Summer school staffing problems lead to virtual learning for special needs students in Montgomery Co.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. - Staffing problems in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) now mean some students with special needs will have to move to virtual learning for a summer school program. 

The school system said they're short about 20 teachers for the Extended School Year program. 

About 4,400 students are in the program and most will have an in-person teacher, however, 172 students will have to learn online —  leaving some parents concerned.  

"You know, honestly, I couldn’t sleep last night. It made me so nervous, and it brought back so many memories of the pandemic," said MCPS parent Christina Hartman...

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/summer-school-staffing-problems-lead-to-virtual-learning-for-special-needs-students-in-montgomery-co?taid=62be97f13e1ad60001a99704&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=trueanthem&utm_source=twitter

.@MCPS Letter: Extended School Year (ESY) FAILURE. No teachers for students with special education needs. What are over 400 ADMINISTRATORS doing this summer?? Put 'em in classrooms!

What are MCPS' over 400 educational specialist administrators and managers doing this summer? It's time to call them back into the classroom. 

Parents and guardians with children needing special education classes this summer have suddenly received the letter shown below.  Families were given approximately 10 days notice that their child would not be in school this summer and that THE FAMILIES had to quickly find someone to sit with their child each school day for virtual, at home instruction.  

Who is in charge of this failure?  Gwendolyn Mason, brought back from the Superintendent Jerry Weast years in MCPS.  Superintendent Monifa McKnight has been bringing back a lot of administrators from the years of Superintendent Jerry Weast.  Monifa McKnight is a Jerry Weast reboot.  

The failure to plan for students needing special education services over the summer is, therefore, no surprise but a return to the MCPS attitude that students with special education services don't deserve services at all. Superintendent Jerry Weast took a family with a student with special education needs all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to make his case. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

June 29, 2022

Dear Parents/Guardians:

On Friday, June XX, 2022, the Office of Special Education (OSE) invited you to a meeting to discuss Extended School Year (ESY) services for your child beginning, July 5, 2022. The purpose of the meeting was to share some very urgent and important information regarding the impact of the special education teacher shortage on delivering in-person ESY services in Summer 2022.

Due to the significant teacher shortage, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) OSE has been unable to hire special education teachers to serve a select group of ESY eligible students in-person. Also, MCPS offered incentive pay to special education teachers in an effort to encourage and attract teachers to work in the ESY program this summer. Unfortunately, not enough teachers indicated an interest in the opportunity.

As a result, MCPS will provide virtual ESY services for your child. To support your child during virtual instruction, MCPS will pay a person that you identify $19 per hour. This person may be a parent/guardian, relative or childcare provider. The person will be paid for working 4 hours daily, with the exception of July 19, 2022, when schools are closed. In order to pay your selected person, please complete the ESY survey by July 5, 2022.

Your child will be attending the morning ESY session that will be held from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. You will be sent a link that will enable you to access virtual ESY services at the time referenced in this letter. If there are any concerns about your child’s session or the ESY Provider Survey, please contact Anna_E_Szilagyi-Weichbrod@mcpsmd.org.

You are invited to pick up your child’s Chromebook from their school of enrollment during the 2021–2022 school year from 9:00 a.m. through 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 30, 2022, or Friday, July 1, 2022. Chromebooks are expected to be returned to the school from which it was picked up from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Monday, August 1, 2022.

Please contact me at Gwendoyn_J_Mason@mcpsmd.org if you have any questions.

Sincerely,


Gwendolyn J. Mason, Ed.D.
Acting Associate Superintendent

Leaders discuss possibility of year-round schooling in Maryland

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/leaders-discuss-year-round-schooling-in-maryland/32095597

MCPS should abandon extended schedules

How would you like six extra weeks of school?

As fearsome as that may seem to the average high school student, expanded schedules have become a reality this school year for hundreds of MCPS students. MCPS officials implemented an experimental schedule in two elementary schools.

In 2018, MCPS designated two Title 1 schools, Arcola Elementary School and Roscoe Nix Elementary school — which have a high population of low-income students — as “innovative schools.” This designation brings a variety of new programs, including free breakfast for students and the integration of Project Lead the Way engineering programs into the curriculum. Most radically, this new schedule added 30 extra days to the school year. Both schools finish in mid-June like the rest of MCPS, but unlike other MCPS schools, they begin in the beginning of July.

These measures are part of a nation-wide effort to fight the so-called “summer learning loss,” a phenomenon where students forget information over a long summer vacation, leading to lower achievement levels during the school year. Some think that long summer vacations are especially harmful for low-income students, who have less access to educational activities, camps and books throughout the summer. 

There’s only one problem with this well-intentioned and seemingly sound program: it doesn’t work.

One notable Ohio State University study found that students at year-round schools don’t learn more than students at traditional schools. In fact, many students in countries that have less instructional time, like India and Finland, actually perform better on standardized tests than students in the U.S. Furthermore, some of the original studies on summer learning loss relied on inaccurate results and could not be replicated.

D.C. Public Schools extended their school year by four weeks for 13 schools in 2017, but they discontinued the program in 2019 due to “concerns from educators about student and staff burnout,” said Ashlynn Profit, DCPS Deputy Press Secretary...

https://theblackandwhite.net/65540/opinion/mcps-should-abandon-extended-schedules/?fbclid=IwAR0ml8jSLTLfty70M-mKtIkjEhHAX_d0o8GkaZNqGDbtKWww-BOSlskbsLw

Is Summer Learning Loss Real?

Every summer, the news is filled with stories about summer learning loss. The warnings sound dire: two months of math learning lost for most students every summer, and two to three months of reading learning lost for low-income students, according to the National Summer Learning Association. By the ninth grade, “summer learning loss during elementary school accounts for two-thirds of the achievement gap in reading between low-income children and their middle-income peers,” the association says. There can be no doubt about it: as American children lounge poolside, watch too much television, and play too many video games, most are forgetting what they learned in school last year, and low-income students are falling even further behind.

It sounds plausible. But how reliable are these claims? How many of these findings can be replicated? Is summer learning loss really a thing?

I used to be a big believer in summer learning loss. After all, children’s home lives can be pretty different. Some children live in big houses with one sibling and two college-educated parents. Others children live in small run-down apartments with several siblings competing for time with a single parent who may not have finished high school. We know that these differences make a mark in early childhood; we know that poor children are already behind academically by the time they start kindergarten. Why wouldn’t family disadvantages have the same negative effects when children return home for summer vacation?

But my belief has been shaken. I’m no longer sure that the average child loses months of skills each year, and I doubt that summer learning loss contributes much to the achievement gap in ninth grade.

Several things happened to challenge my faith. One is that my colleagues and I tried to replicate some of the classic results in the summer learning literature—and failed. Sure, the patterns were present on one test—the one used in the best-known study of summer learning. But that study is 30 years old, and we couldn’t replicate its results using modern exams. And it turned out that the test from that study had problems, which had been debated long ago and then, over time, forgotten...

...But if the new questions are in the middle, where most rich children can answer them and most poor children cannot, then the percentage gap between rich and poor children will grow bigger than 20 percentage points. Depending on what questions you add, you can get any gap that you want...

https://www.educationnext.org/is-summer-learning-loss-real-how-i-lost-faith-education-research-results/

Teachers Rally for More Pay During Extended School Year Program

Teachers from Arcola and Roscoe R. Nix elementary schools packed Thursday night’s county school board meeting and voiced frustration over what they believe are unfair contracts for working during a longer school year program.

“MCPS should sprint back to the negotiating table with (the teachers’ union) … and make the teachers feel heard, appreciated and respected,” said Michelle Perez, mother of a kindergarten student at Arcola. “Instead of feeling stressed, teachers should feel celebrated and supported as they embark on new exciting, innovating school year.”..

https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/schools/teachers-rally-for-more-pay-during-extended-school-year-program/

MCPS Teachers Getting Stipend for Extended School Year Work

About 125 teachers at two Silver Spring schools that will be offering nearly year-round classes will each receive an additional $2,000 for their work.

Along with pay added to their salaries, teachers at Arcola and Roscoe R. Nix elementary schools will receive the stipend for the additional 30 days work in a pilot program aimed at preventing “summer learning loss” in students at high-poverty schools, according to school board documents.

Montgomery teachers’ pay is determined based on their level of education and experience. The average teacher salary in county schools is about $65,000.

Principals at the two schools will receive a $9,000 stipend and assistant principals will receive $4,000.

The amounts were determined during negotiations between the school system, the teachers union, Montgomery County Education Association and the Service Employees International Union Local 500.

School leaders recently renewed their commitment to the pilot program at the two schools, despite a similar program failing in Washington, D.C...

https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/schools/teachers-to-get-stipend-for-extended-school-year-work/

Silver Chips: Only a fool would extend school

Extending school would cause public blowback, monetary problems and learning ineffectiveness

by Arthi Thyagarajan, Staff Writer and Eric Feigen, Staff Writer

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) plan to close the ever-growing achievement gap between low and high income students with a new strategy: an extended school year. Two Silver Spring elementary schools have already extended the end of the 2018-2019 school year by five weeks. Arcola Elementary and Roscoe Nix Elementary were targeted because they have a particularly high number of students from economically disadvantaged families. The new initiative hopes to help these students boost their academic performance, but it also fails to recognize the issues of cost, effectiveness and negative attitudes that would result. 

http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/story/13770

Summer Learning

Open Letter to the Johns Hopkins Center for Summer Learning:

Dear Directors Fairchild and Libit:

I am writing you concerning the recent award to Montgomery County Public Schools of the "Champion of Summer Learning Award." While everyone in Montgomery County agrees that the ELO-SAIL is a valuable program, parents of students with disabilities were extremely discouraged to see MCPS awarded as a "champion of summer learning" when MCPS has engaged in a campaign over the last several years to eliminate, reduce, and cut back extended school year services for students with disabilities.

As you know, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides for extended school year services during the summer for students with disabilities who meet certain criteria. MCPS had to be sued many years ago in federal court in order to force them to comply with this portion of the law. MCPS was monitored for several years on their compliance and provision of services.

Since the monitoring has ceased, however, MCPS has systematically reduced the amount of extended school year services available during the summer, found more children "ineligible" than in previous years, and reduced the quantity of services that they do provide to eligible children.

Children with disabilities, including severe disabilities like autism, come from families of all socio-economic backgrounds and ethnicities. Surely the Center for Summer Learning sees the corresponding need for high-quality summer education programs provided to students with disabilities, who, just like the students in the ESO-SAIL program, could benefit from programs targeted to maintain their skills and boost those skills in preparation for the upcoming school year. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities who need this summer programming are not getting it.

Would you be willing to issue a statement from your organization (the National Center for Summer Learning) supporting providing summer services to students with disabilities and encouraging MCPS to follow both the Letter and the Spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act with regard to Extended School Year Services? I anxiously await your response.

Sincerely,

Lyda Astrove
Rockville, MD