By LINDA CHION KENNEY
Concerns over how best to deliver and assess education during a pandemic are again on the agenda, this time in a Jan. 24 letter from Hillsborough County school leaders to the state’s chief education officer, asking that schools not be held accountable for their grades for the 2021-22 academic year.
The grades are for school grade rankings overall, and not for individual student grades.
The request to allow schools to opt-in to “A to F grades” is not without precedent, as a similar measure was approved for the 2020-21 school year. Both measures are tied to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which since the initial Florida lockdown in April 2020 has fueled debates over which public health protocols to enact and enforce and whose parameters of choice should reign supreme.
Fueling the current “A-to-F” opt-in request are the high rates of student and teacher absenteeism, fueled both by confirmed cases of the virus and quarantine due to exposure.
“Unfortunately, just as the onset of the virus unfolded unpredictably, the Delta and Omicron [variants have] emerged throughout this school year, disrupting learning,” reads the Jan. 24 letter signed by Addison Davis, Hillsborough’s superintendent of schools, and Nadia Combs, the county’s school board chair.
Addressed to Florida Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, the letter refers to the significant impact the current school year’s absences have had on the district’s “ability to provide equitable learning opportunities consistently.”
According to district figures, the latest COVID variant spikes have resulted in a more than 10 percent increase in student absences of at least 10 days compared to the 2020-21 school year. Moreover, “the average teacher absence of 10 days or more to date has already increased by more than 10 percent compared to the entire 2020-21 school year,” and that percentage is expected “to increase significantly” by the end of the school year in June.
In a telephone interview this week, Davis emphasized the key points of the Jan. 24 letter, including its assertion that “when accounting for the increased vacancies and historically low substitute fill rate, you can see how the challenges are, in many ways, even more insurmountable than when we first entered this pandemic.”
“We need individuals to step up and be able to serve,” Davis said in his telephone interview, about the critical need for substitute teachers. “We’re using district personnel, coaches, content specialists and paying teachers additional money to cover classes and split-up classes. There’s a national shortage of substitute teachers, and we’re trying to recruit as many people as we can.”
Statewide, the need is for 4,100 substitute teachers, Davis said, amounting to some 84,000 students not being served.
In a related issue, the Jan. 24 letter calls upon state education officials to reevaluate its timeline for implementing new “concordant scores” for this year’s graduating seniors, given that “as these students matriculated to the 11th grade during the 2020-21 school year, many did not participate in a state assessment administration due to the unsafe conditions posed by the virus.” According to Davis, about 1,000 students are affected by this issue.
The letter commends Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed budget for fiscal year 2022-23, which it says “includes an additional $50 million, for a total of $600 million to continue increasing the minimum teacher salary for full-time public school classroom teachers.” Nevertheless, the letter urges Corcoran to champion additional funding for veteran teachers as well. Davis in his interview said two-thirds of his district’s educators are veteran teachers.
Meanwhile, the counts continue for the number of teachers and students impacted by the coronavirus. From March 2020 through Aug. 1, 2021, the district’s COVID-19 dashboard reported 8,771 cases. That number as of Monday, Feb. 7, amounted to 26,807 cases, with students accounting for 82.5 percent of the cases overall.