Teachers around the U.S. are confronting classrooms where as many as half of students are absent because they have been exposed to COVID-19 or their families kept them at home out of concern about the surging coronavirus.
. That's because they have been exposed to COVID-19 or their families kept them at home out of concern about the surging coronavirus. F
“This is really taking a toll on the learning. If you have three kids in your class one day and you’re supposed to have 12, you have to reteach everything two weeks later when those kids come back,” said Tabatha Rosproy, a teacher in Olathe, Kansas, and the 2020 national Teacher of the Year. In New York, about 76% of the city's roughly 1 million public school students were in class Wednesday, with some schools reporting well over half of their students out.
“Part of me was like, why are we sitting here doing nothing the whole day. Why can’t we just stay home” and learn remotely, he said. “The other part of me knows that the mayor wants to keep the school open for certain reasons, and I can understand that. But the more and more we went through it, I just kept thinking at this point it’s a waste of time for everyone because we’re not learning anything.
The absences leave teachers wrestling with whether to forge ahead with lessons and how to help students left behind. The challenge then falls to teachers"to almost individually prescribe each student with an academic learning plan,” he said.