So whats the criteria to reopen the school

[ansky]

Originally Posted by cw30000

I personal think this school year is done.

And unfortunately, NJ school is not ready or willing to do online learning.

Out of all my kids teachers, only one teacher did I online learning. It is my son’s music teacher. All other teachers just assign homework over Google classroom.

What do you mean by "online learning"? Do you mean a teacher doing live instruction by video conference? You're never going to see widespread use of that because there will always be some kids that don't have access to the required equipment (internet access and/or computer). My kids use Google classroom and they have only been assigned enough work to keep them busy for about an hour per day.

[jaymoney]

It's difficult with parents also working from home to do synchronized learning via video, and frankly, having 20 little boxes on the teachers screen is a difficult ask. Right now the teachers were asked to basically come up with two weeks of work, most of which has been review, as we haven't been getting into new ideas.

But I would suspect they've been using these two weeks to figure out a better way to get lesson plans out there and get resources like Chromebooks and internet into those who need it. I am assuming recorded lessons and homework to be assigned for some asynchronous learning to fit into the parents schedules as well. It's not going to be the standard six hours but a compressed variant of that to get everything in they can this year as best they can this year for the foreseeable future. This is not ideal but it's not ideal for anyone right now and we're all muddling through as best we can.

[swilliamsny]

Wow. I feel so lucky with our school district. We ARE doing online learning. When the teachers aren't using Zoom, they've posted videos of themselves going over the lessons and every one of them is available for video chat during their 'block' if a student has questions. Only once or twice since last week has it just been an assignment over Google classroom. The kids have to take video of themselves doing assigned phys. ed. exercises with a 30 second time lapse and send it in for gym.

I think one family worked out shared wifi with a neighbor (probably with help from the district supervisor or someone in town, but not sure). I have no formal data on how many of our kids don't have internet access, but if there are others, something has been done to solve the issue. Would be interesting to find out.

If it looks like summer programs will close, I think we'll start to see TONS of push-back from the people. At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that if you try to lock people in for too long, they're going to start getting squirrely. Short of an approved vaccine or other effective treatment, government is going to have to find the line between protecting and risking riots.