Virtual learning long-term detriment to community

Virtual learning is not engaging, effective, and feels like a waste of time.

Our children miss their peers, they love their teachers. They want to be back in the classroom. These are difficult times, but our state needs to work hard to come up with creative solutions of how we can help our keiki.

My question to the teachers: How will it be when you go back to in person learning and the children have been out of school for 18 months? After that long out of school, many won’t want to go back. Teachers are already facing an impossible task of catching students up who’ve had six months of no school. Add another year to that and it will make their already difficult and underpaid job insurmountable. It will widen the inequality between students with educated or academically skilled parents at home and students with parents for whom English is a second language or parents who have to work all day.

Thousands of private school students across the state have resumed school safely. Do we continue to allow the wealthy and privileged in our society to have such a huge advantage, continue to widen the gap between the haves and have not because our public schools will not step up and educate our children? School settings with proper procedures in place including social distancing and mask wearing are a relatively low risk environment.

Distance learning is not effective, and the losses from this misguided method will be to the long-term detriment of our whole island community.

Rebecca Hill

Kihei