IAsked | Informal Survey of Parents on School Board Meetings

Recently, the Philadelphia school board voted 7-1 to begin the upcoming school year with 100% remote teaching and learning amidst this current coronavirus pandemic. As we know, the initial vote on a plan to begin the year with the option of either hybrid instruction or completely remote instruction was scrapped because of the overwhelming pushback from some advocates, parents, teachers, students, and school administrators who preferred all remote instruction because of the risks involved in gathering physically. 

Underwhelming were any parents' voices who would've preferred some form of hybrid teaching and learning, with precautions, for any number of reasons including their full-time work schedule.

Either during or after a thoughtful twitter discussion with one of Philly's journo peeps, I decided to ask parents how many even know about school board meeting dates and location. I posed the same question on 3 social platforms. Two platform accounts had the same result. 100% of the respondents didn't know about meeting dates/locations.

On another personal platform I asked the same question.

22% answered "Yes"

78% responded with some variation of "No"

I have personally recommitted myself to keeping parents informed of upcoming school board meetings. My encouragement to the district is do a little more to reach more parents and families. "More" can be almost anything including posts/REposts on every social platform they have and encouraging schools do to the same on their socials.

Additionally, they may want to (re)consider the efficacy of:

Email

Billboards throughout the city with dates of the meetings for the year with the website and phone number

Opt-in text reminders

etc.

I don't always attend, but I do know about them and make a choice to engage or not depending on what's going on in my life at the time. If parents don't know, they're stopped at a door they didn't even know existed.

IAsked: "How should teachers do this online teaching thing?"

Now that we can see a little clearer regarding fall classes, here is some advice from a couple of my students who chose to respond to my open-ended question about teaching online. 

Another student left a voicemail acknowledging and suggesting the following:

• remote learning is "the better choice"
• remote learning can be a "hassle for hands-on kids"
• be considerate of the amount of work given
• "in school we get work but not as much"
• once we converted to online school it was a "ridiculous amount of work" considering that "we have other classes"
• "don't' think that just because we're at home that 'oh they have time'"
• "students go to work, help siblings, grandparents--we're their number one healthcare provider"
• furthermore, students, "make dinner, go to work [noted again"
• [noted again] "be aware of the amount of work"
• "we don't have a bunch of free time"
• "we do a bunch of other responsibilities"