Niecea Wilson: Land of the Free and Appropriate Education - How One Tiny School District is Coping with COVID-19
Niecea Wilson, Fulbright ETA 2018-2019 at Agriculture and Veterinary High School in Lanskroun, reports on her experience returning to teach in the USA and the effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning in Downieville, a picturesque mountain town of 300 residents in the heart of the Sierra-Nevadas. New teachers are told if they can persist through the difficulties of the first year, nothing is impossible. Well, this is my third year teaching, (my first year back in the United States after completing my 2018-2019 Fulbright ETA in Lanškroun, Czechia) and it has certainly been the most difficult. A year that began with rolling power outages, leaving millions of Californians without electricity, now concludes with a global pandemic that shut our schools so abruptly, many of us didn’t get to say goodbye to our students. Everything just came to a standstill. School districts and states are now grappling with how to administer free and appropriate public education, a right to all stu...