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A school board in South Carolina has launched a pilot program to get rid of snow days and instead have students work from home when the weather turns treacherous. Beyond depriving schoolkids of the joys of weather-enforced truancy, the plan will exacerbate the region's digital divide for student who don't have internet access at home.
Anderson County School District Five will be the first region to participate in the pilot program this upcoming school year. In the past, Anderson County had makeup days tacked on to the end of the school year in lieu of days missed due to bad weather, but most kids ended up just skipping them, according to a local news report.
Students from grades 3 through 12 in the school board are already given Chromebooks to use at home, so in the event of a snow day or other inclement weather that causes a shutdown, kids will be expected to log on from home, communicate with teachers, and complete assignments.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:23PM (2 children)
What? Giving kids junkware from privacy-hostile companies like Google won't improve our school system? Impossible! Everything must be proprietary, and everything must be In the Cloud. That will surely solve the problem of schools not being able to educate children about anything more advanced than the absolute basics.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)
And the absolute basics isn't being taught sometimes and they still get passed through.
But now they'll know how to suck the Google teat and the Microsoft teat will maybe dry up?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @07:35PM
There's an easy solution to all of this, and it's that we need more easily-quantifiable, cheap, and standardized multiple choice tests that test almost entirely for rote memorization. That will appease the masses.