Friday, August 28, 2020

Open Letter: Prioritize Instruction AND Safety | JD2718

Open Letter: Prioritize Instruction AND Safety | JD2718

Open Letter: Prioritize Instruction AND Safety



This petition gets it right. Read it here (or read it below, but the numbering is a little weird.) And then sign here.
August 25, 2020

TO: Mayor Bill De Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza,
We are two weeks away from the beginning of the school year and the DOE has yet to provide clear actionable support for instructional planning and programming for the hybrid and remote classroom models. Instruction, the engine of the classroom, has been overlooked, and overshadowed by the daunting task of creating protocols for physically returning to school buildings. What has been promised to families and paraded before the media is not possible to enact. I am a high school teacher with 20 years of classroom experience. I want to go back to my building and teach. But we are not prepared. Opening the school year now, using the Chancellor’s plan, means going back with inadequate staffing for both models, which will result in fragmented lessons, teacher burnout and diminished learning for all students. We urge the Mayor and the Chancellor to open schools remotely for the first semester. Allow teachers the time to focus on developing quality online instruction first. Then when it is safe, and we have developed a tenable plan, we can go back to our buildings for in-person instruction. 
    1. Schools have not received the guidance or programming support needed to create a coherent plan for day-to-day instruction.
      1. Principals had to choose one of the city’s proposed instructional models before they knew the CONTINUE READING: Open Letter: Prioritize Instruction AND Safety | JD2718