With Repetition and Consistency, This Special Education Teacher Is Keeping Her Students on Track
June 11, 2020
A Conversation With Lakewood Attorney Michael Inzelbuch
June 15, 2020Leaked Email from Lakewood: School’s Open!
Governor Phil Murphy has yet to announce plans for school reopenings. Regarding summer services for students with disabilities, known as “Extended School Year” or ESY, Murphy’s Office said on May 4th, “[t]he Administration will create a steering committee consisting of a diverse group of stakeholders in the education community to explore summer learning opportunities for all students, including school-sponsored summer programming and Extended School Year for students with disabilities.”
This steering committee has yet to weigh in. On May 19 Murphy said, according to the NJ Herald, “that the Departments of Education and Health were ‘war-gaming through what back-to-school looks like.’ He said the state would in the coming weeks provide guidance for schools assuming students go back to class.” (The rest of the Herald article describes district superintendents’ frustrations with the DOE, with one saying, “in my 13 years as a superintendent I have never seen so much dumped to schools to fend for themselves with limited, shifting, convoluted or zero guidance.”)
Yet lack of guidance is not stopping Lakewood Public Schools. In an email sent this morning to staff, Superintendent Laura Winters announced that Lakewood’s ESY programming will begin in-person on July 1st. Bus transportation will be provided and staff will practice various precautions. For example, aides will take students’ temperatures, staff will wear “face shields and face masks,” students will be “encouraged” to wear face masks, students will sit six feet apart, and hand-washing will be “frequent.”
Asbury Park just defied Murphy’s lock-down orders by allowing indoor seating in restaurants and now “are on notice,” the Governor warned today. Will he put Lakewood on notice? Stay tuned.
Here’s part of the email. I’m not printing the whole thing in order to protect anonymity.
4 Comments
[…] each day. So maybe we’ll learn something by probing NJ’s superintendents’ near consensus (Lakewood’s always an outlier) that following Repollet and Murphy’s guidance is a non-starter. That […]
Why are the reopening tomorrow (7/6/2020)??? When all other indoor schools are closed, how do they justify this??? Another example of NJ political corruption
Any NJ school can be open for in person learning for the most needy special needs students in what is called an Extended Year Program. Schools have been told by DoE to follow guidelines set forth by the DoH for “day camps”, though ESY is defined in the guidelines.
In Lakewood, the public school district itself, and two Approved Private Schools for Students with Disabilities — School for Children with Hidden Intelligence (SCHI) and The Center for Education (TCFE) have opened their doors to provide the much needed educational and therapeutic services their children desperately are in need of. Simply stated, virtual remote instruction and therapies do not work at all for those children/ young adults who are medically fragile and in need of daily professional interventions.
These schools should be commended for the brave, unselfish steps they are taking and in complying with all recognized and required Covid precautions. It is a labor of dedication and determination on which these schools have embarked.
From what I hear many of the teachers have been threatened to be arrested if they didn’t continue with their teaching also many of the teachers themselves weren’t wearing their masks both cloth and plastic face coverings those that did were being made fun of. How dare these people not think of the health of teachers that truly care or of these beautiful students who are so important to our future Americans