It was a hard realization for me that the schools I have been involved with, and the district myself and others in my family have worked and volunteered for, were far more interested with having butts in the seats so that the money kept flowing in than they actually were with the health (or even education) of the kids, and certainly the teachers and staff....and I was pretty cynical before COVID.
@BE @pixplz that was literally our experience. Over the last 3 years, every decison our local district made was CLEARLY made toward putting butts in seats. They even wrote newsletters during the worst parts of the pandemic with things like "at MUSD, academics is number 1" rather than "safety is number 1", and they made good on that. Many teachers quit, many got very sick, many kids got very sick, people died.
They cared SO little about actual pandemic controls that they spent any additional money they received in 2020/21 for new watering fountains / hand washing stations and some Carrier brand in-wall HVAC units. (the trump admin shilled for Carrier, gave them a bunch of pandemic money and free publicity, then they laid of 10,000 workers)
The school did actual distance learning for maybe 3-4 weeks in 2020 when they were forced to by the state, where teachers sat in empty classrooms and did Teams-based school sessions with the regular curriculum and all the kids from their class. That worked well, so of course they immediately ended it and said "it's safe to go back! Just do voluntary symptom checking, and if your kid has a fever, don't send them until it'd gone 24hr".
Then they forced any patents still distancing into an Independent Study system connected to a program called 'Calvert', which is loosely affiliated to Calvery and is ideologically and academically a very poor program designed for traditional... families, and we lost all our teachers again.
Additionally, in order to make the Calvert program look good, they forced 100% completion and 100% correct answers on all assignments so that the program looked academically superior to public schools, and they made us liable to PROGRESSIVE TRUANCY notices (official mailed truancy noticed from the police dept) if work was not 100% complete.
Our youngest, 1st grade at the time, was struggling because of not having enough in person time and an interrupted Kindergarten year, so she didn't complete a few assignments and we started getting truancy letters!! Had to hire a lawyer, etc, and eventually found a new remote program. (K12).
Everything the local district did, including all photo ops with children in school, from parties, sports, etc, showed almost no masking and everyone just hanging out like nothing has changed. Turns out they had a financial incentive from the state of CA to get kids' butts in seats, but the money they had already received was supposed to have been for safety equipment, making it safer to get kids in seats, but nope. They wanted that extra money for more sports complexes and more computers.
This is basically a systemic failure. America has failed families at a fundamental level here.
That all mirrors our experience so much, just with the added viewpoint of being married to someone who taught in the local classrooms for over 15 years and left after the same "get back to the classroom" push after 3 weeks.
Out of curiosity, how do you like K12? It was on our shortlist for our kids, and we ended up going a different route, but the one we chose is locked-out of the area we're moving to next year. K12 is a possibility there, though.
