COVID-19 Policy Update #249
COVID-19 Policy Update
THURSDAY 5/6
TOP THREE
Can You Be Fired for Refusing a COVID-19 Vaccine? A federal court in the Central District of California will hear arguments in a lawsuit from teachers who want the court to stop local governments from ordering teachers to get vaccinated.
Seven employees of the Los Angeles School District have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the District’s right to mandate that its employees receive the COVID-19 vaccination
More on this and other cases at MarketWatch,
Children and the Vaccines: Via RollCall: Vaccinating kids for COVID-19 poses additional challenges for officials. White House has yet to release distribution plan that incorporates school clinics.
"Distributing vaccines to kids will likely present many of the same challenges that plagued the United States’ efforts to vaccinate adults, experts say, including issues with equity, access and skepticism. Kids’ dependence on adults adds another layer of complexity that could make vaccinating them even more difficult."
"But the Biden administration has not yet released a plan to get kids vaccinated, which public health experts call a problem."
"Sara Bode, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on School Health, said the AAP plans to soon release recommendations about setting up COVID-19 vaccination clinics in schools to reach more kids."
"Every state requires specific vaccines for students, but the COVID-19 vaccine is more tricky because there is no precedent for requiring an authorized, although not fully approved, vaccine in schools, Hannan noted."
"Vaccine-hesitant parents may also be a barrier. Parents who get vaccinated themselves may be reticent to give their children the shot or wait for more information. A recent Parents Together survey found 70 percent of parents plan to get vaccinated, but only 58 percent plan to vaccinate their children."
Hop, Skip, Leapfrog: New resource from The Learning Accelerator that explores ways schools and systems pursued student-centered innovation during COVID-19. Great list of examples and resources based on:
“Hops” represent small tweaks or improvements, usually through implementation of single tools or specific instructional strategies.
"Skips” required educators to adopt new systems of practice, changing student experience at a greater scale (either in terms of sustained, consistent change within an area or across a greater number of students and classrooms).
“Leaps” were systemic, longer-term changes to the “grammar” of school, where traditional organizational structures for learning such as use of time, space, grade-levels, and progress assessment were fundamentally altered.
FEDERAL
CDC: Vaccinated adolescents at camps can remove masks if outside
"Critics had called CDC guidance, issued last month, stating that everyone at summer camps should be masked unless eating, drinking or swimming "unfairly draconian."
ED: Announces Richard Cordray as Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid
COVID-19 RESEARCH
Schools Unlikely to Require COVID Vaccine: Via Axios
STATE
Colorado:
Children between 0 to 19 account for 26.4% of all COVID cases
Gov. Polis memes up vaccine signups (Was Allie K. driving?)
Georgia: Gwinnett County school district is preparing for summer school to more than triple in size this year.
"The school district is hiring education majors from Georgia Gwinnett College to work as tutors and classroom helpers."
"Students will take quizzes throughout summer school and their results will be given to their teachers next school year."
"To continue closing gaps throughout next school year and beyond, the district wide learning loss team recommended continuing small class sizes, an accelerated curriculum and a large-scale tutoring program with community partners."
Michigan: Mason Public Schools will offer a fully online learning option for 2021-22 school year.
North Carolina: How Carteret County plans to spend their $20 million of federal ESSER funds.
South Carolina: South Carolina Dept. of Education said state education officials are seeing anywhere from two to four months of learning lag in early grades in English Language Arts and Math.
Virginia: Prince William County Public Schools will offer students at all grade levels the option to return to school in-person five days a week or remain virtual
INTERNATIONAL
Canada: "Ontario teachers’ unions are sounding the alarm after the provincial government announced its holding consultations on whether or not to make online learning options a permanent choice for families once the pandemic ends."
“They're planning to make virtual learning permanent while undermining Ontario’s publicly funded education system. It's a plan that they’re busy working on behind closed doors during a global pandemic.”
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
Future of Work: As COVID-19 wanes, employers are accelerating the use of robots. Where does that leave workers?
"Orders for robots in North America, mostly the U.S., surged 20% in the first quarter compared with a year earlier and were up 16% from the same three-month period in 2019, well before the pandemic, according to the Assn. for Advancing Automation"
Promising Job Numbers are Hiding a Slow Recovery for Many Metro Areas: Via Brookings.
Map below visualizes the percent change in employment from February 2020 to March 2021 across the 191 largest metro areas.
Tourism hubs such as New York, Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., Honolulu, and Atlantic City, N.J. are among the metro areas where jobs remained more than 10% below pre-pandemic levels in March.
Many metro areas across the South and in Utah are close to recovery, with jobs less than 2% below pre-pandemic levels.
Five large and midsized metro areas exceeded pre-pandemic levels of total employment in March: Boise City, Idaho; Lakeland, Fla.; Ogden, Utah; Provo-Orem, Utah; and Waco, Texas.
RESOURCES
Don’t Ban Virtual School. Improve It: Via Michael Horn.
Microsoft: Announced more than 35 new education features for Microsoft Teams including Reading Progress that allows students to record themselves reading passages for teachers to review along with some fluency data.
The Next Normal: OpEd by W. Nathan Durant: "Rethinking summer learning through an equitable lens."
April Polling Report: From EdChoice/MorningConsult. Report / Blog Post / Crosstabs. And their ongoing list of polls.
People feel less disrupted by the pandemic now than they have since lockdowns and closures began happening back in March 2020.
Interest in learning pods is at its highest level since October.
Six out of ten school parents believe the outbreak will be controlled enough to send students to school in-person by September.
Most school parents believe that schools should provide multiple learning options for students in the fall.
Another Amazing Drone Video: This time from inside the Mall of America by the photographer who gave us the amazing bowling alley video last month.