start staff and would ensure that Head Start programs reach full enrollment before state pre-K systems add more children. Finally, the president’s fiscal year 2022 budget recommendation adds another $1.4 billion, which would increase annual Head Start funding to $12.2 billion.

Michael Maxwell, a vice president who leads Acelero Learning programs in Clark County, Nevada, said outside of Washington, there’s “an appetite” for expanding early-childhood education programs.

“You’re seeing it at the city and county level, especially here in Las Vegas,” he said. “They’ve realized that kids coming into kindergarten ready to learn are a huge value to the K-12 system.”

Created as part of the war on poverty in 1964, Head Start has always focused on the broader needs of children, including health, nutrition, mental health and employment support for families. But like most schools in the U.S., many Head Start programs didn’t have a lot of experience with delivering services virtually.

Ankrah said staff members in her centers were just beginning to use the Remind app to communicate with parents before the pandemic but accelerated use of the program when centers shut down. Teachers held virtual classes each day — usually less than two hours — and Acelero developed to give families access to activities such as ebooks and Khan Academy Kids, a preschool version of the popular online education website.

At Avarian’s center in Racine, children learning remotely also had the option of morning or afternoon sessions. Larson, who had to leave her job to stay home with Avarian, said she appreciated that teachers tried to accommodate parents coping with distance learning for the first time.

Avarian, she said, is usually “bouncing off the walls,” but his teachers were able to hold his attention. “Everyday they reinforced counting and the alphabet and sang a greeting song,” she said. The children couldn’t see each other on the screen, but Larson said her grandson would get excited when he heard the teacher sing one of his friend’s names.

Centers shifted parent meetings, another major component of the Head Start model, to an online platform.

“We wanted to make sure parents still had a voice in this,” Ankrah said.

Bergeron expects Head Start’s leap into technology to be a lasting impact of the pandemic across the majority of programs — not just Acelero’s. Virtual meetings allow more parents to participate and children have gained technology skills they might not have learned until they were older.

Like all early-childhood programs that shifted to a remote format, Head Start centers still saw less participation among families with school-aged children learning at home and from those facing COVID-related sickness and trauma. In the June 2020 survey, 72 percent of programs reported providing consultations with disability or mental health counselors on the need for mental health services for families and 22 percent said they had noticed an increase in domestic violence or child abuse during stay-at-home orders.

But Bergeron said, “When you provide parents with the support they need, they will rise to the occasion. There is so much to learn about what it means to have strong, trusting relationships with parents.”

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Updated July 28

The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted Monday to approve KIPP DC’s virtual program proposal for grades K-12. It held off, however, on approving its request for creating an all-virtual campus in SY 2022-23, wanting to see how the virtual option works in the next school year. The two other charter networks that submitted all-virtual proposals did not get greenlighted: The board denied Howard University PCS’ request to continue its simulcasting model, determining the network had not shown its virtual program will result in improved performance or that there would be demand after the  pandemic ends. AppleTree withdrew its application.  

With school districts around the country increasingly adding virtual learning for the fall, three D.C. charter networks are seeking approval for their own all-virtual options, citing parent demand amid pandemic safety concerns.

, and are asking the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the city’s charter authorizer, to allow them to permanently offer all-virtual learning to a limited number of students.

“We know in-person is ideal,” said Andhra Lutz, KIPP DC’s managing director of secondary schools. But “we [also] have so much respect and so much love for our families. And our families have asked us for this.”

The plans range from launching all-new programming with virtual staff to sticking to last year’s learning models. Officials say there would be various safeguards — such as mentorship programs, attendance eligibility requirements and parent check-ins— to assure a high-quality experience rivaling in-person learning.

Projected capacity ranges from 20 students at AppleTree to nearly 300 students at KIPP DC, or about 4 percent of its student population. KIPP DC is also requesting approval to transition its virtual program into what would be the city’s second free, all-virtual public school in SY 2022-23.

A fourth school, , is requesting to permanently offer hybrid learning.

Without the PCSB’s approval, these schools could only offer all-virtual learning starting next year to students such as severe asthma, in line with from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

A virtual hearing and vote are scheduled for Monday.

“Khamal won’t even go to the grocery store with me,” KIPP DC mom KyShawn Route-Crowder said of her seventh grade son, who’s stressed about returning to school and wants to stay virtual. His father had a heart attack in 2016, is immunocompromised and can’t get a COVID vaccine.

Route-Crowder added that her son, who attends KIPP DC’s KEY Academy, has flourished in virtual learning without classroom distractions. “You have to know what type of student you have. And I know my child specifically, and I know he can excel online right now.”

While most students nationwide are expected to head back to the classroom full-time this fall, virtual learning is sticking around. A estimated 56 percent of schools will offer a remote learning option this fall, including in , , and Cleveland. Another report found nearly two-thirds of the country’s largest school systems will provide students an option to learn in stand-alone, remote academies.

Currently, D.C. Public Schools — which serves about 53 percent of the city’s public school kids — is only allowing those with a “documented medical condition” to learn virtually next year. , and have made similar calls.

This wouldn’t be the first time the PCSB considered changes that ran counter to local guidance, experts noted. It broadly a by the Deputy Mayor for Education cautioning against adding more charter high schools, for example. Any backlash to these plans, they surmised, would be less about regulations and more about concerns with program quality.

For most, distance learning last year was an inadequate substitute for in-person class. Slow Internet, digital literacy challenges, competing family obligations and distracting home environments upended many students’ progress — especially students of color from under-resourced neighborhoods. Numerous reports point to that districts now flush with recent federal stimulus aid are rushing to address.

For some families in D.C., though, online school has been working. In a sample parent survey Howard University PCS conducted last month, about 94 percent said it was “extremely” or “very” important that they at least had the option of all-virtual schooling this fall.

Ward 4 mom Keisha, whose eighth grade son attends Howard University PCS, hopes her son goes back to in-person class — just not next year. She’s holding off on vaccinating him — the vaccine for kids is still new, she said — and developments have her wary of him resuming his Metrobus commutes to school.

“Keeping him safe and healthy is my main priority,” she said. “I’m not rushing him back.”

A PCSB spokesperson said while the “goal is for schools to return to in-person learning as the primary mode of instruction,” the board is open to the conversation, wanting “to be responsive to the questions and concerns that we have heard from schools and students.”

KIPP DC: A new model in the making

Virtual programming this fall would look “vastly different” from last year, said Caitlin Maxwell, KIPP DC’s director of virtual learning programs.

On a typical day, kids would log on to in the morning, watch a seven-to 10-minute video for each of their class subjects and complete class work testing comprehension of the material.

KIPP DC’s “learning coordinators,” who are certified teachers, would then take about two hours to review students’ submissions, crafting their lesson plan for small group instruction that afternoon based on the concepts students struggled with most that morning.

During that two-hour period, students would have a break to eat lunch and take an “enrichment” class — like a foreign language or cooking — via a partnership with .

Spokesman Adam Rupe confirmed KIPP DC is poised to hire 20 to 25 all-virtual staff members using recent federal stimulus funding. If the all-virtual campus is approved, “we’d use our per-pupil dollars” to pay for the program long-term, he added.

So far, KIPP DC has identified 66 medically eligible students for this program. Broader polling of the school community informed the estimate that around 280 students in total may opt-in if able.

Not every student would be eligible to participate, though, Lutz clarified. A student would need to have had at least 90 percent daily attendance in remote learning last year. Staff would also review the student’s academic records and have a conversation with the parents “where we’re really upfront about what’s different [from last year],” she said.

If a family changed their mind after the school year began, KIPP DC would allow that student to return to in-person during one of its quarter breaks.

Lutz and Maxwell feel confident in students’ ability to succeed virtually; recently compiled data shows 76 percent of KIPP DC middle schoolers saw growth in math over the 2020-21 school year. (����Ӱ�� asked for that same data pre-pandemic, but comparable data wasn’t available). They confirmed virtual learners would take “the same assessments” as students learning in-person.

While these students wouldn’t be working alongside their peers, Maxwell said KIPP DC’s virtual student clubs and monthly outdoor field trips would provide opportunities to socialize.

“That creates a sense of belonging for kids, and that’s often what they look forward to the most,” Maxwell said.

Howard University PCS: Sticking to what it knows

As of last week, there were about 18 Howard University PCS families with some 25 students interested in staying virtual, Principal Kathryn Procope said.

If approved, the school would stick to the model it’s used since late January: Simulcasting, where the teacher is physically in the classroom with some students and streaming the lesson live via Microsoft Teams for others tuning in virtually.

All classrooms are already equipped with — 360° camera, mic and speaker devices — for an immersive virtual experience, Procope said. Students at home could use the platform’s raised hand function to ask their teacher a question in the middle of the lesson.

No new staff hires would be needed under this model, Procope said. If a student decided to come back in-person during the school year, they wouldn’t need to change teachers.

Procope acknowledged the network overall saw “some slight dips in math and reading” performance last year, “but they weren’t significant.” Virtual students’ academic growth, she added, would be monitored with fidelity: The network’s learning platform, , is full of practice assignments to gauge students’ mastery of the content.And online quizzes and tests would only be released at specific times when a teacher is available to monitor the students on camera.

The school’s existing mentoring program is another safeguard to ensure students would have what they need to succeed, Procope said. Every student has an established relationship with a mentor who checks in at least weekly.

“It gives us an opportunity to know, ‘Hey, Mary’s family is experiencing homelessness, they may need X,'” she explained. “It allows us several touch points.”

“If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic,” Procope said, “it’s that we’re going to adjust and shift the way we educate them to make sure we reach them.”

The virtual public hearing and vote will be on Monday starting at 6:30 p.m. Information on registering to attend will be posted on www.dcpcsb.org.

Nearly next school year, according to a recent tally from Burbio, a website that tracks school calendars and reopenings.

Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 128 will hold virtual programs this fall, while 60 — such as those in , and — will offer no fully remote options, save for medical exceptions for immunocompromised students. Another 12 have yet to announce their plans.

The update comes as the highly transmissible Delta variant now accounts for the , casting uncertainty on an upcoming school year that, just weeks ago, many observers had hoped would mark a — and spurring many parents to revise their expectations for the fall.

“Everyone is assuming that all kids are going back into buildings in September,” Annette Anderson, who is a mother of three children in Baltimore City Public Schools, told ����Ӱ��. “And I’m not really clear with the Delta variant what’s going to happen.”

Her kids — rising 8th-, 9th- and 11th-graders — had already endured a year and a half of remote classes, and were itching to see their friends, she said.

But when COVID case counts once again began to rise in late June, her family’s calculus suddenly became much more complicated. Kids under 12 do not yet have access to vaccinations, Anderson points out, and with many schools following a recent update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said vaccinated students and staff could forgo face coverings, she worries that schools could become vectors of spread this fall.

A possible precursor of dangers still to come, the U.S. has experienced a in states such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas in June and July.

“There is still a lot of outstanding questioning on my part about whether or not we are ready to let our kids go back into buildings full time,” said the Baltimore mother, who is also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

At first, “I was comfortable with [my kids] going back to school,” she said, “[but now] the question of children carrying the Delta variant is still very open ended.”

Halfway across the country, just outside of San Antonio, Texas, Deneatra Terry feels similarly. Her state has banned virtual-only school options this fall, and now the mother of two is shopping around for a charter school that would allow her youngest to stay online or keep class sizes low for social distancing.

“If there is something out there … worse than the [previous strains of] COVID, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to open that damn [schoolhouse] door,” she told ����Ӱ��. “If you keep knocking on the door, the devil does answer, eventually.”

The mothers are not alone in their concern. Worry for the highly infectious mutation could impact the schooling choices that many parents make for their kids this fall, says Robin Lake, director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“I think the Delta variant has quite a few families spooked,” she told ����Ӱ�� via email. “A lot of families may decide to hedge their bets and enroll in alternative programs.”

Because the new strain is even than the Alpha variant before it, which originated in the United Kingdom, the coming months may mark the “most dangerous” time in the pandemic for unvaccinated individuals and young people, University of Missouri infectious disease expert Taylor Nelson told ����Ӱ�� in late June.

But while acknowledging that the Delta variant is “incredibly concerning,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says that schools do not have to be risky places for children.

Last year, “we really did see minimal transmission in the K-12 setting, which is reassuring,” he told ����Ӱ��. In Chan’s home state, the vast majority of student and staff coronavirus cases came from out-of-school exposures, he explained.

Last spring, hundreds of academic studies pointed to mitigation measures such as masking and ventilation that schools could use to reopen safely. New CDC guidelines now emphasize flexibility for schools and districts to implement “layered mitigation strategies” to keep kids safe, which proponents say will allow schools more freedom to problem-solve and take local levels of infection into account. Critics meanwhile worry the new guidance will allow decision makers to sidestep key safety measures.

Above all else, however, the Rhode Island doctor emphasizes immunization as the single most effective way to limit spread, including for the new variant.

“We know that the vaccines, certainly the ones we’re using here in the U.S., are effective against the Delta variant,” said Chan. “As long as people in the community … are vaccinated, hopefully the risk of transmission within the K-12 setting will be minimal.”

According to a recent announcement from Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company will seek to expand its existing emergency authorization for shots to . Their pediatric vaccine trials are currently underway. Even with expanded authorization, it’s unclear whether parents will immunize young children in large numbers and there remain swaths of the country, especially in the South, .

In the meantime, Lake, of the University of Washington, underscores the well-documented benefits of face-to-face learning for most students versus attending virtual school.

“Most of the studies comparing learning outcomes in remote learning compared to in-person show students do better both academically and emotionally when they have in-person instruction,” she said.

Ahead of the July 13 Global Education Meeting, UNICEF and UNESCO extolled the benefits of in-person learning, urging decision makers around the world to to “avoid a generational catastrophe.”

Still, there were students and families that thrived in remote learning, the Center for Reinventing Public Education director points out. The key takeaway for district leaders, she says, is that “quality options are the right solution.”

School systems, however, do not yet appear to be altering their plans.

“We’re not seeing any districts walk back plans [for in-person school] yet,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��. Most districts’ strategies for the fall were formulated this past spring and were announced early in the summer, he said.

If spread of the new COVID strain does spur changes to reopening plans, those revisions would likely come “in about a three-week window in advance of school,” according to Roche, because districts take time to alter course.

In the meantime, parents will mull how to balance the academic, social-emotional and physical health needs of their children in yet another uncertain back-to-school season.

“We wanted COVID to go away with a vaccine and it has largely dissipated, but it has not disappeared,” said Anderson, in Baltimore. “So that’s what I’m wrestling with.”

The coronavirus pandemic turned Julie Welch’s work life upside down, forcing her to teach her 6th grade class online for the first time in her 30-year career.

But losing time with her loved ones was among the biggest hurdles she faced over the past year.

“Not being able to touch and hug and be with my daughters, and my mother-in-law and father-in-law — and just the people that you just kind of take for granted sometimes, that you can hug and kiss when you see them,” Welch said. “That was a big challenge for me to miss out on those times, just like it is for most people.”

Welch said her family was limited to just a few outdoor get-togethers last summer. But she was especially grateful for those moments when her father-in-law unexpectedly died from a stroke in March.

“Trying to say those final goodbyes during COVID was really, really tough,” Welch said. “We were able to still see a few extended family members who had already been vaccinated but we haven’t yet been able to have his memorial service. So that was really a great loss this year for us.”

But the vaccinations of Welch’s immediate family members have offered her fresh freedoms, she said.

“It’s like we’re starting to be able to feel safe being together and it’s just this incredible wonderful feeling,” Welch said. “I’m really looking forward to actually being with my children, maybe being able to safely get on an airplane and fly out to visit my one daughter who lives in New York City and actually enjoy time physically with her rather than just on Zoom.”

Those joys are returning as Welch reflects on one positive from the pandemic: She has struck a new work-life balance while teaching from home through the La Crosse School District’s Coulee Region Virtual Academy.

In past years, Welch ended each long day in her classroom feeling like she ran out of time — failing to reach each student who needed her. She is now making those connections online during school hours with time to spare for herself.

“I’ve spent so much more time this year being reflective, being alone, being quiet and it’s been good,” Welch said. “I have missed friends and I have missed a lot of that socialization. But I’ve also realized how important the quiet is, and I’m hoping that this is a permanent change in my life.”

Welch and her husband have spent some of that extra time with new canine companions. First, they met Mabel, a Cane Corso mastiff mix. The couple adopted her in March 2020 just as COVID-19 began upending society. Welch walked her daily, and Mabel watched the couple as they gardened.

“She was just a constant presence in my life,” Welch said.

But their time was short.

“Sadly, she died in December. We know she was an older dog and she had a pretty rough life before she came to us so she didn’t live through the year,” Welch said.

Losing Mabel left a void in the home, Welch said. She initially tried to fill it by occasionally caring for friends’ dogs over several weeks. This spring, however, the couple started fostering another dog: Zara.

“She immediately adopted my husband as her person, and it was right after my husband had lost his dad,” Welch said. “She crawled right up in his lap and would hug him and just gave him that outlet of comfort.”

The couple quickly decided they couldn’t let go of Zara. They adopted her in April.

Listen to Julie Welch’s audio diary, produced by Hope Kirwan for Wisconsin Public Radio: 

is collaborative series, produced in partnership with , that chronicles as they navigate life during the coronavirus pandemic.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

During the early days of the pandemic, with students around the world shut out of school buildings and many struggling to succeed in virtual classrooms, academics and philanthropies in several countries embraced a novel solution: online tutoring. In recent months, the first research studies on those initial efforts — one based in the United Kingdom, the other in Italy — have emerged, showing significant evidence of effectiveness.

Preliminary from the National Online Tutoring Pilot, launched last June by four existing tutoring organizations in partnership with a consortium of British charities, indicate that online tutoring was a successful means of reaching over 1,000 disadvantaged students, and that participants were overwhelmingly likely to say they enjoyed the experience. Even more striking, a of the Italian Tutoring Online Program (TOP) found that it delivered sizable benefits to pupils in terms of academic performance, life aspirations, and even psychological health. In cases where participants were randomly assigned to receive twice the amount of tutoring than other participants, their academic gains measured against similar students almost doubled.

While caveats exist, including the potential challenges of offering digital assistance to children who may not have reliable internet connections, the results could lend weight to the arguments for an American approach to online tutoring. Largely in response to reports of learning loss experienced by students who have missed a year or more of in-person school, a coalition of education leaders, politicians, and nonprofit organizations has recently begun advocating for a national mobilization of volunteer tutors.

As momentum builds behind the proposal, advocates can look to the European initiatives as possible models. Both were executed at a small scale, benefiting only a few thousand students between them, but they were also established within a remarkably short span of time and under some of the most trying circumstances imaginable.

Eliana La Ferrara, an economics professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, raced to develop TOP last spring as the first wave of COVID-19 gripped Italy. When most Westerners still wondered whether the novel coronavirus posed a serious threat, the wealthy Lombardy region, of which Milan is the capital, was almost immediately hit with in the world. Mandatory school closures convinced La Ferrara and her collaborator, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Michela Carlana, that fast action was necessary.

“There was this climate of crisis, and it became clear to us that families were struggling and this would not be over within a month,” she told ����Ӱ�� in an interview. “We felt like we could predict that this would affect every other country the same way, so that was part of the eagerness to get things started.”

Within weeks, they had contacted middle school principals across the country to identify students who needed help in math, English, and Italian (most often a combination of the three) and identified over 1,000 potential beneficiaries from 76 schools. They also recruited hundreds of volunteer tutors from undergraduate and graduate programs at three Milan universities, connecting them with online training resources designed by a team of pedagogical experts. Amid the sprint, 530 students were randomly assigned to receive free virtual tutoring sessions of between three and six hours per week, while the rest were observed as a control group.

The researchers’ findings showed that children received clear advantages from a tutoring regimen with a median length of just five weeks. According to survey data from students, parents, and teachers, they spent an average of 10 minutes more per day on homework, were 16 percent more likely to attend online classes regularly, were 10 percent less likely to say they found the classes hard to follow, and were 6 percent less likely to exhibit behavioral problems during the school day. In a concluding examination designed by expert middle school teachers to mimic Italy’s annual tests, which were canceled in 2020, tutored students saw an increase in correct answers of 9 percent over the control group.

The program’s effects on non-academic outcomes were smaller, but still notable. TOP students were more likely to say they intended to attend college (and their teachers were more likely to say they should) and less likely to say they planned to attend a vocational high school. Compared with struggling peers who received no tutoring, they had significantly higher chances of reporting that they saw the events of their lives as being in their own control. And at a time when they were suddenly cut off from their friends and teachers, they said they experienced fewer symptoms of depression and higher overall happiness.

While the program was helpful for participants of all backgrounds, its effects were particularly concentrated among certain groups: Students with learning disorders like dyslexia saw a boost in test scores that far exceeded that of typical students. A smaller group, chosen randomly from the population of kids struggling in more than one subject, were assigned tutors who were willing to volunteer for six hours per week; they experienced academic gains roughly double the size of other participating children. And the uptick in mental health was driven almost entirely by immigrants — possibly, La Ferrara said, because they were more likely to draw connection and encouragement from their relationships with tutors.

“It’s a very clear finding, and it told us that the way our kids are dealing with isolation is basically through other social networks where they interact,” she said. “It’s a speculation, but it seems as if these kids from immigrant backgrounds might have been less well-connected outside the classroom, so perhaps having a tutor who is there to talk to you and who cares about you might have an effect.”

While designed to answer more conceptual questions — mainly, whether it was even possible to reach large numbers of pupils during the summer through virtual tutoring — on Britain’s National Online Tutoring Pilot offered similarly hopeful conclusions.

The study examined a pilot after the first COVID wave crested in much of Europe. Funding and coordination came from a range of philanthropic sources, most prominently the Education Endowment Foundation, and instruction was offered by four U.K. tutoring services with experience working with disadvantaged students.

Between June and October 2020, nearly 10,000 tutoring sessions, each lasting about an hour, were delivered to 1,425 students across 65 schools. Participants were somewhat older than those identified by TOP, with most between the ages of 14 and 16. A majority met eligibility standards for “pupil premium” funding, essentially a British equivalent of Title I dollars.

Survey answers from students indicate an overwhelmingly positive response to the pilot. Nearly all agreed either somewhat or strongly that their tutor was helpful; majorities strongly agreed that their tutors were knowledgeable, patient, fun, and even inspiring; majorities said they liked completing online lessons and felt more confident in their schoolwork because of the tutoring; and 87 percent said that they would prefer to continue with it if given the opportunity. All told, three-quarters of students said they enjoyed learning more than they did before taking part.

Researchers warned that a few obstacles prevented students from getting more out of the pilot, mostly relating to technological difficulties. Eight percent of learners reported missing a session because of a lack of necessary equipment, such as a laptop or tablet, while 16 percent said they had because of bad internet connectivity. In a survey of school leaders, nearly half said that equipment issues made it more challenging for kids to access the virtual instruction.

In a set of recommendations accompanying the report, authors advised that schools and tutoring entities “work together to identify any technological barriers for individual learners and consider appropriate solutions,” including both offering equipment to families in need and hosting the online sessions in schools rather than students’ homes.

The pilot study leaves much to be discovered, and a more fully developed was established last fall to provide supplemental instruction to additional students through an approved list of over 30 partner organizations. Likewise, a second round of TOP is under way during this school year, from which La Ferrara and her collaborators hope to learn more — including the impact of tutoring on both students and the tutors themselves.

“At the time, all this discussion about COVID and mental health was not in the air yet, because we were just beginning. For us, it was not salient, but if I could do it again, I would [try to measure] those outcomes.”

When Clint Myrick graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010, he left with two consequential pieces of paper: a diploma for a bachelor’s degree in music education — and an eye-popping student loan bill.

The Milwaukee native was one of the first in his family to attend college, and Myrick said he entered with little knowledge of how to pay for it.

“I was totally unprepared,” Myrick said. “I didn’t know how much it cost … I kind of had to figure out everything on my own.”

Myrick held a number of jobs during college to help pay the bills, from working at a flower shop to running a cash register at the UW-Milwaukee student union. He earned about $6 an hour, and student loans allowed him to pay for school.

Over a decade later, Myrick’s student loan debt has only ballooned, even after years of payments. In 2015 he consolidated $118,473 worth of loans, but interest has pushed the debt to $152,039, the highest it has ever been. The husband and father of three works multiple jobs to service the debt. He spends an extra 20 to 30 hours a week as an Uber driver outside of his full-time job for a bank and duties as president for the Milwaukee chapter of the Black fraternity he belonged to in college, Alpha Phi Alpha.

Myrick is not alone in this struggle. In Wisconsin, about , with the median debt at $17,323, according to Gov. Tony Evers’ 2020 task force on student loan debt. Nationally, the toll of crippling levels of student debt on tens of millions of Americans has prompted some calls for wide-ranging loan forgiveness.

That burden weighs on students unevenly. According to , Black and African-American college graduates owe around $25,000 more in student loan debt on average than their white counterparts. The same report also found that four years after graduation, 48% of Black students owe around 12.5% more than they originally borrowed.

Such disparities are particularly stark in the Milwaukee area, according to a In majority-minority ZIP codes in Milwaukee, Waukesha and West Allis, 23% of the population has student loan debt, compared to 19% of majority white ZIP codes. The real difference comes in the proportion of those loans that are in default. In ZIP codes where most residents are people of color, 21% of the loans are in default, compared to just 6% in majority-white areas.

Evers’ task force recommended Wisconsin take several steps to ease the student debt burden, including expanding financial literacy education for K-12 students; increasing need-based financial aid; loan forgiveness for graduates entering certain professions; state tax credits; and a mechanism to refinance student debt to lower interest rates.

It concluded that “finding solutions to tackle racial and ethnic inequity in student debt is a critical aspect of finding solutions for Wisconsin’s student loan borrowers.”

Disparities deep in Milwaukee

A variety of studies have named Milwaukee the nation’s , home to structural inequality that makes it tougher for Black residents to bolster their standard of living compared to white residents. A 2020 compared Milwaukee’s Black community to those in the country’s 50 largest metropolitan cities. The report found that Milwaukee’s Black residents fared among the worst nationally regarding income and economic mobility, with many enduring “caste-like conditions” forged by a range of discriminatory policies and practices in government and the private sector.

The study identified a vast gulf between Black and white young people in income and future earning potential, finding that Milwaukee over four decades trailed all but three major metro areas in upward mobility for Black youth. During that same time, Milwaukee saw the 18th best upward mobility for white youths.

Myrick said these statistics show how racism inhibits the overall well-being of Black folks.

“The base of it is racism. Racism is the driving force in the disparities between Black and white people,” Myrick said. “We’re not receiving the same education, the same resources or the same facilities.”

During a March on student loan forgiveness, Ashley Harrington of the Center for Responsible Lending said many Black students are severely burdened by this loan debt. The nonprofit works to protect homeownership and family wealth by opposing abusive financial practices.

“(Student debt) is disproportionately weighing on borrowers of color, Black borrowers in particular, who are more likely to borrow, to borrow more and to struggle in repayment,” said Harrington, federal advocacy director for the group. “That is the direct result of centuries of racially exclusionary policies and practices that continue to this day.”

At Myrick’s alma mater, UW-Milwaukee, many students are racking up crippling debt to lenders.

The of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) found the percentage of UW-Milwaukee students taking out student loans in the 2018-19 school year was 7 percentage points higher than the median of a comparison group of similar institutions. Additionally, UW-Milwaukee students in the same year took out an average of $7,499 a year in student loans — roughly $1,000 more than the median amount.

Myrick said he understands why so many students take out loans without necessarily knowing how to pay them back.

“They sell you on the dream. ‘Just take out the loans, and you’ll get a job where you’ll be able to pay that stuff back!’ You really believe it,” Myrick said.

More debt, more defaults

Loan debt at UW-Milwaukee disproportionately affects Black students in other ways too.

Nationwide, 45.9% of Black students graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to . But at UW-Milwaukee, only 25% of Black and African-American students at UW-Milwaukee achieve this, according to the . That is roughly half of the graduation rate for white UW-Milwaukee students and the lowest among all racial and ethnic groups at the university.

That disparity stems at least in part from students having to drop out of school for financial reasons, said Victoria Pryor, UW-Milwaukee’s Black Student Cultural Center student services program manager. Pryor said many Black students face a troubling dilemma: Take out more student loans or leave school.

“I’ve seen several students who have had to drop out because they might not have had that last little bit of money for tuition or they might have fallen on hard times,” Pryor said. “They may get their degree but still have $40,000 to $50,000 in student loans to repay. That’s the worst thing — to have that much money to pay back, and you still don’t have that degree.”

Black students are taking particularly big financial risks when attending higher education, UW-Madison’s Fenaba Addo said in a for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

“(Black students) tend to rely on student loans more than whites, have higher debt burdens, express more concern about the affordability of loan payments, and are more likely to default,” said Addo, a faculty affiliate at the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty.

Financial aid scarce

To avoid the possibility of piling on more loan debt, many UW-Milwaukee students turn to the university’s financial aid office.

However, the university lags behind similar institutions in regard to financial aid. The same 2020 IPEDS found 58% of UW-Milwaukee students received grant aid in the 2018-19 school year — far below the comparison group median of 84%. UW-Milwaukee that year offered students roughly half the aid that comparison universities provided.

Increasing financial aid could combat loan disparities, but Tim Opgenorth, UW-Milwaukee’s director of financial aid, said the university lacks funding to cover the need.

“(The IPEDS data) doesn’t surprise me. We have a very small amount of institutional, need-based aid that we can give to students,” Opgenorth said. “The campus is aware that they have a ways to go, and they’ve been trying to raise money to address it.”

Pryor and the multicultural student success coordinators at UW-Milwaukee’s aim to address this gap through academic, career and personal resources and helping Black students search for financial aid.

“The one thing I always preach to them is that I want them to leave here with as little debt as possible,” Pryor said.

Pryor, a 1988 UW-Milwaukee alum, said working a job to help cover college costs was less  common when she was in school as it is today.

“I look at these students today. They come in with so many challenges and obstacles,” Pryor said. “… We want to make sure that we provide a space and have resources to make sure those students are equipped with those tools to be successful.”

Pryor said she and other members of the Black Student Cultural Center hope to start by working with the university to establish an emergency grant fund for students.

“I do think if we could get some more scholarship money for our students, that could really close the (racial) gap,” Pryor said. “I think our students would be able to be more successful and would not have to work two or three jobs. They could focus more on their studies, and they might not have to drop out.”

Pryor said that UWM Black Student Cultural Center staff is also doing more outreach to new students, to build trust and relationships prior to the beginning of the semester. “If students have an established relationship and know the staff members earlier, that could alleviate some of those challenges and obstacles,” she said.

‘It would change everything’

The national conversation around addressing student loan debt is getting louder since President Joe Biden took office. Biden’s plan to forgive up to $10,000 in student loan debt per person even triggered a question in February’s CNN at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater. Some in the Democratic Party call Biden’s plan too modest.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are among those for the 43 million Americans who collectively owe more than $1.5 trillion.

In a February from Warren, Schumer said canceling more student loan debt could address debt disparities and even start to fix the national racial wealth gap.

Democratic Party leaders also hope the Biden administration’s of Richard Cordray as chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid increases opportunities to excuse more student loan debt nationwide. In a , Warren said she believes Cordray, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, can greatly benefit borrowers struggling with student loan debt.

“Rich Cordray has spent years fighting on behalf of American families … I’m very glad he will get to apply his fearlessness and expertise to protecting student loan borrowers and bringing much needed accountability to the federal student loan program,” Warren said.

But some are criticizing this push to eliminate debt across the board, worried it would give a break to the wrong people. During the recent , Reason editor-at-large Nick Gillespie said forgiving student loan debt for all would give wealthy families help they don’t need.

“There is no reason on God’s green Earth that wealthy people should not be paying their way. When they take out loans or their kids take out loans, they should pay them back,” Gillespie said.

Brookings Institution fellow Adam Looney argues that “even modest student loan forgiveness proposals are staggeringly expensive and … would exceed cumulative spending on many of the nation’s major antipoverty programs over the last several decades.” Looney proposes more

But Harrington of the Center for Responsible Lending said canceling all student loan debt could be an effective way to address racial gaps in debt and wealth.

“Debt cancellation is absolutely a way to begin to address racial inequities. If you cancel the debt, and it disproportionately impacts Black and brown people, now they have the ability to do other things,” Harrington said. “It will literally move so many families to positive wealth from negative wealth. That is not nothing. That is powerful.”

With no relief yet in sight, Myrick continues to chip away at his six-figure loan debt, which continues to exact a steep toll. The debt kept his family from qualifying for the lowest rate on a home loan, and it has stalled plans to begin investing in real estate.

Myrick said canceling all student debt would transform his family’s life and help address the deep racial disparities in Milwaukee and nationally.

“Some people wouldn’t even have debt if you eliminate those. I’m one of them,” he said. “I wouldn’t have to work a second job if they wiped them clean. I would have more time with the family. Wiping student loans across the board for Black folks … it would change everything.”

This story was produced as part of an investigative reporting class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication under the direction of Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch’s managing editor, who contributed to this story. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch () collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Julie Welch starts each school day by heading down the stairs to her basement. Last summer, she turned her guest room into a classroom for the La Crosse School District’s Coulee Region Virtual Academy, an online charter school created as an alternative to in-person classes this year.

Welch checks email and opens the day’s online lessons for her 6th grade class before starting their morning meeting on Zoom.

“Just like if we were in person when kids arrive, we start the day in a circle, greeting each other and just kind of doing that check in, like ‘Hey, how are you doing? What’s new? What do you have to share?’” Welch said.

For some of her more self-sufficient students, Welch said the 30-minute meeting may be the only time she sees them for the day. The lessons are designed to be done independently, but she offers help sessions for each subject on Zoom and hosts virtual office hours for students who need extra help.

But Welch has been surprised by the relationships she’s built with students and their families without even meeting them in person.

“It’s amazing to me how it’s not the same as being in school and being in a classroom with each other, but it isn’t as remote and lonely as I thought it would be,” Welch said.

She said there’s a special intimacy that comes from seeing into her students’ homes and sharing her home as a Zoom backdrop. Family pets often make cameos during their meetings, and Welch said the class has even collectively experienced loss.

“I lost my dog this year. She died and my kids were heartbroken with me because they knew her. They saw her every day. And so when that happened, they actually helped me through that,” Welch said.

Welch also started what she calls “Club Time” on Fridays, when students can share their passions with their classmates. She said kids have done everything from baking demonstrations to origami lessons and video game demonstrations.

When signing up to teach the online program, Welch worried that she would draw only one type of student in her class: kids from families who could afford to keep them at home.

Education equity has always been important to her, and she worried the online classroom would lack the diversity of students that she had taught in person for the past 30 years.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Yes, I do have families who have made the commitment to stay home or to make sure their child is with a grandparent. And some of my students are the caregiver to their siblings,” Welch said. “I have students that are home because of medical concerns. And I have students who are home because their parents just didn’t want the back and forth (between in-person and online).”

Still, teaching online is different than being together in person, Welch said.

She said some students have because they have poor internet connections or can’t attend help sessions throughout the day because of commitments at home.

Welch said some of her students have also experienced isolation. of more than 3,000 Wisconsin families by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that around 3% of families said remote learning impacted their child’s emotional health. A similar number expressed concern about their child’s social development and connections with friends.

Welch said a few of her students switched back to in-person classes after the first semester because of these concerns. She tries to talk with her class about loneliness while seeking ways to foster friendships between students.

“There are times where I’ll finish my lesson and I’m like ‘You’re welcome to go get some work done or I can just leave this Zoom open for 15 minutes and you all can just chat,’” Welch said. “It’s so fun just to listen to them and they’re kids. It’s kind of like sitting in the corner of the room. I’m just there as a guide on the side, but I don’t really say much and I just let them interact and get the socialization that they need.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

As districts across the United States consider how to get student learning back on track and fortify parent interest in public schools, they’re asking the same question as Steve Joel: What should we keep after the pandemic?

The superintendent in Lincoln, Nebraska, says a district survey this past fall found that 10% of parents liked remote learning – pandemic or not. Nationally, say they are likely to choose virtual instruction indefinitely for their children, according to a February NPR/Ipsos poll.

While the end of the pandemic is likely still months off, the White House has called for most K-8 schools to reopen by May, with in-person instruction at least one day a week, prolonging the possibility of distance learning.

Though virtual challenges remain – like teacher burnout and learning loss – some districts are pinpointing remote practices worth keeping. Sifting out solutions from the struggle may help solve chronic problems of quality and equity, say education experts.

“After a moment of disruption – of major disruption – the conditions are ripe for accelerating innovation,” says Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. “We are in that moment now in education.”

Hints of a remote learning legacy are emerging. The digital pivot made some districts solve preexisting tech gaps. Educators explored new social-emotional supports with heightened attention to mental health. And parents have transformed into stronger collaborators in their children’s learning.

Leveraging such changes long term could be a matter of public school survival. Dr. Joel says his district, where a majority of K-12 learners are in person, is experiencing its first school-year enrollment decline in two decades.

“We really don’t want to do remote learning as a stand-alone [option],” says Dr. Joel, who has concerns about the instruction quality of remote learning. “But we don’t have any choice,” he adds, noting that because some parents like remote learning, they might seek alternatives to the district.

To navigate tough choices ahead, he joins district leaders nationwide analyzing what has worked.

Unexpected gains in equity

One school district in New York state is making inroads into inequities through a new notion of discipline. Remote learning has changed the approach to out-of-school suspension at Shenendehowa Central School District, where more than a fourth of students identify as nonwhite.

Grades K-5 in the district are in person, but middle and high schools are mostly hybrid. With the ability to log into lessons online, students at the secondary level won’t have to miss instruction even if they’re suspended, says Superintendent L. Oliver Robinson. It’s one way pandemic adjustments can address long-term.

During the 2015-16 school year, Black students in the district faced out-of-school suspension at 3.4 times the rate of white students, according to an of federal data by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The disparity was slightly steeper on average (3.9 times) for districts across the New York Capital Region.

Before, out-of-school suspension risked academic setback for students, says Dr. Robinson, since it was sometimes logistically difficult to arrange tutors. Now with virtual options, suspended students can continue learning alongside their class. Though discipline issues declined during the pandemic, suspension remains a deterrent because too many infractions threaten student graduation.

“[Racial] disproportionality in things like suspension is real,” Dr. Robinson says. “Until that is completely addressed, the impact of the disproportionality can be significantly minimized or mitigated.”

While students ultimately may go back to in-person learning, remote learning will remain a possibility for suspended students “whenever feasible,” he says.

The pandemic also made it clearer that students can connect to coursework offered beyond their buildings. To soften the blow of class cancellations, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) collaborated with dual enrollment partners to offer high schoolers online college-credit classes last summer. Flexible Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding meant the college could offer the program tuition-free.

was a way to “give back” to students potentially impacted by learning loss and prepare them for college in the fall, says NOVA’s dual enrollment director Amy Nearman. Nearly 3,000 students enrolled, mostly graduating seniors.

The college benefited, too. JumpStart provided a pipeline to NOVA as more than a third of students enrolled in the fall (while community college enrollment fell by around 10% at the start of the school year compared with 2019, NOVA enrollment increased by 2%). The program also bolstered access to learning opportunities at times limited by availability and affordability. With JumpStart, says Ms. Nearman, “all of our students could have the same access to programming and not have to worry about, well, my parents can’t afford it.”

Federal funds help narrow the digital divide

Millions of students still face access issues. But between the start of the pandemic and December 2020, up to 12% of K-12 public school students gained internet connectivity who lacked it previously, and a similar share of students got access to digital devices, estimates Titilayo Tinubu Ali, senior director of research and policy at the Southern Education Foundation.

“We’re really excited” about districts taking this seriously, says Ms. Ali, co-author of a on the tech gap. “The benefits of digital equity go far beyond education. … They have an implication for how students and their parents’ quality of life will be.”

The researchers found that most of these solutions are short term, however, and will require more funding.

In Utah, the Murray City School District had been slowly developing a broadband network for students for two years when funding from the CARES Act helped the district speed up the rollout. In January, the district activated stronger radio towers that have allowed around 90 students in primarily low-income areas to log on. The district hopes to expand access to all 6,000 students by mid-April.

Now, though five of Jeannette Bowen’s children are back at Murray schools in person, the whole crew can log in simultaneously to the district network to do homework without disrupting their household internet. And the district network is useful when a child needs to stay home from school.

“It’s a reassurance as a parent to know they can get on and they can learn just like their peers in person,” says Ms. Bowen.

“This will be part of our Murray culture now,” says Superintendent Jennifer Covington.

There’s nothing new about trying to equip students with tech devices, but the pandemic spur to prioritize, fund, and accelerate that process will help students for years to come – especially as districts maintain online offerings. One in 5 school systems report that they have already adopted a fully virtual school option, or are considering adopting this in the future, according to the .

Educators in the suburban Chicago North Shore School District 112 retooled after determining that many of the available tech devices weren’t good enough to handle constant use during distance learning, says Superintendent Michael Lubelfeld.

“This was a real awakening,” he says. “We were trying hard, but there were some things that just didn’t work.”

The district put $1.6 million toward new iPads for every student in K-5 and all staff pre-K-8. A standardized inventory shared by all learners “equalizes the playing field,” says Dr. Lubelfeld.

Heightened focus on communication

How schools communicate with parents and how they check on the well-being of students have improved.

Tweaks to services for students, for example, resulted from a more empathetic understanding of individual student needs, says Dr. Robinson in New York.

“The question became: How much do we really know our students?” he says.

Based on input from students and parents, educators in his district relaxed rigid deadlines and grades. And teachers were forced to develop more methodical lesson plans that allow both virtual and in-person students to keep up. In some cases, the slowed instruction enhanced student understanding, says Dr. Robinson.

Remote options give students better access to school services like tutoring – something that, by nature, was limited and complex in the past because parents had to schedule pickups and drop-offs, he says. Now, he adds, students have more control than ever over their “academic destiny.”

Offering virtual tutoring followed the district’s realization, he says, about “how much young people were hostages, if you will, to the availability of adults in their lives.”

This expanded sense of possibilities, says Dr. Robinson, could have benefited students even before the pandemic, and is likely to outlast it.

The pandemic has increased mental health awareness, says Dr. Lubelfeld in Illinois. His district began one-on-one check-ins between students and mental health professionals last summer over Zoom, as well as home visits as needed. He expects the practice to continue beyond the pandemic.

“Everybody needs a check-in. And if someone hasn’t been heard of in a day or two, we need to have a triage,” says Dr. Lubelfeld, whose district will transition from hybrid to full in-person learning next month.

That kind of change in mental health awareness is also happening educator by educator. In St. Louis, a seventh-grade language arts teacher adapted her own classroom check-ins.

Before the pandemic, Adia Turner asked her Long International Middle School students to place sticky notes with their name on a “mental health wall” within categories that spelled out different feelings. Sometimes the exercise prompted her to follow up with individual concerns.

With the shift to digital learning, she collects that data through private weekly Microsoft Forms – using memes to illustrate moods – and has expanded her questions to include what they’re grateful for. One student expressed thanks for the “clothes on my back and food in my house.”

Ms. Turner has kept up this “necessary part of our day” even though two of her three classes are back in school.

“The ones who do participate, you can tell they gain a lot from it just by how intentional and thoughtful their answers are,” she says.

Stronger parent-school partnerships

Virtual communication has offered an efficient replacement for in-school conferences, which were often derailed by parent work schedules and child care.

An online Parent Academy – a digital extension of an already-existing initiative – was launched in Georgia’s Clayton County Public Schools last spring. Supported by federal funds, it coaches parents on topics like constructive study routines, how to monitor student progress, and new vocabulary specific to the digital classroom. The frequent workshops also offer translation services for families whose first language isn’t English.

Parent involvement is “critical,” says Assistant Superintendent Ebony Lee. And the district, currently fully virtual, plans to continue the academy because of positive feedback from parents like Kimberly Brown-Mack, the mother of an 11th grade student.

The online option is “a lot better for most of us parents who are working,” says Ms. Brown-Mack, a student support specialist in another district. “It is vitally important that parents have access to being able to continue to do virtual workshops.”

New York City’s Success Academy, a public charter of 20,000 students studying virtually, has turned to Zoom for all parent meetings.

“We can much more easily gather parents, explain things, get their feedback when they’re unhappy or upset about something,” says CEO Eva Moskowitz, adding it has bolstered parent partnership.

Because all Success Academy students have school-issued laptops or tablets, that means all parents are equipped to attend remote meetings, which the charter operator plans to continue indefinitely.

“I wouldn’t want to go back to a world where we didn’t prioritize parental convenience,” says Dr. Moskowitz.

Sustaining lessons learned

Some learners , but sustaining the progress of all students has demanded flexibility from educators.

“I think we’ve learned how to more individualize and differentiate instruction,” says Dr. Joel in Nebraska. “I think we’ve always been good at that, but I think we became a lot better at it.”

That flexibility is emblematic of a spirit that Ms. Covington, in Utah, says must be embraced: “If we don’t come out of this pandemic learning new ways to do things, it will be our loss.”

Sarah Matusek is a staff writer at The Christian Science Monitor