According to LeiLani Cauthen, CEO and Publisher at The Learning Counsel Delivers her Market Briefing, “This is the generation, even the parents, they grew up on their iPhones. They're expecting a pop-up in their texts to tell them what's next. And it should be 10 words or less. So the iPhone generation is demanding flexibility, unlike anything ever seen, and not just in space use, but in time. That is not predicted to go away. Since the start of the pandemic, there's been an eye-opening, new awareness of what's available commercially and therefore the model of grade and class structure specific times of day, every day, that just blew up everywhere in the pandemic.
“So the master schedule complexity is a thing you're going to see the commercial side step up in this area in the next year, there's already a lot of projects going on. Learning Counsel research is already running a demo project. That's going to be near completion in the next couple of months called the Hybrid Logistics Project, because we didn't find anything commercially that was available to really handle the massive mutations going on right now in the United States. They also have no admin time. Most superintendents are telling us, ‘Hey. So I spent all my time with pandemic battles, masks and things. And I don't have that. I don't have time to really think about the future. I'm in a mad scramble all the time.’ That's continuing this Fall. We don't see it letting up until maybe late fall and going into next year, which is also going to mean that there's a huge bundle of Cares Act money that's going to hover - like the bulk of the money that's been out there has not been spent. It will probably not all be spent for at least five years.
“That's what happened with our 2008 or whatever year that was with the first big stimulus that hit the United States. It took five years to spend all that money. It's going to take that long, at least, for all of these Cares Act monies. Before the pandemic, we were at 27 percent of the United States population of school, age kids already opted out. The fastest growing segment was homeschooling even then, at 20 percent annually, that's 55 million kids, probably closer to 56 million where we're at now. In 2020, the average defection away from traditional public was 3.6 percent per district to any alternative. So that could have been a charter school, a private school, a homeschool.
“Many districts are experiencing well above that 3.6 percent still. The estimate of a total of 33.6 percent now opted out is conservative. I just saw an article about the fact that an average of 2 million moms left their work and now homeschool. So there's been a whole trend away from continuing to work during the pandemic. And a lot of those moms are not going to go back to work. Um, so the immediate was over 5 million students nationally on top of the earlier numbers. So, and those losses are continuing in 2021 because we're in a very shaky landscape. Maybe there's another lockdown, or maybe there's a surge over here.”
For the complete briefing, click on the link. It is definitely must-see video!
