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:
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.
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