Teachers, parents, principals tell homeschooling stories - The Washington Post

Teachers, parents, principals tell homeschooling stories - The Washington Post

Teachers, parents and principals tell their stories about remote learning
The emotional toll

The Network for Public Education, a nonprofit group that advocates for public schools, recently conducted a survey of parents and teachers to see how they were experiencing the sudden shift to remote learning because of the covid-19 crisis — and the results paint an interesting portrait of the homeschooling experiment now underway from coast to coast.

In this post, by Carol Burris, teachers and parents and principals tell their stories about how they are coping, and what they most worry about in this troubling period of schooling.

Burris is a former New York high school principal who serves as executive director of the Network for Public Education. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Burris has been writing for this blog for years about modern school restructuring and school choice.

By Carol Burris

When I asked Bronx high school Principal Jeff Palladino to describe his day recently, he replied: “That is hard to do. I don’t know when it begins and when it ends.”

He starts his day, he said, by checking into Google Classroom to see if students turned in their work. “Many of our students live in crowded apartments with family members that are ill, so the only time it’s quiet enough for them to do their work is at night,” he said.

Jeff Palladino is the principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, located in the most impoverished congressional district in the United States. Sixty percent of Fannie Lou Hamer students are Latino, and 39 percent are black. Their parents are either workers declared essential or suffering from the worry of being laid off.

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The Bronx community that the high school serves has been devastated by covid-19. “Since this began, our students are losing family members," he said. "We lose two or three each week. We have lost an alumna. One of our students passed away, although we are not certain if the cause was covid-19. It is so hard because you cannot physically be there for them.” CONTINUE READING: Teachers, parents, principals tell homeschooling stories - The Washington Post

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