Education

These women search for farmworkers’ children, to help educate them. COVID-19 made their jobs harder.

Florida lawmakers will deal with the pandemic’s impact on education when they reconvene in Tallahassee in March. Among the issues: a steep drop in student attendance, growing concerns about learning losses and a Republican effort to consolidate the state’s school choice programs.

Students at historically Black colleges and universities in Florida are finding different ways to cope with illness, grief, family obligations and uncertainty. For the multiethnic Black community, COVID-19 has been an added stressor atop another centuries-long pandemic: racial injustice.

For the senior class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the fear and isolation of the pandemic were layered on top of an already traumatic few years in school. The students graduating this year were freshmen when 17 people were killed and 17 others were injured during the 2018 shooting at their school.

When schools shut down last spring to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the closures were especially difficult for families of children with disabilities or severe medical conditions. Then came perhaps an even tougher dilemma: what to do when schools reopened in the fall.

Last spring, the coronavirus pandemic forced schools across the state to shut down, and teachers to move their lessons online, which Denise Wilson said was a struggle from the start for her son Brady. He is among the nearly 15% of public school students in Florida who have a disability and receive special education services.

It's long been true that some students who attend Monroe County schools struggle with not having enough food to eat, and COVID-19 has made the situation worse. Educators say the pandemic also has led to new solutions for student hunger.

A nationally representative survey released late last year by Education Next, a peer-reviewed education research journal affiliated with Harvard University, found that white students were much more likely than Black or Latino students to be learning in person.

Broward College announced Wednesday that it received nearly $400,000 in grant funding to assist students who may be facing food insecurity. The Florida Blue Foundation granted the college $377,000 to use over the next four years to build three food pantries, one in each campus.

Florida school districts are planning to administer state exams next month, but don’t know how those exams will be used. Lynn Hatter reports as the testing window draws closer, a pair of Florida Democrats want the state to not put much stock into the results.