Dear Commons Community,

Payton S. Gendron, the suspect in the fatal shooting of 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket Saturday, was reportedly haunted in his writing by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — a viciously racist view of the world that has been touted by far-right conservatives such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson (see video above).

Gendron repeatedly returned to the conspiracy in his 180-page online manifesto that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by people of color by immigration, interracial marriage and eventually violence, The New York Times reported Saturday. Almost all of the victims in the mass shooting were Black.

Gendron, 18, referred to “racial replacement” and “white genocide” in his writings, according to the Times. The first page included a symbol known as the sonnenrad, or black sun, which was once used by German Nazis but has been adopted by white supremacist neo-Nazis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In an interview on CNN Saturday night, Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), who represents Buffalo, called the mass shooting part of a planned, “organized” effort to attack the minority community within an “element in our society that is blatantly racist, and they’re violent.”

The horrific crime “points to an effort to exact domestic terrorism that is racially motivated,” he added. “That threat to our community in Buffalo and western New York is a threat to the nation.”

This is a “problem that’s pervasive and growing,” he warned.

“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said of Gendron, who traveled some 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to carry out the attack. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”

The “great replacement” rhetoric was once considered an extreme-right belief, but has edged toward the mainstream with winks from politicians and outright support on right-wing programs, including Tucker Carlson’s.

Just a week ago, Carlson was dubbed in an MSNBC column the “No. 1 champion” of the racist ideology ― someone who repeatedly warns of invasions of “illegals” and has insisted that President Joe Biden wants to “change the racial mix” of the nation.

In September, Media Matters reported that Carlson launched a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.”

The conspiracy motivated white nationalists who marched in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia (who were described as “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump). “Jews will not replace us,” marchers chanted.

The conspiracy has been cited as motivation in several racist mass shootings, including the killing of 20 people in an El Paso store in 2019 and the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

“It is the most mass-violence-inspiring idea in white supremacist circles right now,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Times.

About 60% of extremist murders in the U.S. between 2009 and 2019 were committed by people espousing white supremacist ideologies like the replacement theory, according to the ADL.

“A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation,” Biden said in a statement Saturday after the shooting.

“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” he added. “Hate must have no safe harbor. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fueled domestic terrorism.”

Tony

An artist’s rendering of the space hotel. (Orbital Assembly)

Dear Commons Community,

Orbital Assembly Corporation announced a new project that could launch a space hotel into orbit as soon as 2025; they plan to design two new stations customized to accommodate space tourism. The first, which might launch in just three years, has been coined Pioneer Station—and it’s an all-inclusive luxury dwelling that offers “incredible views of space from the comfort of your own hotel room stocked with gravity,” notes the company’s website.

According to its brochure, the Pioneer will be the first hybrid space station for both work and stay and offers accommodations for up to 28 people. The larger hotel, dubbed Voyager, can hold as many as 400 guests and is scheduled to open in 2027. “Voyager is a rotating space station designed to produce varying levels of artificial gravity by increasing or decreasing the rate of rotation,” OAC’s website states. “Artificial, or simulated, gravity is essential to long term habitation in space.” Though gravity is not yet available on either station, both Pioneer and Voyager are slated to have this technology in place by their respective launch dates; this will allow passengers to move around freely, just as they would on Earth.

Each station is shaped like a wheel with modules built around the Gravity Ring (see image above), which is believed to be the first, at-scale platform capable of providing this level of artificial gravity, notes the company’s press release. These modules will house office spaces and research facilities that will be available for rent. Military groups, research organizations, and other entities will be able to launch and attach to this Gravity Ring, which “can simulate all levels of gravity including Mars,” the release states.

While guests will still experience some weightlessness during their stay, the Gravity Ring makes it possible for them to easily drink out of a cup—and they won’t need to be strapped down to their beds at night, SmithsonianMagazine reports. Early designs of both Pioneer and Voyager’s interiors are indicative of an experience that doesn’t look too dissimilar to a luxury hotel here on Earth, with complete kitchens, bars, and more.

Beam me up, Scotty!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a column this morning entitled, “Too Much Church in the State”, examining the makeup of the US Supreme Court in light of a possible ruling on abortion that might overturn Roe v. Wade.  Here is an excerpt:

“There is an astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court — six out of the nine justices, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and went to the same Jesuit boys’ high school in a Maryland suburb that Brett Kavanaugh and my nephews did, Georgetown Prep.

My father was furious that Catholic presidential candidates Al Smith and J.F.K. had to defend themselves against scurrilous charges that, if they got to the White House, they would take their orders from the pope.

One must tread carefully here. A Catholic signed on to the Roe v. Wade decision and another was in the court majority that upheld it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic, has expressed support for Roe, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic, may be working for a compromise decision that can uphold Roe.

Still, this Catholic feels an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping (or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down.”

Dowd has an interesting slant on this.

The entire column is below.

Tony

——————————————

The New York Times

Too Much Church in the State

By Maureen Dowd

May 14, 2022

WASHINGTON — During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett tried to reassure Democrats who were leery of her role as a “handmaid” in a Christian group called “People of Praise.”

The group has a male-dominated hierarchy and a rigid view of sexuality reflecting conservative gender norms and rejecting openly gay men and women. Men, the group’s decision makers, “headed” their wives.

Justice Barrett said then that she would not impose her personal beliefs on the country. “Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion’ — and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she said amicably. “It’s not the law of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.”

Yet that’s what seems to be coming. Like a royal queen, she will impose her will on the world. It will be the law of Amy. And Sam. And Clarence. And Neil. And Brett.

It’s outrageous that five or six people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views on the rest of the country. While they will certainly provide the legal casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation. There are prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.

As a Catholic whose father lived through the Irish Catholics “need not apply” era, I’m happy to see Catholics do well in the world. There is an astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court — six out of the nine justices, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and went to the same Jesuit boys’ high school in a Maryland suburb that Brett Kavanaugh and my nephews did, Georgetown Prep.

My father was furious that Catholic presidential candidates Al Smith and J.F.K. had to defend themselves against scurrilous charges that, if they got to the White House, they would take their orders from the pope.

One must tread carefully here. A Catholic signed on to the Roe v. Wade decision and another was in the court majority that upheld it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic, has expressed support for Roe, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic, may be working for a compromise decision that can uphold Roe.

Still, this Catholic feels an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping (or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down.

I come from a family that hews to the Catholic dictates on abortion, and I respect the views of my relatives. But it’s hard for me to watch the church trying to control women’s sexuality after a shocking number of its own priests sexually assaulted children and teenagers for decades, and got recycled into other parishes, as the church covered up the whole scandal. It is also hard to see the church couch its anti-abortion position in the context of caring for women when it continues to keep women in subservient roles in the church.

Religiosity is a subject some Catholics on the court have been more open about in recent years.

Last year, at Thomas Aquinas College in California, Justice Samuel Alito fretted that there was growing cultural hostility toward Christianity and Catholicism. “There is a real movement to suppress the expression of anything that opposes the secular orthodoxy,” he said. Precisely which belief or practice of his religion does he feel he has been denied?

President Biden is a Catholic who is uncomfortable with the issue of abortion despite his support for Roe. Still, when Barrett was a law professor at Notre Dame, a group she belonged to unanimously denounced the university’s decision to honor Biden even though he didn’t support the church’s position on abortion.

We have no one in the public arena like Mario Cuomo, who respected the multiplicity of values in an open society and had the guts to wade into the lion’s den at Notre Dame in 1984.

“The Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic democracy — who is elected to serve Jews and Muslims, atheists and Protestants, as well as Catholics — bears special responsibility,” Cuomo said. “He or she undertakes to help create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom; where everyone who chooses may hold beliefs different from specifically Catholic ones — sometimes contradictory to them; where the laws protect people’s right to divorce, to use birth control and even to choose abortion.”

The explosive nature of Alito’s draft opinion on Roe has brought to the fore how radical the majority on the court is, willing to make women fit with their zealous worldview — a view most Americans reject. It has also shown how radical Republicans are; although after pushing for this result for decades, because it made a good political weapon, they are now pretending it’s no big deal. We will all have to live with the catastrophic results of their zealotry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugaCCP6Okck

Dear Commons Community,

Ten people were killed and three others injured in what authorities have described as a “racially-motivated” shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket yesterday (see video reporting above).

Police arrested Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white male, after he ― armed with an assault rifle and wearing a tactical vest ― opened fire outside and inside the Tops Friendly Market. The market is in a predominately Black neighborhood, about 3 miles north of downtown Buffalo.

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting a hate crime.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“This was pure evil,” Garcia said. “It was straight up racially-motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us.”

Eleven of the 13 people who were shot are Black and two are white. At a press conference Saturday night, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) called the shooter “a white supremacist who has engaged in an act of terrorism, and will be prosecuted as such.”

Gendron traveled from Conklin, NY, about a three and a half hour drive from Buffalo.

“This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at a news conference. “The depth of pain that families are feeling and that all of us are feeling right now cannot even be explained.”

Police also confirmed that the suspect live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. In a statement, a Twitch spokesperson confirmed there was a live broadcast of the shooting, and said the company was working to monitor for any potential re-streams of the content.

The identities of the victims have not been released, but Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Saturday that one of the victims was a retired Buffalo police officer who was working as a security guard for the store. Gramaglia said the security guard was killed when he exchanged gunfire with the suspect, striking the gunman once in his armor plating.

Pure evil indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

White House press secretary Jen Psaki stood at the podium in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room for the last time yesterday (see video clip above), facing questions on crises old and new, foreign and domestic. She addressed the baby formula shortage and gun violence, immigration and war.

She also addressed the journalists seated and standing before her. “You have challenged me. You have pushed me. You have debated me — and at times we have disagreed,” she said. “That is democracy in action.”

Tearing up, Psaki acknowledged that her plans to “keep it together” were being undone in the moment. Her successor, principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, watched from a chair alongside several of her loyal deputies in the White House communications department.

A spokeswoman for the State Department during the Obama administration, Psaki did not work on the Biden campaign, but beat out several well-regarded candidates for the job when she was named to the position shortly after the 2020 presidential election. Her immediate task was to move beyond the atmosphere of animosity and recrimination that had marked the Trump years, when the president himself would sometimes spar with members of the press.

“There will be times when we see things differently in this room — I mean, among all of us. That’s OK. That’s part of our democracy,” she said at her first briefing.

An analysis by Business Insider found that Psaki held 224 briefings in all, more than the total conducted by all four of Trump’s press secretaries (Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany). It was rare for her to go two consecutive days without a briefing, whereas, by contrast, Grisham did not hold a single briefing.

Psaki could sometimes be short with reporters, and progressives on social media delighted at the “Psaki bombs” she deployed to cut off unwelcome inquiries. Heated exchanges with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy became a regular occurrence, one that seemed to benefit both the conservative network and the White House.

Psaki’s biggest misstep was likely her quip — made as a new coronavirus surge was underway — about the White House sending coronavirus tests to every American, an idea she plainly found preposterous.

“Should we just send one to every American?” Psaki fired back sarcastically at NPR reporter Mara Liasson, who had asked about making the tests free. Days later, the Biden administration announced it was, in fact, providing Americans with free tests.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Psaki used her expertise in foreign affairs to capably detail the administration’s approach to the war without making the kinds of gaffes that complicate international relations. The invasion almost certainly prolonged her tenure at the White House by several months.

The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, praised Psaki as “one of the best press secretaries ever.

Even when Chris Wallace was at Fox News, a frequent critic of the Bident administration, he called Psaki one of the best ever.

Psaki has restored honor, dignity and class to the White House briefing room after four years of Donald Trump press secretaries, who seemed more interested in picking fights and criticizing the media than effectively communicating that administration’s policies and agenda.

Stephanie Grisham, a White House press secretary under Trump, even wrote a book about how dysfunctional it was to work as press secretary in Trump’s White House. In “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Grisham wrote she never held an official press conference: “I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic.”

Psaki was certainly a welcome change from her immediate predecessor, Kayleigh McEnany, who goes down as one of the most incompetent press secretaries ever. (McEnany’s daily pokes at Democrats and the media now fit right in at Fox News.)

Psaki was consistently prepared, effective in communicating for the president and, even when sparring with media members, always respectful. Even her frequent foe in the White House briefing room — Fox News’ Peter Doocy — had kind words for her when she announced she was leaving the post. (And Psaki was kind in return.) Doocy told Psaki, “You’ve always been a good sport. So on behalf of everybody, thank you for everything.”

Psaki will soon start a new gig at MSNBC, where she is expected to be a high-profile on-air personality, especially as the congressional midterms approach. Jean-Pierre, the new White House press secretary, will begin work on Monday.

She was a breadth of fresh air.

We wish her well!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A total lunar eclipse (see video above) will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual sights for stargazers across North and South America.

The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about 1 1/2 hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade. It will be the first so-called blood moon in a year.

Observers in the eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America will have prime seats for the whole show, weather permitting. Partial stages of the eclipse will be visible across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Left out: Alaska, Asia and Australia.

“This is really an eclipse for the Americas,” said NASA’s Noah Petro, a planetary geologist who specializes in the moon. “It’s going to be a treat.”

All you need, he noted, are “patience and eyeballs.”

A total eclipse occurs when Earth passes directly between the moon and the sun, and casts a shadow on our constant, cosmic companion. The moon will be 225,000 miles (362,000 kilometers) away at the peak of the eclipse — around midnight on the U.S. East Coast.

“This is this gradual, slow, wonderful event that as long as it’s clear where you are, you get to see it,” Petro said.

If not, NASA will provide a livestream of the eclipse from various locations; so will the Slooh network of observatories.

There’ll be another lengthy total lunar eclipse in November, with Africa and Europe lucking out again, but not the Americas. Then the next one isn’t until 2025.

Launched last fall, NASA’s asteroid-seeking Lucy spacecraft will photograph this weekend’s event from 64 million miles (103 million kilometers) away, as ground controllers continue their effort to fix a loose solar panel.

NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, a geologist, plans to set her alarm clock early aboard the International Space Station.

“Hopefully, we can be up in time and be at the right place at the right time to catch a good glimpse,” she told The Associated Press earlier this week.

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

At an event in  Dallas last night, Justice Clarence Thomas says the Supreme Court has been changed “forever” by the shocking leak of a draft opinion earlier this month. The opinion suggests the court is poised to overturn the right to an abortion recognized nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade.

The conservative Thomas, who joined the court in 1991 and has long called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, described the leak as an unthinkable breach of trust. As reported by the Associated Press.

“When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like kind of an infidelity that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it,” he said while speaking at a conference Friday evening in Dallas.

The court has said the draft does not represent the final position of any of the court’s members, and Chief Justice John Roberts has ordered an investigation into the leak.

Thomas, a nominee of President George H.W. Bush, said it was beyond “anyone’s imagination” before the May 2 leak of the opinion to Politico that even a line of a draft opinion would be released in advance, much less an entire draft that runs nearly 100 pages. Politico has also reported that in addition to Thomas, conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett had voted with the draft opinion’s author, Samuel Alito, to overrule Roe v. Wade and a 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that affirmed Roe’s finding of a constitutional right to abortion.

Thomas said that previously, “if someone said that one line of one opinion” would be leaked, the response would have been: “Oh, that’s impossible. No one would ever do that.”

“Now that trust or that belief is gone forever,” Thomas said at the Old Parkland Conference, which describes itself as a conference “to discuss alternative proven approaches to tackling the challenges facing Black Americans today.”

Thomas also said at one point: “I do think that what happened at the court is tremendously bad…I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.”

Thomas also touched in passing on the protests by liberals at conservative justices’ homes in Maryland and Virginia that followed the draft opinion’s release. Thomas argued that conservatives have never acted that way.

“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way. We didn’t throw temper tantrums. I think it is … incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not to repay tit for tat,” he said.

Thomas was speaking before an audience as part of a conversation with John Yoo, who is now a Berkeley Law professor but worked for Thomas for a year in the early 1990s as a law clerk.

Each justice generally has four law clerks every year and the current group of law clerks has been a focus of speculation as a possible source of the draft opinion’s leak. They are one of a few groups along with the justices and some administrative staff that has access to draft opinions.

Thomas also answered a few questions from the audience, including one from a man who asked about the friendships between liberal and conservative justices on the court, such as a well-known friendship between the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. “How can we foster that same type of relationship within Congress and within the general population?” the man asked.

“Well, I’m just worried about keeping it at the court now,” Thomas responded. He went on to speak in glowing terms about former colleagues. “This is not the court of that era,” he said.

Tony

Kathy Barnette

Dear Commons Community,

The sudden rise of conservative commentator and author Kathy Barnette in polls  is shaking up the Republican Pennsylvania Senate primary race.   

A Fox News poll showed Barnette within striking distance of Mehmet Oz,  Donald Trump’s candidate.  In response, Trump released a statement slamming Barnette as too weak to face the Democrat in the general election.  A reported by The Huffington Post.

“Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats,” Trump said Thursday in a news release from his political action committee.

In the same statement, Trump left the door open to supporting her if she wins, an effort to cover his bases in light of increasing scrutiny about the waning power of his political endorsements.

“She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party — and I will be behind her all the way,” he said.

Barnette, who wrote a book about being Black and conservative and who has never held public office, has a lengthy history of anti-Muslim and anti-gay statements, according to CNN. She falsely accused former President Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim and has suggested banning Islam. She’s also dabbled in fraud conspiracies concerning the 2020 election.

The Fox poll from Tuesday showed Barnette with 19% of the vote, just behind Oz at 22% and former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick at 20%. It also had 18% of voters still undecided.

National Republicans are choosing to stay out of the fray for now. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is neutral when it comes to the primary. On Thursday, he downplayed concerns about Barnette’s viability as a general election candidate and projected confidence about winning the open seat no matter who comes out on top.

“We’ll win Pennsylvania,” Scott told HuffPost.

But Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the vice chair of the Senate GOP conference, defended Barnette by calling her “extraordinary.”

“Just because you’re a political newcomer doesn’t mean we write you off,” Ernst said in an interview with CNN.

Trump on Thursday also announced a tele-rally for Oz just days after he traveled to the state to hold a MAGA rally for the former “Dr. Oz Show” host — another sign that the former president believes Oz might need his last-minute help before Tuesday’s primary. ​​At the live rally last Friday, Trump had trouble selling the crowd on Oz, who got booed on stage.

Barnette’s rise in the race’s home stretch is stunning considering the millions Oz and McCormick have spent introducing themselves to voters and trashing each other in TV ads. They’ve each questioned the other’s conservative credentials, ties to China and spotty residency links to the state they want to represent in Congress.

Democrats have their own primary headaches to contend with ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the most competitive races of the cycle. But they couldn’t help gloating a little on Thursday about the situation that Republicans find themselves in.

“We have a challenge this year for sure, but this primary they’re having ― it’s so negative, so rancorous, so divisive that I think it’s going to hurt their nominee,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) said.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden yesterday marked the “tragic milestone” of 1 million American lives lost to COVID-19, calling each death an “irreplaceable loss.” 

“One million empty chairs around the dinner table,” Biden said in a statement (see video above). “Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them.”

Biden directed flags on government buildings to be flown at half-staff for five days.

Though COVID-19 counts vary, the White House uses data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins University, which showed deaths approaching the 1 million mark Thursday morning.

“I know the pain of that black hole in your heart,” said Biden, who has dealt with the loss of two of his children and his first wife. “But I also know the ones you love are never truly gone. They will always be with you.”

The president urged Congress to approve additional funding he requested to fight the pandemic. Without more money, the United States will lose its place in line for new COVID-19 treatments and vaccines for the fall when a new variant could hit, according to the administration.

A tragedy none of us expected in our lifetimes!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York City is planning to launch two virtual schools, education department officials said during a City Council hearing on Tuesday, though key details about how and when they will be created have yet to be revealed.

City officials told local lawmakers that launching the “full-time” virtual schools will be part of the solution to high rates of chronic absenteeism and re-engaging students in the wake of pandemic disruption. About 37% of the city’s K-12 students are on track to be chronically absent, defined as missing at least 10% of the school year, substantially higher than the years before the pandemic.  As reported by Chalkbeat.

“I believe that virtual learning is here to stay whether or not we have a pandemic,” schools Chancellor David Banks said. He added that students should be “exposed to the best teaching, the best experiences all over the world.”

Banks has signaled since taking office in January that he’s interested in creating more permanent virtual learning options, even as the city has required all students to attend in person this school year. And, amid the Omicron surge this winter, the schools chief said he hoped to revive virtual learning as many parents kept their children home out of fear of exposure or were stuck in quarantines. But he indicated it was difficult to negotiate with the city’s teachers union and the option never materialized. 

Creating separate virtual schools may help overcome one of the key problems with virtual learning during the pandemic: the task fell to individual schools to figure out how to simultaneously staff in-person and remote classrooms. Standalone virtual schools that rely on separate teaching staff would ease that burden, though it’s not clear if that is the model officials are planning.

A virtual model would likely appeal to parents who have lingering fears about the virus or whose children preferred remote instruction. It may also appeal to families whose children have more significant medical issues that make them vulnerable to COVID or other illnesses. The city’s current programming for those students typically only offers an hour a day of instruction.

Many details are unclear about the new virtual schools. City officials did not answer emailed questions about how they will operate, such as which grades will be served, when they would start, or who would staff the program. Nathaniel Styer, a department spokesperson, wrote that the department “will have more to say soon.”

Dick Riley, a spokesperson for the United Federation of Teachers, wrote in an email that the union “had some initial conversations” about the virtual schools “but nothing concrete so far.”

If students are allowed to enroll in separate virtual schools, that could create headaches for some schools and district leaders. Depending on the number of students who are allowed to enroll, the virtual schools could exacerbate enrollment problems at brick-and-mortar campuses, potentially redirecting funding from some campuses and creating more pressure to consolidate or close them. The city’s district schools have seen enrollment slide about 6.4% since the pandemic hit.

Some districts across the country, including Denver, ran virtual programs before the pandemic led to mass closures in March 2020.  Denver previously offered a virtual high school option but has since expanded to cover other grades.

Philadelphia and Detroit created virtual academies during the pandemic. Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school district behind New York City, plans to launch new virtual schools this fall. Chalkbeat previously reported that as some districts separated virtual academies from their regular schools, there tended to be less interest in them in part because there were fewer opportunities to interact with their classmates and teachers.

Before the pandemic, New York City experimented with remote learning on a small scale, including a pilot program intended to expand access to advanced coursework for students attending 15 schools in the Bronx. 

Still, the education department has a mixed track record when it comes to creating virtual options. In the summer of 2020, the city scrambled to scale up a virtual summer program built off a centralized platform. It ran into serious technical difficulties, and some teachers struggled to connect with students they had never met in person.

Tom Liam Lynch, who runs the website InsideSchools, and worked with the education department to implement a digital learning platform a decade ago, said he’s confident the education department can pull off a virtual option despite previous stumbles. 

“Post-COVID, being able to successfully learn online is just going to be an ongoing part of what it means to be a student, what it means to be a worker, what it means to be civically engaged in society,” Lynch said.

I agree!

Tony