Name: What the coronavirus means for America’s education system
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T17:47:32.000Z
Duration: 4 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and nearly 36 million American Children are out of school right now in at least 35 states.

Past simple

And in Boston, today was the last day of in person instruction for the 54,000 public school students there.

Future simple

Tomorrow, all schools will be closed until at least April 27th.

Joining me now is Dr Brenda Caselli is the superintendent of Boston Public Schools.

Obviously, this was a difficult but necessary decision and one that districts across the country made last week.

So we have been assessing the evolving situation, Uh, for weeks now and watching that and collaboration with the city and with the mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh.

And as we were able to be ableto see, the situation evolved.

Wednesday was a very different day in the country with the president's address and the restrictions on travel as well as of the MBA closing down for their season and then more information coming across the country.

And then we had our first confirmed case at one of our schools, and then we decided to take this swift action to keep our students, our state, our staff safe.

And of course, you have students who did not have access to Internet or technology at home.

How will they be able to learn remotely, and what kind of assistance will you be able to offer their families?

So we just had such a overwhelming response from our community?

Are philanthropic partners as well as our city partners is so liver for very able to purchase 20,000 chromebooks for our students and then deploy many, many other thousands of their existing chromebooks already in our schools, to our students to send home for virtual learning again?

It's a supplemental learning that we're providing to try to bridge that gap and lost that we know that will happen for parents of of nurses and doctors.

Clearly, we need their heroic efforts in hospitals.

What will you do to support them so that they're able to stay on the job and have their kids have a place to go?

Yes, So we've been working with our community based providers, as well as some of our teacher volunteers and other visitors that they want a picture in.

We're working with our city partners right now to coordinate efforts in order to try to figure out new solutions again.

This is unprecedented waters and time for all of us.

And we're trying to figure out just how to do that with the other restrictions that we have on not groups of more than 25 and social distancing and really just learning all together about how we meet those really important needs.

What kind of tips would you be able to offer?

Parents who may be trying to work from home and now have the added responsibility of taking an active role in their child's education?

All the wilder kids air confined to these close quarters and in many cases, I'm sure bouncing off the walls.

Yeah, I know as a parent, uh, how it feels to really have kids you know, on summer break or after school and trying to help them with their learning, especially, but the year older kids, and you haven't done that work for quite a while.

There's a lot of really great technology and software online for parents.

Our parents in Boston and anyone else really can go online and look at www Boston public schools got ord menus.

Your school districts have information as well im their website signal.

My colleagues are working super hard and our staffs are working hard to get these Resource is up.

They're paper Resource is also preparing to do not technology have technology.

We will have re sources for families who are not yet speaking English and need support.

I know that we are in conversations with Univision to try to get those resource is out as well and then the students with disabilities.

What we're doing is working with families on a 1 to 1 basis to try to figure out what makes sense for each and each of our students with disabilities during this time, um, to figure out what we can actually do.

And so, you know, these actors are coming to us, and it's really great to see people innovating certainly need that innovation, especially for parents like me.

And so trying to teach our kids at a bunch of us were were talking about us here.

But thank you s so much for your time, Dr Brenda Kiss Alias.

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