A 100-day headache: Biden’s vow to quickly reopen schools
Presented by Sallie Mae
With help from Mackenzie Mays
Editor’s Note: Welcome to Weekly Education: Coronavirus special edition. Each week, we will explore how the pandemic is reshaping and upending education as we know it across the country, from pre-K through grad school. We will explore the debates of the day, new challenges and talk to movers and shakers about whether changes ushered in now are here to stay.
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ALBANY, N.Y. â Questar III BOCES Superintendent Dr. Gladys Cruz has joined with her colleague Dr. Lupita Hightower, who leads Arizonaâs Tolleson Elementary School District, to launch a groundbreaking new program for leaders who have been long underrepresented in public schools.
Despite being 2,500 miles apart, Cruz and Hightower are leading The Aspiring Superintendents Academy for Latino and Latina Leaders, a project of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. AASA is a professional organization for more than 13,000 educational leaders in the United States and throughout the world.
AASA selected Cruz and Hightower to help design the academy and serve as its lead teachers, due to their recognition as leaders in the education community.
This story was originally published on July 10, 2020. As part of MedPage Today s review of the past year s top stories, we are republishing it, along with an update on school reopenings, reviewing subsequent developments in 2020.
As school officials debate whether to reopen this fall, physicians, teachers, and a prominent ethicist markedly disagreed on whether sending children back into the classroom is safe for their communities.
Some pediatricians are driving the push to reopen, while infectious disease specialists, family physicians, and teachers appear more wary, concerned that schools could become new hotspots for the virus.
At the heart of the debate are many unanswered questions, with arguably the most important being: How often are children infected, and how contagious are their infections?
By Dian Schaffhauser
01/15/21
Even as the Biden administration has begun pushing for the next recovery package, educators are still sorting out the details of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, otherwise known as CARES Act 2. The $900 billion relief package passed by Congress on Dec. 21, 2020 and signed into law on Dec. 27, dedicated $82 billion for education. While the funding covered the same three buckets of money set aside in the CARES Act legislation signed into law in March 2020, specifics vary slightly. Act 2 provides:
$54.3 billion for K-12, under the Elementary School Emergency Relief (ESSER II) Fund;
$22.7 billion for colleges and universities, under the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER II) fund;