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Brooklyn teachers, parents refl ect
on fi rst week of remote learning
BROOKLYN WEEKLY, APRIL 5, 2020
BY JESSICA PARKS
Brooklyn’s 300,000-plus
public school students
started remote learning
on March 23, marking an
enormous shift in the city’s
education system — and
parents and teachers have
been working overtime to
help bring the classroom
into students’ homes.
“It’s a new reality for
the 1.1 million students and
families in New York City,”
said Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“We are literally fl ying the
plane as we’re building the
plane. So, not everything is
going to go 100 percent as
plan, but that’s okay because
we’ll fi gure it out together.”
While parents prepped
their homes for learning,
public school teachers had
just three days of training
before they were required
to take their classrooms online
on March 23 in an effort
to promote social distancing
amid the novel coronavirus
outbreak — and, while students
may have enjoyed a
week-long hiatus from class
the week prior, vacation is
defi nitely over.
“We are holding the children
accountable. We are
not saying ‘you are off now,
you are on vacation,’” said
Mario Caggiano, a union
chapter leader and physical
education teacher at Coney
Island’s I.S. 303. “The children
have to check in by 9
am, so we know they are online,
they are engaged, and
they are learning.”
Educators have taken up
technology like the videoconferencing
platform
Zoom to help teach students
new material, and online
apps like Google Classroom
to assign and grade work
— despite the rapid tectonic
change, the new system
is working well, said Caggiano.
“I am proud of all my
teachers, they are trying
their best to make it as close
as possible in an environment
to the classroom,” he
said. “The response from
the kids has been great, they
want to learn and want to do
lessons.”
But while the system is
working as well as could be
expected, it’s not without
fl aws.
Caggiano worried that
the prolonged out-of-classroom
experience, which de
Blasio predicted would last
through the end of the school
year, would cause some students
to get behind on their
formative schooling.
“I am actually worried
that a lot of students will
fall through the cracks, and
they won’t get the education
they deserve and they will
be very, very behind,” Caggiano
said, “because they
will not be doing all the
work, and not understanding
a lot of it.”
Some 300,000 students
in the New York City public
school system do not have an
internet connection at home
or a device to access the internet,
Schools Chancellor
Richard Carranza said on
March 23, and even though
the Department of Education
has issued over 175,000
devices — including both
iPads and laptops — in an
effort to close the gap, some
students were still waiting
to receive their devices days
into the transition.
“We did sign up for a remote
device and we have
not gotten it. On March 23,
they told us they are still
waiting on the devices,” said
Shaquana Boykin, who is
the guardian of a student enrolled
at Brooklyn Community
Arts and Media High
School.
Education advocates lamented
that the current
crisis further emphasizes
a need for educational resources
for lower-equity students,
who may regularly
lack things like an internet
connection, a laptop, or even
adult supervision.
“Unfortunately, the pandemic
reveals new challenges,
but to existing problems.
There is a realization
that not all children have
the same tools available to
them,” said Shelley Pasnik,
the director of the Center for
Children and Technology in
Manhattan.
Missing classroom time
or being unable to complete
assignments will only further
the inequality of education
for these vulnerable
students.
“Every day of education
matters. We know that students
who are homeless, and
students in foster care have
worse educational outcomes
than their peers — they are
already less likely to be profi
cient in reading, and more
likely to drop out of school,”
said Randi Levine, a policy
director with Advocates for
Children of New York. “So,
we do worry that any further
gap in their education
is going to set them further
behind.”
Students across the borough — and their teachers — are adjusting
to remote learning. Pexels
Dr. Anthony Fauci, central fi gure in national coronavirus
response, draws roots in southern Brooklyn
BY JESSICA PARKS
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the
seasoned epidemiologist
at the helm of the nation’s
fi ght against the rapidlyspreading
novel coronavirus,
is the proud product of
southern Brooklyn, where
his mother and father ran
their beloved family pharmacy
for decades.
Fauci, who has served
as Director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases under
six presidents, was born
in Bensonhurst and later
moved to Dyker Heights
where his parents, Stephen
and Eugenia Fauci, opened
up Fauci Pharmacy on 13th
Avenue and 83rd Street.
Now, at the age of 79, the
infectious disease expert
fi nds himself as somewhat
of a pseudo-celebrity, having
been appointed to the
White House Coronavirus
Task Force by President
Donald Trump, where he
has been hailed as one of the
most trustworthy sources
during the crisis, according
to a study conducted by
Business Insider.
Fauci’s long history of
medicine began on 13th
Avenue, where he delivered
prescriptions for his
parents as a young boy, his
longtime friend John Gallin
said at a 2007 ceremony
for Fauci.
For elementary school,
Fauci attended Our Lady
of Guadalupe Academy, a
Catholic school in Bensonhurst
that closed last June,
and later went to Regis
High School, a free Catholic
high school in Manhattan’s
Upper East Side, where he
captained the school’s basketball
team.
Despite the family pharmacy
having long-been
shuttered, his friend said
the respected doctor continues
to exhibit Brooklyn
qualities, which have
proved helpful when steering
through pandemics —
such as the AIDS crisis, Ebola,
and Zika.
“Tony’s experiences as
the streetwise kid growing
up in Brooklyn undoubtedly
helped him
weather the storms of activist
groups,” Gallin said.
“He was the target of their
criticism and even burned
in effi gy. Instead of being
angry, Tony noted the pain
of the people in these activist
groups and approached
them as a physician approaches
a suffering patient.”
For his work on the various
outbreaks of deadly
diseases worldwide, President
George W. Bush
awarded the medicine man
the Presidential Medal of
Freedom — considered to
be the nation’s top civilian
honor.
To combat the current
outbreak of COVID-19, the
pandemic veteran has spoken
up for emergency precautionary
health measures,
such as stay-at-home
orders and domestic travel
bans, and said the president’s
extension of social
distancing guidelines until
the end of April was a “wise
and prudent decision.”
“We feel that the mitigation
that we are doing right
now is having an effect, it
is very diffi cult to quantitate
because you have two
dynamic things going on at
the same time,” Fauci said
at a March 29 press conference
at the White House’s
Rose Garden. “You have
the virus going up and you
have the mitigation trying
to push it down”
Infectious Diseases expert Anthony
Fauci. REUTERS/Al Drago