Day 10: Students in Need
It's after 9 pm and it's another day of where is all the down time we supposedly have at home? Another fine day of workish stuff, cooking (sourdough bread and mushroom soup), and a good run when the sun came out (not as fun as yesterday's surprise ski adventure on 2" of snow hacking around in the woods and hoping to beat nightfall:).
We had faculty meeting today and being so late already, I will only reflect on the sadness of how little support it seems we can provide for the most vulnerable kids. The most noteworthy are students who are in difficult home situations and not only do they have trouble connecting via the internet, but they probably don't have a good space at home to do work and they may have parents with their own struggles and then they feel worse about themselves and personal challenges they may have been putting behind them begin to resurface and all this progress they may have made and all the stability and reinforcement they get in school all disappears and they start to regress in ways personal and academic. And the worse they feel, the less likely they are to connect by the internet or even to respond to attempts to talk on the phone or to meet in person if possible.
I know this is not unique to Compass at all, and it may be our kids don't even have as hard home situations as some other kids in the country. We don't have any brilliant solutions to this, although we are trying to reach out from all different angles. If we find anything that works, I'll share it. But for now, this seems what I anticipated in being even worse than normal in having a class divide where the more privileged will do far better in these unusual times than those less well off.
Would love to hear any successful ways to close this divide and help these most needy kids. We usually think Compass is extremely good with this between the multiplicity of supports in the school and the way we assure access of every student to every learning experience (including even having all our 11th grade class go on our international immersion experience), but in this disconnected world, all the social-emotional and academic support is pulled out from these most needy kids, which is incredibly discouraging. Not terribly uplifting.
We had faculty meeting today and being so late already, I will only reflect on the sadness of how little support it seems we can provide for the most vulnerable kids. The most noteworthy are students who are in difficult home situations and not only do they have trouble connecting via the internet, but they probably don't have a good space at home to do work and they may have parents with their own struggles and then they feel worse about themselves and personal challenges they may have been putting behind them begin to resurface and all this progress they may have made and all the stability and reinforcement they get in school all disappears and they start to regress in ways personal and academic. And the worse they feel, the less likely they are to connect by the internet or even to respond to attempts to talk on the phone or to meet in person if possible.
I know this is not unique to Compass at all, and it may be our kids don't even have as hard home situations as some other kids in the country. We don't have any brilliant solutions to this, although we are trying to reach out from all different angles. If we find anything that works, I'll share it. But for now, this seems what I anticipated in being even worse than normal in having a class divide where the more privileged will do far better in these unusual times than those less well off.
Would love to hear any successful ways to close this divide and help these most needy kids. We usually think Compass is extremely good with this between the multiplicity of supports in the school and the way we assure access of every student to every learning experience (including even having all our 11th grade class go on our international immersion experience), but in this disconnected world, all the social-emotional and academic support is pulled out from these most needy kids, which is incredibly discouraging. Not terribly uplifting.
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