A mixed system of in-person and virtual learning options for the 2021-22 Cobb County School District’s academic year includes an “exclusive” virtual program and a five-days-a-week instructional calendar for both.
The Cobb Board of Education heard more details Thursday from district officials, including Superintendent Chris Ragsdale, who said “virtual is here to stay” and not just in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has prompted online instruction for the last year.
More details will be provided Monday at the district’s Cobb Learning Everywhere vertical. Also starting Monday, registration for grades 6-12 will get underway and lasts through April 1.
Ragsdale and Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Lawson presented grade-level plans that include an “exclusive” online learning environment for grades 6-12.
For students from pre-kindergarten through 5th grade, there will be local school-based online learning. Ragsdale said many of those options will be “school by school specific,” with no singular district-wide program.
The plans also call for some online elementary learners from several schools in a geographic cluster to be taught by a singular teacher. That model is designed for semester and year-long enrollment.
Registration for PreK-5 starts April 19 and continues through May 1.
High school learners will have a block schedule and supplemental classes. Those high school and middle school students in the virtual option will be enrolled through the Cobb Online Learning Academy.
Most online learners will be taught by full-time teachers certified in online teaching. For online high school students who wish to be enrolled through their home high school, they can learn independently through the district’s Cobb Virtual Academy.
The district is in the process of filling more than 750 teaching positions for the next school year, and is conducting a virtual job fair later this month.
“This is good stuff, this is cutting edge stuff,” Cobb school board chairman Randy Scamihorn said at Thursday’s learning options presentation.
“We have a fantastic staff that can make this happen.”
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As long as parents have to stay home with their kids, anyway, they might as well be homeschooling them. Ragsdale says that virtual is here to stay, so there’s nothing to gain by making kids learn in their living rooms.
He doesn’t understand that a virtual option and a digital option are not the same thing, apparently. Almost ten years ago, when my daughter was having a lot of trouble with face-to-face learning, we drove her over to Oakwood (now Cobb Digital Academy … or, at least, that was its name in 2011), by Dobbins, every day school was in session. I don’t know that it would have worked if she had to do it virtually on her own laptop.
If schools were face-to-face with parents who wanted their kids in masks having them doing the digital option at their “home school”, which could be left up if the c-19 debacle ever ends, then that would be one thing. This is not that, and especially with the “virtual is here to stay” edict, CCSD parents have a problem that needs to be addressed before the next school year starts. Kids will be affected for life if this continues, and so will adults.
Did you even read what the district put out? Kids will be F2F 5 days a week. There will be a virtual option for those that choose it, but everyone else is back to normal.