Current News Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nyc-schools-reopening-plan.html (July 8, 2020)
The article attached details how after about four months of remote online learning, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City announced that public schools would have partial reopening in September, saying that classroom attendance would be limited to only 1-3 days a week in an effort to continue to curb the coronavirus outbreak. This way is most likely the only way to accommodate students in school buildings while maintaining social distancing, hindering the educational quality of over 1.1 million NYC children. With my current DukeEngage project, I am working on an Equitable Access to Remote Learning tool that ensures remote learning equity amongst Massachusetts school districts, including directed workshops for educational leads in order to effectively plan and curate a curriculum for the upcoming school year.
This article most definitely challenges how I think about the work I am currently doing with LearnLaunch, due to the fact that there is still an underlying assumption that schools will have an in-person component. However, this only reemphasizes the idea that school districts across the United States must be prepared for in-person, online, or hybrid curriculums, which is the mission of LearnLaunch to ensure. It makes our organization as a whole not only reevaluate that the work we are doing must be top notch and effective, as remote learning is the new reality of this upcoming school year, but we also must use the examples of other school districts in different states to be aware of the possible consequences of these decisions.
In the article, the NYC school district perspective is represented, which is one of the largest schooling systems in the United States, and therefore leads by example. However, the Massachusetts school district perspective is obviously missing, for not only is that the focus of LearnLaunch, but the Massachusetts schooling system is ranked consistently as one of the most elite, and so their perspective on how they plan to reopen for the school year would most definitely be helpful. Not only this, however a comparison of how other school districts, such as Georgia, are reopening with fully in-person courses, should also be taken into account. By incorporating all perspectives into the article, the reader could have a better understanding of the different ways educational access is impacted across the United States.