LETTER: No child left behind?

So the Clark County School District will be providing only online education for the foreseeable future.

Teachers will feel safer, and parents who can afford to do so will, in all likelihood, send their children to private or charter students. If they have the time, stamina and ability to do so, they may home-school them.

But what about those students who live in homes where English is a second language, or one not spoken at all? What about those students whose parents cannot afford or connect wi-fi to power the laptops with which their children will be provided? What about students whose parent/s cannot, for whatever reason, help their children with their assignments?

During my 17 years in the district, we teachers were constantly reminded that children learn differently, and that we needed to reflect those differences in our plans and classroom procedures so that, indeed, no child will be left behind. What about those students who absolutely cannot and will not succeed without that individualized instruction?

What about those students who, like the more than one-third who did so since March, fail to even log on to any online classes and have thus been truant for more than a quarter of a school year? What about those students for whom school is a refuge from homelessness or poverty or abuse or despair and is, perhaps, their only real chance to find a way out of those terrible conditions?

Haven’t we always heard and said that children are our future? It appears that, in the face of COVID-19, at-risk children will indeed be left behind. More bureaucratic hypocrisy.