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Keeping kids in school during pandemic – that means finding them first

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 08:19:08 GMT

Keeping kids in school during pandemic has been tough in Washington – at least 29,000 can’t be found

In October, when Daniella got a call from the Kent School District, she had been away from school for so long that she didn’t even know where to start to get back in.

A couple years ago, she felt out of place at a new high school and stopped going. She tried an alternative high school completion program run by the district called iGrad.

Then COVID-19 hit. Her dad, who paints and fixes up houses, was cobbling together small jobs and gone a lot. When around, he urged her to go to school, but she lost motivation and left iGrad in October 2020. She looked after the house. Months passed. “If schools were open, I feel like I could go back and actually talk to someone,” said the now-18-year-old. But they had long since gone remote.

Around the state and country, school districts have grappled with big enrollment drops and high numbers of disengaged students during the pandemic – to the extent that some, as far as educators know, have gone missing. They are not going to school anywhere at all.

“Disengagement isn’t a new problem, but this is a different kind of magnitude,” said Krissy Johnson, assistant director of attendance and engagement for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).

One measure – the percentage of students attending Washington public schools in a given spring who don’t return in the fall and aren’t on record as home schooling, in private school, in another state or receiving a diploma or GED – shows an increasingly troubling pattern. Excluding prekindergarten students, about 23,300 kids disappeared from sight in 2019, as best as educators can tell. (They noted reporting from early years is less reliable.) The year after COVID hit, the number of missing kids shot up to roughly 27,800, the following year more than 29,000.

Not known is whether any of the students have come back.

Heartbreakers, dream fakers, money takers

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 08:19:08 GMT

Heartbreakers, dream fakers, money takers: Romance scams are rising

Awoman quickly realized she was being catfished by one of her Bumble matches after receiving "green" text messages from him, according to her now-viral video.

The video was posted to TikTok on January 29 by Jocelyn (@jjustjocelyn), who wrote: "As if dating wasn't hard enough already." So far, the post has received over 1 million views and thousands of comments that revealed catfishing to be a prevalent problem in the online dating landscape.

Cybersecurity is a Growing Concern

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 08:19:08 GMT

Cybersecurity is a growing concern in all areas of life. Businesses and political entities were put on high alert when the SolarWinds hack took place back in 2019. Individuals have...

1. Do Your Homework with Providers
Most of these recommendations have to do with cleaning up existing financial investments. However, it’s worth taking a moment to point out that the first step in protecting your finances is choosing the right providers to work with.

2. Identify Your Risks
Before you start making specific changes to your accounts, you need to understand where your risks are coming from. This is understandably a very open-ended request. There is no end to the number of fraudulent threats that both exist and are coming into existence.

3. Guard Against Identity Theft
Your identity is the primary gateway to your financial investments. There are plenty of ways that a criminal can try to raid a single account. But if they can masquerade as you, they have a real shot at getting into multiple places.

4. Cover the Basics
Thus far, we’ve discussed high-level activities to protect financial investments. However, at a certain point, you also need to get down in the trenches and do some of the dirty work.

These basic security activities revolve around simple-yet-crucial safety measures that are as old as the internet. For instance, when discussing safeguarding financial information, Finra starts off with the triple recommendation to protect usernames, passwords, and PINs..

5. Protect Your Network and Devices
Along with your digital passwords and PINs, you also want to protect your physical hardware. This includes your network (i.e. your router) and the devices that you use to access the internet via that network.

There are many ways that you can protect your local network and devices.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern in all areas of life. Businesses and political entities were put on high alert when the SolarWinds hack took place back in 2019. Individuals have also suffered from countless numbers of data breaches in recent years, including big-wig names like Yahoo and Target.