CHICAGO -- For show-and-tell Friday, Genevieve Billingsley handed her granddaughter, Alaina, a green and yellow ukulele. The 5-year-old picked at the strings in front of her iPad as she sat on the sofa in her Chicago apartment.
Already that morning, Alaina had watched a video on the weather, written her name with a large yellow pencil and practiced “finger breathing,” a mindfulness technique. Her prekindergarten teacher and special education classroom assistant offered her virtual praise and encouragement through her tablet. Occasionally Alaina paused her schoolwork to lift her Spider-Man shirt to make sure her belly button was still there.
Alaina is a student in the Virtual Academy, the remote-learning option Chicago Public Schools introduced in August for “medically fragile” students as the district returned to full-time, in-person learning for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic. CPS recently announced it is relaxing the academy’s admission guidelines for the fall and increasing access to advanced coursework.
