By Nick Watt | CNN
“I’m not getting a fat check!” joked Kelly R as she helped her daughters with homework in the kitchen of their Los Angeles home. “But I’m hoping that the kids will benefit. That’s the biggest thing that I was worried about. All kids benefitting.”
Kelly is among the parents, students and community groups who successfully sued California, demanding more money, time and focus be spent to help underserved students – disproportionately low-income Black and Latino kids – recover from educational losses during the Covid pandemic. These students were already at a disadvantage before the pandemic, according to experts, then suffered more than students in affluent school districts during Covid and are not rebounding as quickly.
The plaintiffs were only identified by first name and last initial in the lawsuit, and Kelly asked CNN to do the same.
Kelly, like so many other parents, does not have fond memories of virtual schooling. She was stuck at home with her daughters who were ages 9, 11 and 14 when the pandemic began.
“The computers were glitchy…We live in the airport flight paths; sometimes we weren’t getting internet connection. Sometimes the school Internet connection … wasn’t working as well,” she told CNN. “We were kind of just thrown into a situation to be teachers for three different kids, you know, at three different schools … with no training at all.”
To settle the lawsuit, California agreed to spend $2 billion to help children impacted the most to recover from lost learning and the mental health impact caused by school closures during the pandemic. The federal government granted public school districts more than $190 billion between March 2020 and March 2021 for that purpose, but the plaintiffs argued that in California the state failed to ensure local districts targeted the money for students who needed the most help.
The settlement’s provisions still must be enacted into law by the state…
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