The Cobb Board of Education on Thursday will hear a presentation by Superintendent Chris Ragsdale about virtual learning options for the 2021-22 school year.
He’s also expected to provide an update on the district’s purchase of aqueous ozone hand sanitizing machines as a COVID-19 safety measure.
Those items are included on the agenda for the school board work session that starts at 1 p.m. Thursday. An executive session is to follow, and voting meeting starts at 7 p.m.
You can view the agendas by clicking here.
Last month Ragsdale said there would be virtual learning options as there are for the current school year, and “that is emphatic and definite.”
What had to be worked out, among other things, is how teachers would teach. This year they’ve been required to teach students in-person and remote simultaneously.
Ragsdale said at the time that “we are learning from mistakes” and “seeing the impacts” a dual learning system has had on students and teachers.
“We recognize the extreme level of difficulty for all team members this school year,” Ragsdale said then.
For the spring semester, around 66 percent of the Cobb County School District’s 107,000 students chose in-person learning.
An Indiana company called 30e is the manufacturer of the hand sanitizing machines that are being installed in elementary schools, after a proof-of-concept at three schools in the fall semester.
Those were part of a $12 million purchase of COVID-19 safety products that included special UV lights at elementary schools.
But earlier this month the district announced it was cancelling that contract, with Kennesaw-based ProTek Life, after a malfunction at a school.
The safety spending was opposed to two school board members and a parents’ watchdog group, Watching the Funds Cobb, called it into question.
Board members have brought agenda items about a recovery plan for academic gaps caused by COVID-related changes and updates from the Georgia legislature, which will soon finalize its state budget.
The Cobb school district gets nearly half of its $1.2 billion annual budget from the state.
Among the action items on the school board’s agenda Thursday is a request for $2.389 million for HVAC modifications at Addison Elementary School in East Cobb.
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- Cobb schools cancel contract for disinfecting UV lights
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Why? Simply: why? Lots of “why”s.
Why does the population least affected by covid-19 the most affected socially? There’s a lot more to school than books – and kids are missing out on stuff that they’ll never be able to learn as well or as early as they would if they were in “real” school, able to do “real school things”. Like field trips. Like making friendships and keeping them up. Like a lot of memories being tossed away which have spawned memes like “You think you missed out because you couldn’t go to senior prom? Talk to these kids who didn’t go, either”, the point being to stop whining. How many kids were drafted at 18? How many kids have missed out on their senior, and now junior & senior, years of high school?
Why is Ragsdale ignoring the plights into which he’s plunging the parents who have to stay home from work or risk DFACS coming to get them? What about those people? Why shouldn’t they just pull their kids out of the school system totally? Parents have to be there, anyway. Homeschooling is not the isolation that it used to be.
Why is Ragsdale confusing “digital learning” with “virtual learning”? They are not the same thing. Yes, some kids learn better digitally than traditionally – my daughter’s one of them – but she had other kids with whom to interact while she learned digitally. Fortunately, I wasn’t working at the time, as we live in East Cobb and the only digital learning facility was on the other side of Dobbins. I sat over there while she was in school. With virtual learning, you’re eating, sleeping, learning, and petting your cat in the same place. That’s not conducive to good learning, especially when you have to be concerned with what’s showing behind you on the camera, lest it be “against school rules” in your own house.
Why, when cases are plunging, is this even being discussed? It never was during flu season, which hits kids harder. There is absolutely no reason to perpetuate the fear that’s going on; the mental health of both kids and adults is being severely negatively affected.
Why, Superintendent Ragsdale, are you not putting your responsibility to the children of Cobb County ahead of the agenda that government wants you to push? Stop wasting money on new-fangled stuff that has not been proven to work in the way they’re telling you it will … stop wasting money on things you do not need … start spending money on education instead of propaganda. Let the kids learn what they’re supposed to be learning in the way they are supposed to be learning it. If nothing else, you’re going to have to play catch-up teaching Common Core math; adults who are now the teachers have not learned it this way and are much more comfortable with the way they learned it. Good luck fixing that unintended consequence – the “old fashioned way” makes more sense to kids, too.