To the editor: Sure, the Los Angeles Unified College District made the tough choice to shut campuses and maintain college students and staff secure on Aug. 21. However for former Supt. Austin Beutner to insinuate a scarcity of preparedness on our half, or that college students didn’t have enough assets, is irresponsible and out of contact with the present academic realities of L.A. Unified.
For the reason that pandemic, L.A. Unified has ensured that each pupil and worker has web entry in addition to invested within the newest digital instruments for all college students to carry coherence and a continuity of studying.
Early Monday morning, the day after Tropical Storm Hilary struck Southern California, hundreds of studying actions and assignments had been posted on-line, and lecturers pivoted rapidly to supply dynamic on-line studying to college students.
Sturdy academic programming was out there on KLCS-TV. Our pupil and household wellness hotline was additionally working. We served 47,958 meals.
Each regional superintendent within the district was in our group, serving to our colleges and households all through the day. L.A. Unified leveraged each investments and classes realized from the pandemic to organize us for any emergency.
This new faculty yr exhibits unimaginable promise — totally in-person, totally ready to speed up the success of each pupil. Assist from your complete group is important, and our college students and households deserve nothing much less.
Frances Baez, David Baca, Denise Collier, Jose Huerta and Andre Spicer, Los Angeles
The writers are, respectively, L.A. Unified’s chief tutorial officer, area north superintendent, area west superintendent, area east superintendent and area south superintendent.
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To the editor: I’m an LAUSD elementary instructor who’s stunned by how tone-deaf Beutner’s op-ed article is.
If there’s something we’ve realized from the pandemic, it’s that youngsters usually are not adults. It’s developmentally inappropriate to power youngsters to sit down on Zoom conferences all day.
Many youngsters nonetheless undergo from anxiousness and concern of college because of the pitfalls of at-home studying. We wish college students to take pleasure in studying once more, and forcing them to finish cookie-cutter pre-planned busywork, or sit on Zoom all day, is just not good instructing.
When the announcement got here out that colleges would shut on Monday, lecturers at my faculty had been instructed to submit related tutorial instructions for the day on Schoology, our on-line classroom portal. College students got here again to high school the next Tuesday with improbable progress.
I do know L.A. Unified isn’t excellent, however I hope we will unite in celebrating the great that did come out of what we realized from the pandemic.
It’s good that we didn’t ship college students residence with a district-made busywork packet. It’s good that the lecturers could possibly be trusted as professionals to assign developmentally acceptable classwork tailor-made to their very own college students. It’s good that we didn’t power college students to behave like all the things was regular within the face of an excessive local weather risk.
Allison Kelly, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Dad and mom declare to need management over their youngsters’s lives, clamoring that colleges are taking on capabilities that needs to be left to them.
But when given the chance to indicate care and concern for his or her youngsters’s welfare, they complain about colleges closing after a life-threatening storm.
John Snyder, Newbury Park
