LASD community helps feed families during pandemic
Courtesy of Trish Mitchell
LASD Community Gives Back helps families facing food insecurity.
Every week, former Santa Rita School teacher Trish Mitchell rallies support for the LASD Community Gives Back project, which helps Los Altos School District families grappling with food insecurity.
Led by LASD Board of Trustees member Jessica Speiser and district office employee Jason Carballar, the project has consistently served 40 families per week since May.
“The outpouring of love and support for our own community by our own community has really overwhelmed me,” Mitchell said. “People bring bags and bags of food to my house every day. So every week for about four months, I was taking 40 to 80 bags of groceries to the district office.”
Courtesy of Kevin Ngo
Practicing at home and talking as a family about why it matters help kids learn to mask, according to local dad Kevin Ngo, who developed a filter mask with help from his family.
Careful, compliant mask wearing has proven hard for adult Americans to pull off – so it can’t help seeming like an ominous obstacle for families and educators contemplating a return to classrooms, activities and, someday, summer camps. But local program directors have been testing how to reopen small camp sessions since last June, and they, like local school districts testing the water with limited in-person attendance, have learned a lot about the capacity of kids to do better than we imagined.
It s unlikely that Palo Alto Unified middle and high schools will reopen for hybrid instruction this academic year, Superintendent Don Austin said, meaning hundreds of students might go without in-classroom instruction for over a year.
They are not medical workers. They are not soldiers drafted to fight a war, he said. They volunteered for a job in which they educate children in a relatively safe environment, and that environment is gone. We have to restore confidence in that environment.
Trustee Debbie Torok suggested that the district bring teachers back to schools first, before students, to help them acclimate to in-person teaching during a pandemic. I believe and maybe I m wrong but as soon as a teacher feels comfortable in their classroom they re going to be willing to embrace more of what is ahead, she said.
Local teachers address Capitol riot with students Written by Zoe Morgan
As pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol last week, eighth-grade history teacher Katie Mather started getting emails from students, checking to see if she was watching the news.
They wanted to make sure she knew that “the Capitol was being overtaken by an angry mob,” said Mather, who teaches at Blach Intermediate School. Mather set aside class time to talk through the day’s events. A history teacher who discusses current events with her classes regularly, Mather said she takes her cues from students.
“They were very eager to talk about this yesterday and sort of ‘unwrap’ what had happened,” Mather said in a Friday interview.