January 13, 2021

Rutigliano, Trumbull Legislators Join Call for Legislation Establishing Minimum Guidelines for Remote Learning

This article was archived from the previous WordPress site. Formatting and media should be close, but may not match the original post perfectly.

HARTFORD—State Reps. David Rutigliano (R-123), Laura Devlin (R-134) and Ben McGorty (R-122) joined their House Republican colleagues in the call for critical legislation aimed at establishing clear minimum guidelines for remote learning for Connecticut students.

“As many school districts continue remote learning due to the Covid pandemic, we need to ensure that all Connecticut children have equal access to quality education,” said Rep. Rutigliano. “Setting a baseline with minimum expectations, will help students achieve critical educational benchmarks while also preventing the opportunity gap between suburban and urban school districts from growing wider.”

The Trumbull legislators say they are concerned that the inadequacies of remote learning will erode years of legal and policy efforts aimed at narrowing educational inequities between communities. In Connecticut’s 10 lowest-performing Alliance districts, nearly 61 percent of students have been learning remotely compared to the statewide average of 33 percent. Absenteeism is a serious problem too—a December media report, for example, indicated that 1 in 3 public school children in New Haven had missed 10 percent of school days during the pandemic. Overall, the three Republican legislators say that more consistency is needed to measure student participation and engagement once children are logged into a virtual platform. Logging in and submitting work are the dominant metrics.

The proposed legislation would require:

Uniform minimum requirements to be set by the State Department of Education for distance learning that would require online classroom participation by students, while also requiring virtual settings to feature the same amount of teacher instruction time as classroom settings;
Minimum standards for students and educators for classwork as well as assigning grades for completed work;
State-supported teacher training in remote/distance learning;
In-person education for special needs students unless the school can demonstrate that their educational requirements can be met through distance learning;
The State Department of Education to provide periodic review of whether such minimal standards are being met;
Towns to use the first three snow days as traditional snow days with school off and allow subsequent snow days to be substituted for virtual learning that may be counted towards the school’s 180-day requirement.

The proposed legislation would not prohibit local school districts from establishing more stringent standards if they chose to do so.

###