A daily round-up of education news and views for the Sunshine State

Gov. Ron DeSantis devoted a sizable portion of his State of the State speech Tuesday to education policy and education-related rhetoric. He spoke about raising teacher salaries, investing more in vocational programs and giving parents more power over their children's education. DeSantis proposed replacing the FSA test with periodic progress monitoring, along with additional increases in teacher pay and the approval of $1,000 bonuses for educators for a second year in a row. In terms of higher education, DeSantis said he would not support any tuition increases at Florida’s colleges and universities or a reduction in Bright Futures scholarships. Among the other proposals DeSantis made were banning critical race theory in schools.

 

NBC Miami

NBC Miami

The White House is promising to provide 10 million free coronavirus tests each month for schools, aiming to help keep classes in person at a time when testing across the country is uneven. The administration said it would distribute 5 million free rapid antigen tests to K-12 schools each month, to be used in two types of testing. The first is screening tests, in which a portion of students are tested on a regular basis in hopes of finding those who did not realize they were infected. The tests may also be used to create test-to-stay programs, for which students exposed to someone with the coronavirus are allowed to stay in school rather than quarantine at home as long as they periodically test negative. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed this approach last month. The first shipments of the tests are expected later this month. The White House said it also was making lab capacity available to process an additional 5 million PCR tests, which screen for the presence of genetic material from the virus and are more accurate than antigen tests, though they take longer to produce results. Throughout the pandemic, testing — subsidized with billions of dollars in federal funding — has been viewed as a key way to keep children in classrooms and ease the toll of remote learning on emotional health and academic progress. But public health experts say few districts are testing enough, or strategically enough — particularly in the wake of Omicron. “Asking if school testing works is like asking if a dishwasher works — yes, it works, but only if you load the dishes,” says Meagan Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

 

NBC Miami

New York Times

Washington Post

Lee County's 95 traditional schools saw more than 1,000 teacher absences from Jan. 5-7, including 386 on Friday alone, more than double the absences reported from a similar three-day period during the first week back from winter break a year ago. Collier Schools also reported seeing an uptick, with 171 COVID-19 cases confirmed since Jan. 2, according to its virus information page. However, school district officials did not provide exact numbers for how many teachers are calling in sick or needing time off. Lee district spokesman Rob Spicker said getting enough substitutes has been a challenge since the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. “We have plenty who could work but choose not to,” he lamented. There were nearly 5,000 vacancies in Florida for teachers and more than 3,700 openings for support staff at the start of the school year, according to the Florida Education Association, a 67% increase from August 2020.

 

Naplesnews

Many of the nation’s more than 6m K-12 workers came to rely early in the pandemic on the assurance that they could still get paid if they had to stay home while sick or exposed to COVID-19. However, many districts nationwide, including Madison schools in Wisconsin, Wichita schools in Kansas, and Oakland schools in California, are not currently offering paid leave separate from what their employees already receive in a typical year, meaning that they face having their pay docked if they have to quarantine because they’ve come down with COVID and don’t have any sick time left. Denise Specht, the president of Education Minnesota, that state’s teachers’ union, said some local unions have been able to negotiate the continuation of COVID leave during the collective bargaining process, but others have not. “In general, teachers are going to do the right thing and stay home because it’s our nightmare to give COVID to our kids,” says Megan Mullaly, a 6th grade teacher in San Jose, California, “it feels like the people who do the right thing are getting punished for it.”

 

Education Week

The Florida Senate Education Committee advanced a measure Tuesday that would take steps to implement Gov. Ron DeSantis' wishes to move away from the FSA. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz, a Hialeah Republican, would make adjustments to the 2022-23 school year by putting in place a computer-based “progress monitoring” tool and a new standardized test for English language arts and math. Progress monitoring reports would come out in the fall, winter and spring, Diaz said, and the results would be given to teachers within one week and parents within two weeks, in an effort to keep them better informed about students' progress throughout the school year. The bill would not make changes to end-of-course exams in subjects such as algebra, biology and U.S history, and also does not appear to actually reduce testing for students. When the governor first announced the proposal last year, he said the idea was to reduce testing in schools by 75%. As currently written, the legislation would add more testing. Wayne Bertsch, a government relations liaison for the Pasco County School District, said the bill “didn't take anything away,” and Cathy Boehme, a lobbyist with the Florida Education Association, agreed: “It is hard to see how testing time decreases based on the language of the bill. We would like to see where that goes.”

 

The Miami Herald

U.S. Reps. Shontel M. Brown (D-OH) and Jahana Hayes (D-CT) have introduced a bill that would enable schools to provide meals to children in afterschool care "seamlessly," through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Currently, eligible schools can serve snacks to students during afterschool programming through the NSLP After-School Snack Program. However, the program only allows for a two-component snack and participation in the program is much lower than that of NSLP and the School Breakfast Program. The Afterschool Meals Act would expand the afterschool feeding component of the National School Lunch Program to include meals that meet federal nutrition standards; provide reimbursements to School Food Authorities for each free or reduced meal they serve; and grant prioritization to existing Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) afterschool meal programs. The bill has been endorsed by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, among others.

 

Press Release

K-12 Dive names five superintendents to watch in 2022, based on their track records and their outlooks on the top issues facing the education sector. Among those to keep an eye on are Sharonica Hardin-Bartley, superintendent of the School District of University City in Missouri, incoming Los Angeles USD superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who arrives from Miami-Dade in Florida, and Houston ISD leader Millard House. 

 

K-12 Dive