Education News Roundup

An NPR story with up-to-date info on monkeypox. I see that it appears to be very much a sexually transmitted disease. I saw a tweet from a high school teacher who said her students tend to do a lot of body-to-body hugs and she's wondering if her school will send out any advisories in terms of monkeypox. 

What seems to be a bigger problem, that may coincide with schools reopening, is COVID waves throughout the school year. With the large number of teachers who have left teaching  it's going to be interesting(and I can verify this is nationwide and a huge issue for districts, plus subs being pressed into service as full-time teachers). I wonder if SPS will have any updates for parents and schools about their approach. 

Coming from issues around COVID and mask mandates, a story from The NY Times on parents who have become single-issue voters. 

Ms. Longnecker and her fellow objectors are part of a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues. 

Nearly half of Americans oppose masking and a similar share is against vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, polls show. But what is obscured in those numbers is the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views. While they once described themselves as Republicans or Democrats, they now identify as independents who plan to vote based solely on vaccine policies.
Their transformation injects an unpredictable element into November’s midterm elections.

 From The Hechinger Report

Dallas Parents Flocking to Schools That Pull Students From Both Rich and Poor Parts of Town. This is a hugely fascinating story of an experiment to create diversity in schools AND have the schools be very popular, (bold mine).

The school, Solar Prep for Girls, opened in 2016 as a “Transformation School”, one of several efforts underway to reverse decades of white flight from the school system. The school districtis currently 71 percent Hispanic, 21 percent Black and 5 percent white, and 86 percent of its students are eligible for federally subsidized lunches. 

 

In contrast, the city of Dallas is more evenly divided racially and ethnically: It’s 41 percent Hispanic, about 29 percent white and 24 percent Black. 

 

Solar Prep and other “50/50” schools in Dallas have no attendance boundaries. Students are admitted by lottery, with some seats open to families who live outside of the school district. Half of the students admitted must live in one of Dallas’ socioeconomically disadvantaged census blocks, while the other half are drawn from more affluent areas. The district provides transportation to students within its boundaries. 

 

The district currently has 13 such schools. As a group, these 50/50 schools draw thousands of applicants and have proven so popular that the district plans to open 11 more over the next three years, including two that will open when the school year resumes Aug. 15.

But more persuasive than anything is the sheer popularity of the schools. Last year, the district received 25,000 applications for 5,800 seats in the 50/50 schools. A third of those applications were from families whose children weren’t already attending a DISD school. While some of those applications were for kindergarteners, many were for children who had been attending a private or charter school.