1/ “Grades have tanked!” (via email in my inbox)

"I am the Dir. of Technology for a school district open since Aug (split groups 2 days/wk with full remote option). We combined our split groups to push to 4 days/week (1/3 of our students are full remote). A few observations..."

2/ "We have ~2000 students ~250 staff. There have been 2 known student and 2 known staff cases. From what we know, the student cases were not connected to school."

3/ "Masks - It is weird. My favorite part about working in education was seeing the smiles on the little ones faces. That's just gone now."

4/ "Distancing - Everything feels so robotic. The good thing is that with moving to our combined groups 4 days a week, we flat out publicly said that distancing will just not be possible in certain situations - so far, no flak for that."

5/ "Remote Learning - Grades have tanked. Fifteen years ago we strove to make sure (or at least tried) that our grades actually reflected student learning. With the data we have, the first almost 2 months have not gone well at all (6x increase in failure rates)."

6/ "Remote Learning #2 - I have deployed hundreds of hotspots (we're a rural district). We have students with no cell service or other available internet. Some of those chose remote learning in fear of the virus yet they had no internet access, even with the devices we provided."

7/ "You can imagine the further lack of education these students are receiving.

We lost ~150 students to homeschooling and moving. The number of for sale signs is incredible. We are very dependent on state funding. Those 150 students: $1 million hole in the budget."

8/ "We're making it work, but I don't know how long we can sustain this. "

9/ Update: that same source just sent me a chart of failing grades one-month in to school 2019 to 2020.

I have no words.