Insane! ONLINE Classes Only Open To Students Who Are Vaccinated

Online virtual classrooms in the State of Virginia are now requiring students who attend to be immunized against various illnesses despite the fact that the pupils will be taking classes from the comfort of their own home in what can only be considered a blatant push to inject poisonous toxins and metals into to bodies of schoolkids.

The unconstitutional order comes after a high number of parents have refused to take their children to get their standard yearly cocktail dose of vaccines which during a non-COVID school year would allow students to attend school physically.

As rumor has it, parents are concerned about taking their children to get vaccinations due to the current purported COVID-19 outbreak. However, people, in general, may just be waking up to the real dangers of vaccines and may just be to the point where they are outright refusing them altogether.

“I think people feel like if you’re not going to the brick and mortar school then you don’t need to have the immunizations but that’s incorrect,” Fairfax County Health Department worker Shauna Severo told NBC 4 in Washington.

Health officials claim that in Virginia students need to have their shots to attend class whether virtual or not.

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'The virus beat us': Colleges are increasingly going online for fall 2020 semester as COVID-19 cases rise

Call it coronavirus déjà vu. After planning ways to reopen campuses this fall, colleges are increasingly changing their minds, dramatically increasing online offerings or canceling in-person classes outright. 

This sudden shift will be familiar to students whose spring plans were interrupted by the rapid spread of the coronavirus. Now, COVID-19 cases in much of the country are much higher than in the spring, and rising in many places.

In many cases, the colleges had released plans for socially distant in-person classes only a few weeks ago, hoping to beat the coronavirus. “Instead,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, “the virus beat us.”

Just as in the spring, students have been left scrambling to adjust their class schedules and living arrangements, faced with paying expensive tuition for online classes and rent for an apartment they may not need. Digital classes are still unappealing to many, and the chances of in-person instruction for next semester remain murky.

Just this week, Miami University in Ohio said all undergraduate classes would be held virtually through at least September 21. West Virginia University announced its classes would start on August 21, about a week later than originally planned, and that most upper-division courses would be taught online or through a hybrid of in-person and online courses. And George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said it was forgoing its plans for the fall semester and would hold undergraduate and most graduate classes online, joining colleges such as the California State University system and Harvard that had already made that decision.

“We know just how much many of you were looking forward to being on campus this fall, and we understand that this news is disappointing,” George Washington said in a statement. 

Schools are going online, too:Despite CDC recommendations, most major districts going online as COVID-19 cases spike

That news would have been good to know before Arianna Miskin, a graduate student at the university studying for a master’s of public health, signed a lease in Washington. She had been living in the neighboring city of Arlington, Virginia, and wanted to move to be closer to her school and in the city.

For now, she said will remain in the city while trying to finish her coursework.

Miskin said the university has communicated well about its reactions to the pandemic, which she called a “once-in-a-lifetime event.” But she wishes the administration acted earlier in the summer.

“We weren't asked until June whether we preferred online or hybrid-on-campus,” with some classes online and some in person, she said. “The semester starts in a month. They moved too late.”

More universities are likely to follow suit if COVID-19 cases continue to rise.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking the plans for roughly 1,260 colleges throughout the summer. Earlier this year, nearly two-thirds of institutions had planned on in-person instruction. As of Tuesday, about 49% said they were on that track. About a third were planning for a semester that would include a mix of online and in-person classes, while 13% were planning for online instruction.

The medical school of George Washington University on March 12, 2020, as students prepared to leave for spring break. Classes went online after spring break as part of precautions in response to the novel coronavirus.

Some colleges, such as the University of California at Berkeley, have put off an official decision, saying they’ll start the semester remotely with a chance of some in-person instruction later into the semester.

Kelchen expects more schools to announce changes to the fall semester in the next week or so. Colleges have waited to cancel in-person classes in hopes that public health would improve. A huge motivator: Colleges need students on campus to bring in tuition and room-and-board money, and to help at-risk students persist toward their degrees. Plus, many are worried about a backlash from students, lawmakers, or the public, with pressure ranging from the White House to some state governments for education institutions to reopen fully.

Trump administration:Guidance bars new foreign students from US if they're taking online classes

Administrators now have weeks left before the fall semester and little expectation that anything substantial will change, Kelchen said.

One looming alternative: Colleges could reopen their campuses and bring in students from across the country, then have to send students home after a few weeks because of an outbreak.

After all, Kelchen said: “Major League Baseball's spending incredible amounts of money on testing and safety for players in their state,” he said. “Their season is on the brink after three games.”

Even if campuses reopen, ‘anything is possible’

In deciding whether to reopen, colleges must consider more than just their local COVID-19 case rate. Many of their students come from across the country. So while the college’s city or state might be seeing flat or dropping case rates, administrators must weigh the country’s rising caseload as a whole. 

Some institutions, such as Ithaca College, will prohibit students who live in states on the New York mandatory quarantine list from attending class in person during the fall semester. Others say they will require some students to spend two weeks in quarantine before starting classes.

That raises the question of who should be required to quarantine, said Gerri Taylor, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force. Should institutions require only out-of-state students to quarantine? Should that rule also apply to international students?

Bringing students back to campus also introduces questions about coronavirus testing – and few universities have a comprehensive or affordable solution.

Plus, testing addresses a limited time frame. A person might test negative, but they could be positive three days later, Taylor said.  “Who wants to go and get tested every couple of days or even once a week?” Taylor said. “I think that would be a difficult sell for college students.”

Still, the most certain aspect of the fall will be a constant presence of uncertainty. Colleges that are reopening must plan for if and when to move courses online, looking at the number of COVID-19 cases in the community and the number on campus, among students but also faculty and staff.

“Anything is possible,” Taylor said. “I think families also have to have contingency plans.”

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Professors at a Catholic University Call 'White Privilege' America's 'Original Sin'

Several Sacred Heart University professors took part in a discussion that labels white privilege America's "original sin."

At a panel titled "Wrestling with the legacy of America's Original Sin" that took place in late June as a part of the Heart Challenges Hate series, moderator, Associate Dean Michelle Loris divulged how white privilege is the cause behind most of the racism in America, both in the past and present.

"We want to discuss how white privilege is systemic and is made up of all of those institutional advantages that white people enjoy over people of color, solely because white people are white," said Loris at the start of the panel. "We want to discuss how white privilege is embedded in all our institutions of power and how it is integrated in the unconscious assumptions and perceptions, with which white people can operate and interact in the world and black people can not."

Other professors at the university from many different departments proceeded to lecture on the impact of white privilege.

History Professor Jennifer McLaughlin claimed that slavery is the most "most obvious instance of white privilege in America." She also said that the Declaration of Independence did not mean equality for all.

"Thomas Jefferson was not intending that 'all men being created equal' applied to all men or all women and certainly not to African Americans," McLaughlin said.

Catholic studies professor June-Anne Greenly called white privilege a "freely wielded exercise of a disordered soul."

"We have to address the exterior, the behaviors that are the result of that sinful state," said Greenly. "But I think we need to ask people, in terms of how we understand sin, at least the Catholic tradition, to do a really tight inventory."

Crystal Hayes, a clinical assistant professor, said black people need to "navigate and negotiate" white privilege and white supremacy.

She then shared a story about how her black daughter was unfairly penalized for speaking out in class while her white friend was not.

Other topics discussed were how to combat racism and white privilege in the classroom, as well as personal anecdotes on the matter.

The women of the panel all agreed it will be "hard work" fighting white privilege and that they need to "push through."

"That pushing through, being conscious and then pushing through, that's the hard part, that's the challenging part" concluded Loris.

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One in three Australian schools agree to phonics reading check as critics sound alarm

One in three NSW public primary schools have signed up to an August trial of the controversial year 1 phonics screening check, in a sign of educators' growing support for a phonics-heavy approach to teaching reading after decades of bitter debate.

Some 518 of the state's 1600-odd government schools and 49 Catholic schools will do the check between mid and late August. Teachers will spend five to seven minutes with each student to listen to how they blend sounds to read 40 words.

"It will give us a lot of information," said Michelle Looker, the k-2 assistant principal at Kingswood South Primary. "I think it's really helpful."

It comes as the new K-2 curriculum arising from the NSW Curriculum Review is expected to embed a phonics – or sounding out of words – approach as the preferred way of teaching children how to read.

The debate over early reading instruction remains one of the most brutal in education. Opponents of the phonics check, who support an approach called balanced literacy, said they were disappointed so many schools had volunteered.

Both sides agree phonics is part of learning to read. But advocates of so-called synthetic phonics say learning to read is like cracking a code; students need to first learn the relationships between letters and sounds, then how to blend those sounds together to read whole words.

The phonics check is based on this approach, and includes 20 so-called pseudo or non-words such as "flisp" to check that students really know their letter-sound combinations, and don't just recognise the words because they have been repeatedly exposed to them.

Advocates of balanced literacy, which has been the dominant approach to reading instruction in schools and university education departments for decades, say synthetic phonics makes children read robotically, and argue finding meaning in words from the outset is paramount.

They say sounding out words, while valuable, should not be given too much emphasis, and disapprove of the check's pseudo words.

The NSW Department of Education's evidence centre in 2017 backed synthetic phonics as one of the keys to teaching reading effectively, and the department has been offering teachers training in how to use it.

The recent NSW Curriculum Review called for a "detailed and explicit" curriculum for the teaching of reading and pointed to influential research by Macquarie University cognitive scientists on the importance of synthetic phonics.

Phonics advocate Jennifer Buckingham said large number of schools signing up to the check was "a big deal".

"A couple of years ago we were having debates about whether the phonics check was a good idea, there was all this misinformation about the pseudo word component, all without much foundation," she said.

"The fact that 500 schools want to participate means that the right information is finding its way into schools about the value of doing this assessment."

Kingswood South Principal Sandra Martin said the school had a strong synthetic phonics program, and had seen students make progress in literacy as a result.

"We thought anything that could give us more information about how our students are progressing was worth doing," she said. "We can use it to see where our children are at, and that can help our teachers plan."

The learning support co-ordinator, Stephanie Lewis, said the check would involve students reading 20 real words and 20 pseudo words. "It shows us the strategies kids are using to decode a word," she said.

"Sometimes we don't know whether they know that word and are just remembering it. When we use the pseudo words, we can see that they are using those phonics skills to decode the word rather than relying on their memory."

The only other state that uses a year one phonics check – long advocated by the federal Coalition government – is South Australia. "[That trial] identified students struggling with decoding that they'd pegged as really good readers," Dr Buckingham said.

Balanced literacy proponent Robyn Ewing, a professor emerita of education at Sydney University, said she was disappointed that so many schools had signed up.

She said phonics strategies were important, but not helpful if "they're not making meaning and sense of what they're doing," she said. "It boils down to meaning – understanding that it's about meaning-making first."

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