Posted on 08/19/2020 1:12:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Thursday the Tennessee Department of Education released a toolkit on child wellbeing checks to help ensure the needs of children are being met during and after extended periods away from school and to empower local communities to support child wellbeing.
To support this work, the department is setting aside $1 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding to provide regional support for districts in implementing safe and healthy practices in schools. Details of how districts may apply will be shared with directors of schools in the coming days.
In addition, a CDC grant will fund eight regional staff to support this work across the state.
“Since we know many children have experienced adversity due to the pandemic, child wellbeing checks are a deliberate way all stakeholders in the community can help ensure the needs of our children are met,” said Commissioner Penny Schwinn. “I am encouraged by the hard work and dedication of the Task Force and our districts to support kids and their holistic needs.”
In response to the pandemic’s long-term effects on Tennessee’s school districts and students, Governor Bill Lee charged Commissioner Schwinn to convene the COVID-19 Child Wellbeing Task Force. The goal of the taskforce is to help communities come together to check on our kids and support the holistic needs of Tennessee children.
To verify the wellbeing and identify needs of all Tennessee children, the Task Force will be coordinating efforts with a district designee who can identify local community entities to partner in this work. Each district’s designee, as well as regional staff hired for this work, would participate in monthly child wellbeing calls and report on the completion of child wellbeing checks for students zoned within the local community.
"Schools are working valiantly to provide supports and meet the needs of students, but they cannot be expected to do so by themselves,” said Samantha Wigand, CEO of Communities in Schools- Tennessee, and member of Child Wellbeing Task Force. “Youth serving organizations, such as CIS-TN, CIS-M, and many others are poised to amplify the work of the Task Force and partner with schools in support of students and families to help coordinate these wellbeing checks and help meet the needs of all Tennessee students.”
The wellbeing checks toolkit contains additional information and explanation on how child wellbeing checks are defined, how district designees can be selected, the wellbeing check process, the implementation process and models, templates and a resource list.
Guidelines established in this toolkit are encouraged to be enacted during any period of extended school closure, through virtual school models and when students return to school after extended periods away.
Get the kids back to school, stop this empowering local communities crap
That word “empowering”. No good sentence ever contains that.
Another nose in the tent.
Check on the kids being taught at home during pandemic hysteria.
Then check on the homeschoolers.
Then check on all kids, including during summer. Everyone. Whenever.
Resist and you go to jail, the kids to foster home.
More Federal money thrown down the rathole, providing jobs for lazy shiftless losers with education degrees.
I saw a doctor speaking recently about the lockdown and its effects on schoolkids taken out of class. I can’t remember if it was Risch or Atlas, but he said that emergency room doctors had told him that there had been a huge increase in kids showing up with serious injuries suggestive of child abuse.
As bad as the schools may be in the area of education, they’ve been one of the main avenues through which authentic and serious child abuse has been recognized and dealt with.
Or the kids are playing out doors more and doing reckless things the way kids used to and are getting cuts or breaking legs. Child abuse these days might be something like accusing parents for letting kids go over make shift bike jumps and other “dangerous” stuff like that. The implication is that schools are needed because all parents are potential abusers and not to be trusted.
I think it’s quite possible that the stresses of losing employment, being locked-down at home, and all of the fear and worry constantly being instilled by the media, may be leading to more ugly behaviors than ‘normal’.
I won’t pooh pooh that possibility but I think in a lot of cases even if times were “normal” the same folks would be prone to be as abusive as they apparently are during these times.
Let’s also not exclude the possibility that some kids now have more time to be just kids with all the scraped elbows that come it that!
Well, I wouldn’t ‘pooh pooh’ that a number of injuries are due to accidents, either.
But the doc was talking about much more serious injuries than ‘scraped elbows’.
I can easily see that the fear and stress and hardship might be pushing people over the edge - and in situations where there is no objective person to witness the child’s distress.
My main concern with the kids being out of school has to do with socialization (I know you’ll argue with that, too; but kids learn a lot by interacting with other kids and teachers in the school environment) and with the lack of even a modicum of discipline wrt actual learning, which I’m sure has existed in many households over recent months.
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