RCSD educator
The ongoing pandemic has made many of the issues facing the Rochester City School District more severe, particularly engaging students. For RCSD educator Rita, the district did not do enough to ensure that students were attending and participating in remote learning, ultimately meaning those students will leave the system ill-prepared for their future. Here is Rita’s story.
“What I saw over this pandemic with the Rochester City School District kids, it’s shameful, and half the time you’re teaching on the Zoom, you’re teaching the black boxes. I would say that probably 80% of the kids are not even engaged, because they don’t have to respond back to you, you don’t even know if they’re there. Sometimes when the Zoom is over, I just keep an eye out to see how long it’s going to take them to turn it off. They never were there.
“Then last year, what we did was, just kind of mysteriously, our graduation rate shot up, because you know what we did; we just let them go through. There were no Regents exams. When they go to MCC, or when they go to any college, most of the time, our students have to take all these remedial courses, so they use up a lot of their financial aid, trying to get on the same level, on the college level. Because they’re going to take them in, but then the institutions are eating up all their financial aid, so when it’s really time to go to college and take those courses, they have no final financial aid left.”