News Weekly Edition 1 - Middle Schools in the Pandemic

By: Margaret Clark

Editing Help: Ellie C and Cooper Baehr

Kids around the world have been eager to know and learn more things during this worldwide pandemic. But one thing no kid can forget, unbearable questions, all about one thing - School. Most schools went into online learning right after spring break in March. More like a spring staycation for most of us. Everyone, parents, kids, young adults had the question of school in the back of their minds. Especially for college students. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with middle school.

Elementary, middle, and high schools are a completely different story.

If you live in Austin, Texas, the public school district, superintendent, and the school board have delayed the start of school for almost two weeks. But if you are in a private school your teachers and staff probably make the rules (but also have to follow the city’s health guidelines), because private schools are not operated by the government. Some schools offer in person, some others only offer online, and some schools offer both options. Either way, they are all very complex stories.

Let's start with public schools. Public schools may or may not be harder to run than private schools, but I beg to differ. The state legislature gets to decide how and when to fund public schools. In a pandemic, it would definitely be stressful to be relying on someone for part of your career.

The difference from public schools to private schools is their government funding. Usually, public schools are funded for all of the remodeling, extra school activities, and maybe how many subjects there are. Public school is governed by finance authorities, while private schools are governed and financed by private authorities and companies.

Middle schools during the pandemic are a mess. Middle schools we're the toughest jungle to go through already. Let's interview some middle schoolers and see their side of the problem. Ashley Talkington of Walsh public Middle School says that online school is a six on a scale of 1-10, but as a lot of people can agree on, in-person is probably better. Talkington says that she is not the smallest bit scared for in-person school. And it would be better for everyone's mental health.

Mental health may be the thing that some people might be going over and instead of going over real health. Mental health might be so hard for some people. Especially if you're bouncing all over the place, an extrovert, or just haven't seen anyone for six months.

Talkington says that her school uses A and B days, let's go deeper into that. A and B days are when you have, say the first period is an A day it could be theatre and if it's a B day it could be Language Arts. It makes that each day has 4 periods instead of usually 8, so the kids at school don't have to stare into the screen for so long.

But some schools are different. Genevie Burgoyne of LA, California goes to a public school. Her school doesn't know when they are going back to school. But they know that they will try to after winter break. At the beginning of the day they use sites like Jamboard and Padlet (https://jamboard.google.com and https://padlet.com) They also use a site called Schoology instead of Google Classroom for example. They have experiences like small group meetups and shorter school hours.

This pandemic has really given us a shake. Burgoyne says that she is scared to wear a mask for five hours, but being in person would be better.

We can see that a bunch of people prefer in-person to online. It's sensible, but when you have a choice, it can be less hectic. Today we only interviewed public schoolers, but we’ll tune in later for the private and charter schoolers. But for now, we're focusing on a smaller picture.

Overall, schools during a pandemic are shocking, sometimes bad, but most of all, hard. That's why teachers and principles, and the government are trying as hard as they can to keep us safe. Whether or not online or in person. We are all in the same middle school jungle together.