- Cincinnati City Schools is going to a hybrid in-person/remote model after all, starting next week. The plan is a bit confusing to me, but it does seem that remote options—such as they are—are still available for folks not comfortable sending their kids into school buildings at the moment. (WCPO-TV, Cincinnati, 10/5/20)
- Some of those folks are indeed quoted in that Cincy piece—very pointedly so. The takeaway for me—who for the first time does not have children in the K–12 system—is that parenting successfully is inordinately complicated by whipsaw week-to-week changes in plans/teachers/schedules/promises/etc. Personally, I don’t know what I would have done if such disruption as we are seeing now had occurred when my children were at various ages or grades. But I think about it all the time. You know what I don’t think about? How “nasty” a particular brand of hand sanitizer smells. If it can protect me from the rona, it can smell like titan arum in full bloom (look it up) for all I care. I also don’t care if a school’s water fountain is padlocked—that’s to protect kids from legionella, not the rona—or if the school library has caution tape on it. All that seems really smart. Nor do I care if retired teachers create pandemic pods for their neighbors’ kids. Go crazy, y’all. Those pointless points are emphasized and repeated in this Hechinger piece (“We've got the latest and deepest takes.” Vomit.) about just how dang hard the pandemic is for (some) kids and (mostly) parents. You know who I mean. (Hechinger Report, 10/6/20)
- This is good. Remember the chief academic officer in Columbus City Schools who, it was discovered by alert media types, was working a similar job for Philly schools simultaneously for months? According to the Dispatch, her version of it is that she told everyone she got a new job, offered to help with transitioning to a new CAO, told everyone when she moved to Pennsylvania, then waited to be told when the Columbus job was over. That information never came…until the aforementioned alert media types got on the trail. Not only did reporter Alissa Widman Neese (an alert media type herself) obtain an email trail that seems to support that story point-for-point, she also tells us that the district’s new interim CAO had apparently been on the job for nearly a month before she was formally hired by the elected school board this week. Thus, the continued Byzantine hiring processes employed at Columbus City Schools seem to me to add credence to the otherwise-ridiculous-sounding tale of Janie Two-Jobs. See? Told you it was good. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/7/20)
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