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Comment by InitialLastName | Hacker News Reader

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InitialLastName

My SO is an elementary school teacher in a post-industrial urban school. Her students (mostly poor, and crucially almost all with parents who were working in-person through the lockdown) were effectively remote-only from March 2020 until earlier this month, and it's had some substantial visible effects on them. Among other things:

- Missing that in-person school time meant losing a lot of "leaving home" practice for a large chunk of kids. Current second graders were in-person for 6 months of kindergarten, and remote from there. This means there are a lot of mechanical and social things they haven't had to do (sit quietly next to each other, tie their shoes, ask to go to the bathroom).

- The "summer slide" has been much more severe than usual. A large chunk of the students didn't get much education out of being remote for first grade, so a much-larger-than-usual chunk of the cohort are substantially behind grade level for basic skills, especially reading.

- Related to above, there has been a huge backlog of students who need to be evaluated for various special education and disability needs who just haven't been able to be accommodated and who, due to the process difficulties for the last year, probably won't be able to be evaluated based on their data from last year (leaving them severely under-supported for another year while the data is collected).

As someone who's battled with that last point, it's not only the 'intake' side of things (it can be weeks or months before you can get an evaluation, then weeks afterwards before any results can be tabulated)—but even if you do get any kind of evaluation, good luck finding counselors.

Only about 10% of the counselors we called would even call back, and of that 10%, almost all of them said they would not accept any new patients, indefinitely. A couple had openings within a year or so, and one or two had any availability in a shorter time frame.

Not sure what all the reasons are, but I'm guessing it's the perfect storm of more kids needing more services in this unprecedented time, more counselors on the older side retiring early, and funding for these programs being a continual battle.

Yes, for sure in that situation the staff shortage and backlog of students have made a system that is difficult to navigate in normal times essentially intractable.

A local response from some child psychiatrists is that they're swamped by existing patients, as the pandemic changes have been very harsh on kids already having issues with e.g. self-harm or being shut-in so relapsing patients are returning and not leaving much space for new ones.

> Not sure what all the reasons are

It is undesirable work for undesirable pay with undesirable volatility, to many people.

Call me jaded but these are first world problems. Anyone who has access to the internet reads on average more words per day than those who do not. You cannot use the internet and not be literate. No one is going to die from not having a particular type of education. Cramming 500-2k students into box sized class rooms 2-3 feet apart was an idiotic assumption that nothing like this would ever happen (again).

Call me naive but society needs to evolve and entirely redesign itself around this new problem because it is not going away and it will almost certainly not be the last time something like this happens.

Other people use the internet differently. As long as you know what the TikTok icon looks like, you're good for hours.

Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year.

Kids come first. Until this summer the chance of them getting sick or transmitting was super low, with delta it’s a little higher but with sane precautions most of the risk can be alleviated. In a few years time you’re gonna see real disparities between even religious private school kids (which don’t necessarily have better education standards) and public based solely on who was in person.

If you’re trying to win one over your political opponents get out of this, it’s not game.

> Yup that’s why every private school that had honest staff and wasn’t bound by the National Teachers Union who were playing political games was in person most of last year.

Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation & enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city had a well-attended online option last year, if they weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid" (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers—not their unions, just teachers, directly—drove most of the decisions.

I'm sorry but that's not been my experience at all, in my state the union refused to work in person even after they were vaccinated.

That's fine—my experience was very similar outcomes without a union involved. You asserted that unions were a major part of the difference in behavior between public and private schools, but our public schools behaved much the same way without union involvement. They may not be as major a factor in the outcomes as you expect, or, to put it another way, they may be an instrument of a will that was (apparently) present whether or not the union was.

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