oit, MI) for leveraging student transportation technology to creatively serve their school families and communities.
CARES Act Funds Student Accountability, COVID-19 Cleaning on Georgia School Buses: Describes how the Marietta (GA) City Schools used Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds to install ionization units and student RIFD card readers, to increase bus cleaning and student accountability, respectively. Director of Transportation Kimberly Ellis said the 9,000-student district immediately responded to the pandemic last year by purchasing technology that ensured both student and staff safety.
Returning to School: Mitigation and Mental Health Strategies: Presents archived recording, slides and transcript of January 13, 2021 national webinar by the Centers for Disease Control on how to optimize mitigation strategies and mental health to facilitate a safe return to schools in this new year. The presentation included 1) user-friendly tools and information for schools to inform the selection and implementation of COVID-19 mitigation strategies; and 2) information about how to support and promote mental health for students and school staff, both in-person and virtually.
Selected Return to School Resources: Offers an extensive list of information resources from national organizations and agencies to support planning and preparation for return to in-person learning for K-12 students in 2021-22. To support efficient navigation, the Department of Education’s Comprehensive Center National Network provides short descriptions of each hyperlinked document.
Monthly School Survey Dashboard (Institute of Education Sciences): Provides monthly data from 46 states describing the degree to which schools offer remote-only, hybrid or full-time in-person instruction; the proportion of students enrolled in each instructional modality; the attendance rate for each modality, disaggregated by various student groups; and teacher vaccination rates. Recent data published by ED’s Institute of Education Sciences found that, in April 2021, 59% of K-8 schools were offering in-person instruction full time, up from 46% since January 2021.
Special Report: How We Go Back to School: Presents a broad spectrum of options for how to open and operate schools during the COVID-19 national emergency, through interviews with dozens of public health experts, consultants, and frontline educators. In this multi-part series Education Week explores specific strategies that some districts will adopt, and explain the pros, the cons, and the costs.
Restructuring California Schools to Address Barriers to Learning and Teaching in the COVID-19 Context and Beyond: Highlights ways to systematically transform how schools address the overlapping learning, behavioral, and emotional problems that can interfere with learning and teaching. This brief, produced for Policy Analysis for California Education [PACE] by co-directors of UCLA’s Center for Mental Health in Schools, provides a blueprint to enable the state, local education agencies (LEAs) and schools to play a greater role in providing student and learning supports, in ways that enhance equity of opportunity. (The content is applicable in any state, not only in California.)
The Return: How Should Education Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond?: Offers and supports four major recommendations for school leaders to prepare for students’ return to school in the aftermath of the national COVID-19 emergency. This report is a collaboration between Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit, bipartisan network of state and district education chiefs; and the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy.
Recognizing the Role of Afterschool and Summer Programs and Systems in Reopening and Rebuilding: Describes the role that afterschool and summer programs and systems can play in conjoint strategies with school leaders to support youth, families and communities to prepare for and accomplish school reopening. This succinct brief by the American Institutes for Research explains how afterschool and summer progra