Find Our Missing Students!

While Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced a tentative plan to reopen schools, the past year of distance learning has created well-documented learning gaps for Los Angeles students due to troubles with remote learning caused by connectivity, trauma, and more. But what hasn’t been focused on is that many students are completely missing from their virtual classrooms and there isn’t sufficient data to fully understand how immense the problem is. 

In fact, according to LAUSD’s own reporting last fall, an average of 19,000 students were missing three days of school a week, with over 8,000 of those students absent 4 or more days each week. And without clear and consistent data on this topic, we can’t be sure whether the number of students missing class is actually much higher. When E4E-LA’s team dug deeper into the data, they calculated the number of instructional minutes students have lost over the past year—which totaled an exorbitant 3.25 million hours of instruction time that was not completed. 

E4E’s own representative survey of Los Angeles Educators found that 94% of teachers reported low student engagement as a serious obstacle to effectively implementing distance learning this school year and only 23% of teachers reported that “all” students attend the entire class online.

This is a full blown crisis, and with students of color a majority in LAUSD, it is a crisis that falls squarely on the shoulders of our already vulnerable student populations, particularly Black & Latinx students. And educators know that the education system was not equitable even before distance learning. 

We need a real plan to address this crisis. Join us and hundreds of concerned teachers at our emergency meeting on Wednesday, March 24th at 4pm PST. At the meeting we will discuss strategies and list demands for the district and our schools.

Educators have put in herculean efforts to support students academically and emotionally over the past year, but we can not do it alone. We need data, guidance, and to be included in the conversation. Join us and bring your colleagues on the 24th to help make that happen. RSVP here.