The Miami-Dade County School Board had unanimously voted to abandon the K12 online education program, the virtual school platform that raised harsh criticism across the district after a failed start to the remote 2020-2021 school year. Issues with K12 as a base for virtual learning had dominated the conversation during yesterday’s heated session.
“The lack of involvement in this decision, from teachers, is the problem,” said Marie Izquierdo, a public speaker. “The people who are making decisions on the new programs are not even teachers,” she continued.
The meeting had begun on Wednesday, September 9 during the afternoon at 1 p.m., to which the School Board decided to cut ties with My School Online just before 2 a.m. Board members had to address Vice Chair Steve Gallon’s catch-all proposal to investigate what underlying faults lie behind what went wrong.
Despite elongation, this had been the very first board meeting since the instigation of virtual learning on August 31. They had also allowed for public comments about MSO, which took up a majority of the time, and led the virtually live session to stretch past 3 in the morning on Thursday.
M-DCPS held its virtual gathering with the intent of confronting the district’s issues with glitches and cyberattacks to its online learning system during the first week of school. Board chair Perla Tabares to keep in mind the hardships of virtual learning for certain parents and teachers before commencing the session.
The meeting attendees consisted of hundreds of parents and teachers in the comment section who had expressed criticism regarding the poor performance of MSO. Close to 400 teachers and students submitted overwhelmingly negative responses to the K12 platform, in which Miami Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had fallen in the hotspot of condemnation.
“This is your Hurricane Katrina, and you should be ashamed of yourselves,” one mother had told the board members.
Karla Hernandez-Mats, the leading United Teachers of President Dade, praised the School Board’s decision to vote out K12 from virtual learning.
“Despite efforts made by all, this program was not up to par with the curriculum, content or quality of instruction that our educators are accustomed to providing. There were some important lessons learned in this process. The first being that decisions about the classroom should never be made without the input of our educators as they are the experts and the people who know best what their students need.”
K12’s CEO, Nate Davis, wrote a statement to the school board taking responsibility for the controversies surrounding the online educational platform. They had also acknowledged the short time frame that prevented them from meeting all necessary requirements for M-DCPS.
“Although we all knew the 6-week timeframe was a challenge, we owed it to the students, their families, and teachers to deliver. And while in any complex, high scaled solution there will be ongoing issues to solve, we will regret we have not been able to get where the Miami-Dade administration wants us to be,” wrote Davis.
When the time came for Carvalho to speak during the heated meeting, he had agreed to much of the frustrations expressed by opposing commentators. The Superintendent stated that he himself felt responsible for the inaccessibility issues and cyberattacks that bombarded MSO at the start of the school year.
No money has been paid to K12, and teachers should expect a final decision by Friday.
“This is my 13th school opening, and I have to say probably one of the most difficult ones, one of the most challenging ones,” said Carvalho.
“This was a low point for me, a low point for our school system. This was not our finest moment. It did not begin the way we expected.”
