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Pandemic-related school closures, which caused an alarming rate of learning loss among the country’s most vulnerable students, have prompted some administrators, including in New York City and Connecticut, to reconsider the school calendar. An earlier start date, a later end date and numerous, elongated breaks throughout the year could allow more timely remediation for children in need, and enrichment for those who are not. Such thinking has received at least tacit support from U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “Why do we go back to the same system that gives kids two months without engagement in the summer?” he asked in November. “We need to rethink that.” A a less-rigid calendar could allow for greater flexibility for COVID-related emergencies, letting districts more easily consider closing for a week or two to quell an outbreak, knowing they could make up the time later. Harris M. Cooper, Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said it’s too early to make predictions about whether more schools will switch to balanced or modified calendars. But the chaos of the last two years might make it more attractive to families that have already weathered major shifts in scheduling, he said.

 

The 74

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Education has distributed all $122bn in school COVID-19 relief funding from the American Rescue Plan to all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. "We are urging states and school districts to deploy funds now to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Omicron variant, on our school communities. We continue to encourage state and local education leaders to utilize funds for testing, personal protective equipment, and staff recruitment and retention," said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. "In areas where these funds are being deployed quickly, we are already seeing the positive impact that this infusion of federal support is having directly in schools and communities. We know what it takes to keep our schools open safely for in-person learning, and these funds will help us achieve that goal."

 

CNN

Lawmakers and education officials in a few states are seeking changes to school funding formulas to avoid financial harm to districts from pandemic-related drops in student attendance rates.  States currently calculate funding allocations in a variety of complicated ways using attendance and enrollment counts or both, and changing student funding formulas often requires legislative approval. A bill in the California legislature from state Sen. Anthony Portantino, a Democrat, would change that state’s funding formula to one favoring total enrollment that factors in how many students are enrolled in a district. Illinois lawmakers, meanwhile, last year tweaked their state’s funding formula for fiscal years 2022 through 2024 to allow districts to use average student enrollments based on pre-COVID-19 levels, if desired. And in Kentucky, a task force is recommending the state legislature consider moving from its average daily attendance funding formula to one based on average daily membership, a calculation of daily enrollment. Some education finance experts have said funding schools based on attendance was outdated even before the pandemic. The Urban Institute estimates if a 1,000-student district with a $15m budget lost 200 students between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, its budget for the 2021-22 school year would decrease by $3m, or from $15,000 per student to $12,000. However Lance Izumi, a critic of enrollment-based funding, said that it gives public schools little incentive to address the things they are doing that cause students to stop attending.

 

Ed Source

K-12 Dive

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed a $2.1 billion funding increase for the state’s public schools. She wants to spend $31.3 billion on school districts next fiscal year, largely driven by a $1.6. billion increase in Foundation Aid, which districts can use most flexibly. Notably, according to an analysis of November financial figures by the Association of School Business Officials, city schools were projected to receive $8.9 billion in Foundation Aid, which equates to about $345 million more than this year. Hochul wants an 11% increase in tuition rates for state-approved, privately run special education programs that serve thousands of children with more intensive needs, and this amounts to an annual increase of more than $240 million. In her first budget address Tuesday, the governor also called for a four-year extension of New York City’s mayoral control of schools.

 

Chalkbeat

The Kentucky House unanimously passed legislation Tuesday aimed at ensuring that mental health-related absences from school are excused for students. Under the bill, each Kentucky school district’s student attendance policy would have to include provisions for excused absences due to a student’s mental or behavioral health status. Rep. Bobby McCool, the bill's lead sponsor, said: “It’s important because it brings mental health issues to the level of conversation without fear of any type of stigma."

 

Messenger Inquirer

Under new legislation unanimously passed by the D.C. Council on Tuesday, public schools will be required to notify parents within 24 hours if any student in their child’s classroom tests positive for coronavirus. In addition to setting a deadline to notify parents of virus cases, the measure also requires the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to give a weekly report of how many students in each school participate in the city’s asymptomatic testing program. The bill’s introducer, Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), backed down from an initial proposal to require schools to establish specific numerical thresholds for operating virtually instead of in-person when plagued by a high number of coronavirus cases.

 

Washington Post

Pupils in Washington took their first state exams last fall since the pandemic began and their scores dropped. Between 2019 and 2021, the overall percentage of students who met state standards on the math portion of the exam fell by 20 percentage points. Just 30% of children enrolled in grades 4 through 11 met standards in math, while the portion of kids who met the standard in English fell by 9 percentage points. While some state education officials have cautioned against putting too much stock in the numbers, some in the education community have suggested that the scores could show where to direct resources. Washington state received $1.6 billion in the latest round of federal relief aid for schools and 20% of that money, some $334 million, must be spent on efforts to combat learning loss among students. Notably, as of November 2021, districts had spent only about 7% of that academic recovery money.

 

KNKX

Underlining how hacks on third-party platforms can leave schools especially vulnerable, an online platform used in some New York City public schools is out of service following a “security incident,” forcing teachers to rely on more traditional ways of recording grades, tracking attendance and contacting students and parents. School officials were unable to provide a figure for how many schools had been affected by the outage, though several teachers have complained that it's complicating their work. Skedula is operated by Illuminate Education, a California company that has contracts with individual schools, was hit by “an attempted security threat.” The firm also operates PupilPath, a counterpart service for students and parents that is also used by some New York City schools. It too is out of service.

 

New York Times

New research published this week in JAMA Pediatrics offers a view of how school closures are affecting students across the world. The study tracked many studies on the pandemic's impact on children in Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the U.S., and found that 18%-60% ad strong “distress,” especially symptoms of anxiety and depression, which affected more than 1 in 4 adolescents in some countries. Child protection referrals also dropped, with the decline ranging from 27% to nearly 40% across countries and studies. "The toll that school closures and social isolation has had on kid's mental health cannot be overstated," said Dr. Danielle Dooley, medical director of Community Affairs and Population Health in the Child Health Advocacy Institute at Children's National Hospital. Dooley wrote an accompanying editorial that was also published in Pediatrics but was not part of the new research. "As the latest Omicron wave has shown, these discussions are not behind us. We must continue to fully weigh how each decision can impact the lives of children," Dooley added.

 

CNN	Education Week