Friday, February 4, 2022
This week, we invited local teacher and fellow substacker Billy Robb back to write today’s top item about teaching during the pandemic. He wrote about a similar topic for us a few months ago. Now, after getting hit with the virus himself, he’s trying to forget about the trolls and focus on the kids. Down below, after Billy’s insight, we have your regularly scheduled bill roundup and look ahead to next week, along with something happening in virtual reality.
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Schools are getting hit hard by this winter surge. I can attest to this personally now. After teaching without a hiccup for the entire first semester, I caught COVID-19 over winter break. For nearly two weeks at the start of the second semester, I was at home in isolation.
So began a chain reaction: My classes fell behind on content, because even if a school can find a substitute, learning is disrupted in the absence of the lead teacher. Additionally, each prolonged student absence creates a learning gap that needs to be addressed. This mad scramble is playing out in a public school system where teachers are already strained under the weight of counter-productive education policies.
Meanwhile, debates over COVID-19 mitigation efforts continue to rage.
Mask-mandates or mask-optional? Quarantine for exposures? And for how long? What about temperature checks?
It may feel as if we've made no progress in agreeing on how to safely run schools during a pandemic, but we've actually leaped a major hurdle. We're no longer debating open vs. closed. The overwhelming public health consensus is that, all things considered, it's better for students to be in school in person.
The Biden administration said that 96% of the nation's schools are open this January, compared to 46% last January. CDC director Rochelle Walensky reiterated a few weeks ago that schools should be the “first places to open and the last places to close.”
In Arizona, at the beginning of the pandemic, schools were closed down for months. Many schools remained in hybrid mode for an entire year. It’s only recently that we’ve reached a bipartisan consensus that schools should remain open the best they can.
As a teacher, when to open or close a school is not my call. I’m just trying to make good decisions and disseminate credible information.
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
It's easy to run for office when you're already in office … We're getting the legislative band back together … And he's attempting a Hulk Hogan impression
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich seems to grab daily headlines lately. We’re sure it’s just a coincidence for the AG who’s running for U.S. Senate.
On Monday, he threw himself into another federal fight against the Biden administration. This time, Brnovich requested the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services adopt a rule prohibiting the use of race and ethnicity as factors when issuing guidelines for therapies like monoclonal antibodies.
The antibodies issue sprung up recently after the Food and Drug Administration said race and ethnicity could be considered when assessing risk factors for severe COVID-19 and allocating treatment options. Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, have put out similar press releases calling the rules “racist and un-American.”
But that wasn’t the only federal issue the state attorney general took to task in the past week. He also appeared on Fox News, his regular stomping ground, to talk about the border. He called U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly “Cartel Kelly” and said everyone is “less safe” because of the Biden administration and Kelly.
Thursday, January 27, 2022
Arizona Republicans this week lined up behind a measure that would discipline teachers and open them up to lawsuits if they don’t tell parents everything a student tells them — even if the student confides that he or she is gay or transgender.
The legislation, House Bill 2161, would make it illegal for a government employee to withhold information that is “relevant to the physical, emotional or mental health of the parent’s child,” and specifically prevents teachers from withholding information about a student’s “purported gender identity” or a request to transition to a gender other than the “student’s biological sex.”
The bill would allow parents to sue school districts if teachers don’t comply.
Rep. Steve Kaiser, R-Phoenix, the bill’s sponsor, argued in the House Education Committee on Jan. 25 that the aim of the legislation is to reign in surveys sent out by schools that have made headlines in a number of states and locally. The bill also aims to allow parents additional access to certain medical records.
“I still feel this bill is not ready for prime time,” Rep. Daniel Hernandez, D-Tucson, said, adding that he felt there was some merit to schools surveying students. “This bill could’ve been done without this inclusion or without the trivialization of transgender children.”
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Banning books is cool again ... Everyone wants to be a fake elector ... And because of term limits, nobody remembers the law of unintended consequences.
In Arizona’s latest attempt to find any adult bodies to put in front of classrooms of 30-plus screaming children, the State Board of Education this week rolled back regulations on substitute teachers.
The new rules allow emergency subs (humans holding a GED or higher) to teach for two years and remove the ban on districts essentially using certified subs as permanent teachers.
School administrators pleaded for the stopgap solutions to pandemic strains, noting schools are still seeing massive COVID-related teacher absences and increasing full-on classroom vacancies as teachers catch the quitting bug.
Dysart Unified Superintendent Quinn Kellis, for example, told the board that his district had 200 teacher vacancies and 60 substitutes on Monday. (For all you kids with math teachers out sick right now, that’s 140 vacant classrooms in one district.)
“We have vacancies just on an interim basis, but also we have many who are just leaving their jobs for the rest of the year. And it’s not that they wouldn't have continued under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances,” Kellis said.
But after a decade of weakening regulations on who is fit to lead a classroom, a few more tweaks to substitute teacher rules clearly isn’t going to solve Arizona’s teacher shortage crisis.
Monday, January 17, 2022
Gov. Doug Ducey’s final budget proposal calls for $14.25 billion in spending for the 2023 fiscal year that includes nearly $1.4 billion in new spending, the bulk of which will be one-time spending on K-12 education, water infrastructure, beefing up the state’s rainy day fund and expanding Interstate 10.
About $364 million of that new spending will be ongoing, with nearly a third going toward new tax cuts.
Following up on last year’s historic tax cut, which aims to eventually reduce individual income tax rates to a flat 2.5%, the governor is budgeting money for two tax relief packages. One is a 5% earned income tax credit for low-income working families with children. The Ducey administration said the program is intended to provide tax relief to Arizonans while recognizing the value of work.
The governor’s office said 577,000 Arizonans would be eligible, and that the average recipient would get $128 per year. Families with three or more children would be eligible for as much as $325, according to estimates from the governor’s office, depending on their income level. The earned income tax relief program is expected to cost about $74 million next year.
The second proposal is an undefined corporate tax cut. Ducey penciled in $58 million in his budget, but has no explicit proposal. The administration said there are several lawmakers who have their own proposals, so Ducey will negotiate with the legislature to determine what kind of tax cut they pass. Ducey’s office noted that Arizona has the 10th highest industrial property tax rate in the U.S., indicating that the tax cut could be in that area.
Ducey’s plan assumes that last year’s billion-dollar income tax cut, which is on hold after Democrats collected enough signatures to refer it to the November ballot for a citizen referendum, will ultimately go into effect. Republican lawmakers are discussing plans to repeal the tax cuts and replace them with a similar law in order to negate the referendum and keep the proposal off the ballot.
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Ducey is still the governor, and still not in charge of the border … Start your own police force … Anyway, let’s go!
Gov. Doug Ducey declared yesterday that “Arizona schools are open and they will remain open.”
But as schools welcome children back following a winter break where many gathered and traveled, they’re finding that staying open amid a once-again surging pandemic, often without relying on masks to help curb the spread, is difficult and requires a lot of stop-gaps.
Perhaps the best measure of the struggle to keep schools open is substitute teachers — the poor souls who keep 30 screaming children in line on a moment’s notice when a teacher gets sick. Without them, all hell breaks loose.
But after nearly two years of pandemic-ing, many of the state’s underpaid, under-appreciated and generally mistreated substitutes have finally had enough, the Republic’s Yana Kunkchoff and Megan Taros report. When you have to find substitutes for the substitutes, you’re in trouble.
Meanwhile, thousands of kids are getting sick as the vastly more transmissible omicron variant rips through schools (though only 54 Arizona kids have died from COVID-19), KJZZ’s Rocio Hernandez writes. Only 29 percent of Arizona kids under 19 have received at least one shot of the vaccine.
And kids, who can no longer turn off the webcam for a quick break, are having a hard time adjusting to returning to real classes. School officials say kids are showing more aggressive behaviors and shorter attention spans, the Daily Star’s Genesis Lara writes.
While teachers and school administrators generally don’t want to return to remote learning, many schools literally can’t afford to because of the way school funding formulas limit remote learning, Kunichoff explains.
But if politicians demand schools stay open, the least they can do is ensure that everyone, including students who can’t receive vaccinations, feels as safe as possible at school. And they can acknowledge that “open” doesn’t always make for better learning, as one student in New York shared a few days ago.
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Democrats and public school advocates said Gov. Doug Ducey had two glaring holes in his final State of the State speech on Monday: funding for public schools and COVID-19.
“If we truly want Arizona to be unstoppable, our priority should be increasing education attainment,” said Education Forward Arizona spokeswoman Shannon Sowby, referencing Ducey’s slogan for the speech, #AZUnstoppable. “Increasing our attainment rate to the national average would generate over $7B for Arizona’s economy.”
School funding should be a priority issue, said Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, given that schools will face up to $1.2 billion in budget cuts on March 1 without legislative action. That means a drastic reduction in per pupil expenditures — an average of $1,300 per student.
Ducey committed to keeping schools open and increasing school choice. For many, this ignored key issues facing a struggling education system.
Ducey declared schools would not be closed, despite the ongoing and worsening COVID-19 pandemic which has risen to record levels as the omicron variant has swept the state.
The governor lauded Arizona’s status as the number one state for school choice and promised to continue providing alternatives for poor and minority students stuck in “failing” schools.
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
More Ducey money for COVID-19 school closures ... The election "audit" news is never-ending ... And an unexpected Bruce Willis aside.
As students return to classrooms following the winter break, and lawmakers return to the Capitol following their long summers, education is again at the forefront of the political agenda.
So far, lawmakers have mostly stuck to hot-button topics like requiring written parental permission to join LGBTQ student clubs, picking on trans kids in sports and otherwise, and teaching kids to denounce communism.
We’re still waiting to see a bill that addresses the much bigger issue of the constitutional cap on school spending that’s screwing schools out of $1.2 billion in funding that they already have because enrollment was artificially low last year during the pandemic. Lawmakers need to suspend that cap by March, or schools budgets will be thrown into chaos.
But Republican lawmakers are hesitant to raise or suspend that cap because doing so would undercut their legal arguments against Proposition 208, the 2020 Invest in Education initiative, which increases taxes on high earners to pay for education and is still working its way through the courts.
And while lawmakers are largely focused on sex, communism and sports, Gov. Doug Ducey announced a new “preemptive action” yesterday to pay parents to take their kids elsewhere if schools close.
Ducey set aside $10 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to give parents up to $7,000 to cover child care, school transportation, online tutoring and even private school tuition if they meet income requirements and their school or classroom closes “even for one day.”
We’re making sure in-person learning remains an option for all Arizona families and students. That’s why we’re taking preemptive action and launching the Open for Learning Recovery Benefit. 1/
— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) January 4, 2022
Karamargin emphasized that Ducey has long been a proponent of the public education system. But he couldn’t say if Ducey plans to use his State of the State speech Monday to advocate for increasing the spending cap that has schools worried about future layoffs.It’s a lot like the plan he announced at the beginning of the school year to pay families to change schools if their school requires masks. That proposal also set aside $10 million, or $7,000 per student, and the Governor’s Office told us has doled out $600,000 so far. (For the math-challenged, that’s about 100 kids in a state with more than a million students.)
“Our expectation and our hope is that Arizona schools will remain open to the greatest extent possible. And many of them are sincerely working toward that goal,” Ducey spokesman C.J. Karamargin told us, adding that there’s a broad consensus among educators and politicians, including President Joe Biden, that schools should remain open.
Friday, December 3, 2021
Thursday, December 2, 2021
WASHINGTON – He is not currently enrolled in any classes or present on campus, but Kyle Rittenhouse is already casting a long shadow across Arizona State University.
Rittenhouse, acquitted of all charges this month in the killing of two people and the wounding of a third during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, said during his trial that he was “studying nursing” online at ASU. He later said in news reports that he intends to enroll for in-person classes at the school.
University officials said Tuesday that Rittenhouse is not currently enrolled nor has he applied for admission. But that has not kept a number of left-wing groups from scheduling a rally Wednesday to call on the university to deny enrollment to the “high-profile right-wing fascist icon,” among other demands.
Conservative organizations, meanwhile, have come to Rittenhouse’s defense, with some raising money for legal fees and others accusing his opponents of harassment and engaging in “mob rule.”
The two sides agree on at least one thing: Each thinks the university is not doing enough.
An ASU spokesman Tuesday would only say that Rittenhouse is no longer enrolled in the school’s online nondegree programs and that, as of now, he has not applied for admission to a degree-seeking program.
