Micro-schools could be answer for low-income Black students
But not everyone is pleased by the automated efforts
When I became president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League, it was clear that our community faced some incredible challenges. Yet, I always believed that the path forward began with education.
Generational poverty stems from a vicious cycle that we’re all too familiar with. While our organization has helped upskill thousands to compete for high-paying, high-skilled jobs, this is a Band-Aid solution. If our goal is to end this cycle, our fight must begin with children.
For generations, children in low-income Black communities have endured a sub-par education model and these underperforming schools not only hurt our children, but our entire community.
According to the Orlando Economic Partnership, the average net worth for Black adults in Central Florida is less than $18,000 annually, compared to more than $215,000 for white adults. This overt discrepancy is a direct result of a failing education system. Without innovation, these failures will continue to compound as parents are forced to choose between feeding their families and supplementing their children’s education.
With a lack of support both at home and in school, the interest of our children to engage in their learning wanes. While I believe that every child is born with a thirst for knowledge, those in our community are born into a drought with no end in sight.
We can change this. Imagine a school with only a handful of students, learning in a safe and welcoming environment. With such small numbers, their teacher can work with each student, developing and following a personalized learning plan.
Aptly called microschools, this is the reality for those with means. But if the state passes a new education choice bill, this can become a reality for those in underserved communities too. Simply put: the low-income Black children who need them the most.
Senate Bill 48, sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. (R-Hialeah Gardens), combines five education scholarship programs into two. The bill also extends the use of education savings accounts (ESAs), currently only available to the Gardiner Scholarship for special-needs students and the Reading Scholarship, to the newly merged income-based scholarships.
These accounts could be used to cover private-school tuition, technology, tutoring, curriculum and other approved items. Families would have the flexibility to spend their education dollars, providing them access to the learning environment that best fits their children’s needs.
This bill puts us on the cusp of providing these youth with a high-quality learning environment that will begin to close both the historical achievement gap, the school-toprison pipeline, and the growing COVID-19 learning gap.
The past year has demonstrated that, now more than ever, families require educational options. Most children have regressed, struggling to maintain even the most basic curriculum. Throwing these students back into an unsuccessful system will further exasperate their situation.
While the benefits for our youth are clear, micro-schools also provide economic opportunities. If parents have the freedom to spend their children’s education dollars through ESAs, they will demand providers that meet their needs. Entrepreneurs will invest in our communities and this cannot be understated. As a result of the pandemic, over 40% of Black-owned businesses have closed, while the Black unemployment rate is hovering around 10%, four points higher than the state average. Networks of micro-schools would not only our lift up our children, but their families too.
My organization knows first-hand the success of ESAs. The Urban League partnered with several Orange County Public Schools to register more than 700 students to receive supplemental tutoring funded by the Florida Reading Scholarship. This was a blessing for parents who were unable to afford tutoring for their children.
We now have the opportunity to take ESAs to the next level and positively impact not hundreds, but thousands of children. I pray that our elected representatives listen to their constituents. Please fund students over systems, put money in the hands of parents who know what’s best for their children, and bring micro-schools to communities that desperately need them.
Imagine a school with only a handful of students, learning in a safe and welcoming environment. With such small numbers, their teacher can work with each student, developing and following a personalized learning plan.
Glenton “Glen” Gilzean, Jr. is president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League. He is a former Pinellas County School Board member and a former Florida A&M Trustee.
Having trouble scoring a COVID-19 vaccine appointment? You’re not alone. To cope, some people are turning to bots that scan overwhelmed websites and send alerts on social media when slots open up.
They’ve provided relief to families helping older relatives find scarce appointments. But not all public health officials think they’re a good idea.
In Buckland, Massachusetts, two hours west of Boston, a vaccine clinic canceled a day of appointments after learning that out-of-towners scooped up almost all of them in minutes thanks to a Twitter alert. In parts of New Jersey, health officials added steps to block bots, which they say favor the tech-savvy.
What is a vaccine bot?
Bots — basically autonomous programs on the web — have emerged amid widespread frustration with the online world of vaccine appointments.
Though the situations vary by state, people often have to check multiple provider sites for available appointments. Weeks after the rollout began, demand for vaccines continues to outweigh supply, complicating the search even for eligible people as they refresh appointment sites to score a slot. When a coveted opening does appear, many find it can vanish midway through the booking.
The most notable bots scan vaccine provider websites to detect changes, which could mean a clinic is adding new appointments. The bots are often overseen by humans, who then post alerts of the openings using
Twitter or text notifications.
A second type that’s more worrisome to health officials are “scalper” bots that could automatically book appointments, potentially to offer them for sale. So far, there’s little evidence scalper bots are taking appointments.
Are vaccine bot helping?
Yes, for use them.
“THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I GOT MY DAD AN APPOINTMENT! THANK YOU SO MUCH!” tweeted Benjamin Shover, of Stratford, New Jersey, after securing a March 3 appointment for his 70-year-old father with the help of an alert from Twitter account @nj— vaccine.
The success came a month after signing up for New Jersey’s state online vaccine registry.
The creator of
the
alerts people who the bot, software engineer Kenneth Hsu, said his original motivation was to help get an appointment for his own parents-in-law. Now he and other volunteers have set a broader mission of assisting others locked out of New Jersey’s confusing online appointment system.
“These are people who just want to know they’re on a list somewhere and they are going to be helped,” Hsu said. “We want everyone vaccinated. We want to see our grandparents.”
What do health officials think?
The bots have met resistance in some communities. A bot that recently alerted Massachusetts residents to a clinic in sparsely populated Franklin County led many people from the Boston area to sign up for the slots. Local officials canceled all of the appointments, switched to a private system and spread
the word through senior centers and town officials.
“Our goal was to help our residents get their vaccination,” said Tracy Rogers, emergency preparedness manager for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments. “But 95% of the appointments we had were from outside Franklin County.”
New Jersey’s Union County put a CAPTCHA prompt in its scheduling system to confirm visitors are human, blocking efforts “to game” it with a bot, said Sebastian D’Elia, a county spokesperson.
“When you post on Twitter, only a certain segment of society is going to see that,” he said. Even if they’re trying to help someone else, D’Elia said others do not have the luxury of people who are advocating for them.
But the person who created a bot that’s now
blocked in Union County, 24-year-old computer programmer Noah Marcus, said the current system isn’t fair, either.
“The system was already favoring the tech-savvy and the person who can just sit in front of their computer all day, hitting refresh,” Marcus said.
D’Elia said the county is also scheduling appointments by phone to help those who might have trouble online.
How do they work?
Marcus used the Python coding language to create a program that sifts through a vaccine clinic website, looking for certain keywords and tables that would indicate new appointments. Other bots use different techniques, depending on how the target website is built.
This kind of information gathering, known as web scraping, remains a source of rancor. Essentially, scraping is collecting information from a website that its owner doesn’t want collected, said Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Some web services have taken web scrapers to court, saying scraping techniques violate the terms and conditions for accessing their sites. One case involving bots that scraped LinkedIn profiles is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“There’s disagreement in the courts about the legality of web-scraping,” Kerr said. “It’s a murky area. It’s probably legal but it’s not something we have certainty about.”
What bots?
The website for a mass vaccination site in Atlantic City, New Jersey, says its online queue system — which keeps people waiting on the site as slots are allotted — is designed to prevent it from crashing and to stop bots from snapping up appointments “from real people.” But is that actually happening?
Making a bot that can actually book appointments — not just detect them — would be a lot harder. And sites usually ask for information such as a person’s date of birth to make sure they are eligible.
Pharmacy giants Walgreens and CVS, which are increasingly giving people shots across the U.S., have already said they’ve been working to prevent such activity.
Walgreens said it is using cybersecurity techniques to detect and prevent bots so that “only authorized and eligible patients will have access to schedule a vaccine appointment.” CVS Health said it’s encountered various types of automated activities and has designed its appointment-making system to validate legitimate users.
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