State says re-opening schools in the fall will mean limiting classrooms to ten students

It's been ineffective for many of the students who've been suddenly thrown into it with teachers and parents who also have suddenly been thrown in.

But kids who are either homeschooled and take a number of their classes via Outschool and similar, or online college courses, or who attend the public and private online schools do as well as their peers and often better. It makes a difference when you have students who prefer home-based learning, teachers who are accustomed to teaching this way, and parents who are accustomed to supporting it.

Next year might look like having a lot of students whose families have generally been on the fence about alternative schooling doing home/online learning, rather than the current state where everyone has been thrown into it. Jobs are going to be more flexible, as places have learned that not everyone needs to be in the building all the time and remote is possible. A ton of parents who have always felt their student would be better suited to homeschooling or having their kids in online charter school are looking into it since they can now work from home.

I specifically said "shorter days" for each shift.

This isn't unusual in a crisis situation, nor is it a new idea. When Medford HS partially burned down while the new HS was not yet completed, they went to split shifts and shortened days to manage when 60% of the classrooms had been destroyed.

One of the complaints my young men had about high school was that too much time was spent on classroom instruction and changing classes, too little on actually figuring things out.

Have Two Parent Households and Upper Income Demographic and College Educated profiles.

Find me the Scripps winner living in an lower tier apartment community in a down market urban or down market suburban environment that has a parent working at 7-11 or at Dollar Tree and get back to me.

Just because you have a few home schooled kid who does great things, there are many, many, many more that crave the structure that a school building environment gives. My wife had one kid travelling 90 miles a day round trip in order to keep the school structure he had.

The lockdown has also blocked a lot of initial reporting for child abuse, since teachers are the front line workers (and the first responders) on a lot of social situations that kids are facing.

Don't give me that homeschool is better crap. Adam Lanza was home schooled. That did not turn out too well last time I checked.

Yes, I, too, have been frustrated by some of the homeschooling comparisons people have made. I am hearing professionals who are not versed in home education thinking that their current state of being home 24/7 with no in-person learning is just like homeschooling, and using their pandemic experience as a reason to say homeschooling should be outlawed, since they're seeing the detrimental effects of being home 24/7. During non-pandemic times, most homeschoolers do take classes at various places, are on sports teams, in music lessons, and are seeing other people in-person frequently. In addition to my professional experience with education, I have had kids in my home in just about every type of schooling available, including both homeschooling (registered through the city as a homeschooler, parent is responsible for making sure student gets educated) and online public charter (the school is responsible for the student's education and the parent is just responsible for getting them there like in any public school). The types of schooling have all been much more similar to one another than pandemic schooling, where we don't ever see anyone else in person. My homeschooled kids were following routines, doing their hygiene every morning, had a busy weekly schedule that involved traveling all over to classes. My family's life during the pandemic is...not like this (I say, about to head to a clinical interview in my pajamas).

And yes, the whole thing about who is responsible for the student's education matters. In true homeschooling, the parent is. The parent either is the student's teacher, or hires/barters with others to be the teachers of various subjects. The pandemic schooling is more similar to the online public charters in this way; the parent is not devising curriculum, hiring teachers, signing the student up for classes, etc. In most situations though, the parent is doing much more "teaching" than they would be in the online schools, because the public school teachers have been suddenly thrown into this and are not online education professionals the way the teachers are the public and private online schools are. But they still are not "homeschooling" unless they've pulled their child out and registered as a homeschooler.

The point I am making in relation to smaller class sizes though is that I do think it will work itself out. I am seeing a lot of families whose students have been in traditional public school where it wasn't a great fit, and their student is now doing a lot more work via online school. Of course there are the downsides to being home 24/7, but these will become lesser once things open up and we again have access to more in the way of sports, field trips, etc. and their schooling will look more like regular homeschooling or online schooling. Many of these families are now looking into TECCA/MAVA for next year, or are considering homeschooling. They previously knew their students benefitted from a calmer, quieter learning environment without all the transitions and chaos, but families were afraid to do it, because they know that crap happens just like we're seeing in this thread, where someone decides students doing online school or homeschool are being held captive by a cult member. Poorer families especially don't want to take the risk. With a lot more families opting not to send their kids back this fall, it's going to be more visible and normalized, and people will hopefully realize that deciding to do online school for a year isn't anything strange or harmful in and of itself.

Racism is one of the biggest root causes of ill health in the United States, and has been for decades.

Poverty is another big one.

Many of the people out protesting are in the COVID crosshairs either way because they work those low wage "essential" jobs and states won't let them claim unemployment if they don't want to be highly exposed. If you give someone nothing to lose ... this is what you get.

Why don't you take a trip downtown and kneel at the feet of the Nat'l Guard at TJ Maxx and not worry about this other stuff? It's clearly too much for you to process.