THE VILLAGE

Brooke Pinto at her June 27 swearing-in as District Council member representing Ward 2. Courtesy Office of Council member Brooke Pinto.

Brooke Pinto’s ‘Business Perspective’

NEW WARD 2 COUNCIL REP OFF TO A RUNNING START

BY CHRISTOPHER JONES

As the youngest District Council member ever elected and the first woman to represent Ward 2, Democrat Brooke Pinto, 28, is off to a running start after assuming the seat vacated by Jack Evans. Evans had held the post since 1991 — before Pinto was born.

Though she’s only resided in D.C. for six years, Pinto had gained significant legal and political experience prior to winning the special election to succeed Evans in June. Graduating from Georgetown Law in 2016, she served as a tax lawyer for the District Office of Tax and Revenue and, under Attorney General Karl Racine, rose to become D.C.’s assistant attorney general for policy and legislation.

“I love this city. This is where I will be for the rest of my life. It’s where I plan to raise my family, once I have a family,” Pinto said.

But, what a time to step into office — in the summer of the coronavirus pandemic, the economic crisis and the waves of protest stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement. For Pinto, however, great challenges inspire fresh governing opportunities. “I feel really grateful to have the opportunity to lead during this moment in our history,” she said.

Pinto assumed office just as the Council’s budgeting season was heating up. She quickly steered $500,000 toward the Georgetown Business Improvement District for expanded sidewalks, while helping to secure another $500,000 to refurbish the C&O Canal in Georgetown and $7 million to remodel the Jelleff Recreation Center. She also supported the city’s purchase of Georgetown Day School to help relieve crowding at Hardy Middle School.

“The revitalization and recovery of our small business community is front-ofmind,” Pinto said. To assist small businesses, she’s working on a raft of initiatives. She is aiming to help pass massive direct grants to keep shops and restaurants running, maintain employees on the payroll and enable retail tenants to pay rent. Not only did she help business owners process their PPP loans and navigate cumbersome red tape, she also helped them receive a waiver on their sales tax deadlines.

To help set up “streateries,” Pinto intervened to reduce regulatory demands for outdoor dining liability insurance. She is seeking to “incentivize short-term leasing” to address high vacancy rates through tax code adjustments or direct credits. On the Council, she helped eliminate the proposed advertising tax that would have saddled businesses and publications with heavy costs.

“We’re also trying to think creatively about ways we can utilize our spaces to benefit our small businesses,” Pinto said. The Rose Park Farmer’s Market in Georgetown might be opened up to a more diverse range of small businesses. Water Street could be converted to an outdoor dining and market space, not only boosting local socially distanced commerce, but also helping to stem some of the crime in the area.

With an undergraduate degree in business and hospitality from Cornell University, Pinto is especially attuned to the importance of revitalizing the District’s service, hotel and tourist industries. “I think from a business perspective,” she said, noting that it’s essential “to understand how important our hotels are and tourism is to our local economy.”

Social justice issues also permeate Pinto’s agenda. “I feel very inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and think it’s incredibly important and far overdue,” she said. She seeks systemic reforms in the criminal justice system and an expansion of restorative justice programs. She is also committed to diversity in staff hiring, as well as in the range of viewpoints her staff considers. And she supports D.C. statehood.

“I’m really glad to be on the Judiciary Committee so that I can have an opportunity to really implement some of these important measures,” she said. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s pandemic response and the decision to shift D.C. schools to virtual learning this fall are also measures Pinto supports. However, she emphasizes that “we’re doing everything we can to get our children back to school as quickly as possible.”

Right now, Pinto said, “we’re seeing how important it is for the government to run efficiently, to be productive, to be responsive, to be transparent. So that gives me an added sense of commitment and responsibility.”

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Courtesy of Gerogetown University.

“There’s been more experimentation with pedagogy in the last five months at Georgetown than in the last 200 years.”

Courtesy of Fritz Photography.

— Douglas Reed of Georgetown University

VIRTUAL LEARNING IS HERE TO STAY

BY CHRISTOPHER JONES

As the nation grapples with the everwidening coronavirus pandemic and the imminent start of the 2020-21 school year, families are scrambling to adjust to virtual learning from home. Having perceived the rocky end of the spring academic term as a wash educationally, many are leery of returning to online learning on the first day of school.

Given the economic and familial stresses during the pandemic and the interruptions to children’s learning and socialization, parents are longing for kids to return to school or college, with traditional daily instruction from their teachers and professors. But, like it or not, virtual learning is here to stay.

“While day-to-day life will perhaps return to ‘normal’ at some point, for education, there will have to be a new ‘normal,’” writes Robert Speed, vice president at education technology firm Blackboard. “Learners will now expect to be able to seamlessly switch between in-person and virtual formats, particularly in times of crisis.”

The good news is that significant positives may result, according to Georgetown University’s Douglas S. Reed, co-founder and director of GU’s master’s program in educational transformation. Virtual learning can “heighten flexibility for students,” he says, and “can also lead to student ownership” of their intellectual development, where pupils are “not just given more tasks, but more responsibility for surfacing what they’re learning and [for] sharing that in a more collaborative exercise.”

The move toward virtual instruction has accelerated not only due to the pandemic but thanks to expanding broadband connectivity, the proliferation of educational media online (including courses from institutions of higher learning), advancements in datadriven and virtual reality programming and the growing pool of tech-savvy teachers.

As a high-school history teacher for over 30 years, I can attest that the transition from the old-school, “Sage on the Stage” model to a greater emphasis on virtual teaching long preceded the onset of the pandemic. School administrators have promoted the idea of the “flipped classroom” for years. In this approach, students absorb online content posted by their instructors for homework and teachers use follow-up classes for related activities. Blended-learning instructional methods — flexibly combining online and traditional approaches — also long preceded the current crisis.

Before retiring from the classroom last year (I last taught at a D.C. private school), I was thrilled to have virtual teaching tools available to deepen students’ learning. Students could post their own iMovie, Prezi or graphics-interface projects on the class’s or the school’s homepage, use online discussion boards to delve deeply into prompts, create virtual newspapers, posters or comic strips, quiz each other on Kahoot! or deploy interactive editing features within Google Docs to write collaborative speeches and peer-edit each other’s work.

As an online tutor now, I’m amazed how much more directly I can guide students’ writing, editing and critical thinking progress as we work together, sharing screens and documents via Zoom.

In the halls of academe, profound changes are underway to prepare for the Brave New World of virtual learning. Georgetown’s Reed, who teaches courses in law, government and education, is currently developing a new course in instructional design and technology.

Reed credits GU’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship with rapidly training hundreds of faculty members in the new modalities of online learning through the center’s Course Development Institute.

“One thing we really learned last spring is that Zoom fatigue is very real,” Reed said. Finding “visual cues from very tiny spaces” when it’s hard to “read the room” is exhausting. To adjust, Reed parceled out smaller chunks of material for students to work on asynchronously, with discussion, collaboration and student-driven discovery of the materials during “synchronous” (that is, live) virtual classroom sessions.

Class size is critically important for success on Zoom, Reed pointed out. “I had a graduate seminar [on Zoom] with six Ph.D. students in the spring and that was fine,” he said. However, much larger classes, where professors or teachers simply lecture on Zoom, can be “like a bludgeon” on the students — not to mention disheartening for instructors as they cast about and only see blank boxes with students’ turned-off video screens.

Asked about the future of the conventional lecture model, Reed foresees a permanent change. “The conventional lecture class may very well not persist,” he said. A teacher or professor might spend 20 minutes delivering a “core lecture,” but will soon make the choice to “flip the course” so that students can “work on materials, maybe in groups, or in a collaborative fashion.”

Reed believes that, in response to the crisis, Georgetown University has examined and updated its teaching approaches with remarkable speed and commitment. “There’s been more experimentation with pedagogy in the last five months at Georgetown than in the last 200 years,” he said. This fall, for example, Georgetown professors will be adopting the lecture-capturing platform Panopto.

As a proudly traditional institution, Georgetown “doesn’t generally make innovations quickly,” Reed said. However, the university has moved with dispatch to offer a series of socially relevant one-credit courses for freshmen, modified its grading policies and worked to foster inclusion in online instruction for students from multiple time zones.

Reed expressed concern over how marginalized populations might suffer further as the U.S. moves toward greater reliance on remote learning without allocating sufficient public resources to school districts in need. He also counseled that, no matter what virtual tools a teacher has at his or her disposal, a course cannot be effective without thoughtful design planning and the fostering of mutual and positive relationships in the classroom.

“Good teaching has always been interactive,” Reed noted. To be sufficiently engaging, the new normal of virtual learning will demand an even higher level of that essential component.

BACK TO SCHOOL (SORT OF) IN GEORGETOWN

BY PEGGY SANDS

As schools in D.C. and Georgetown grapple with being fully online, fully in-person or a mix this fall, we must ask: What is best for children, teachers and staff — along with economic and, most of all, public health?

“It’s 50-50,” a Hyde-Addison Elementary School teacher told The Georgetowner (off the record). “My colleagues, parents and students are split about how and when schools should go back to in-person or remain fully virtual.”

“So many parents, myself included, are really struggling with the risk/reward equation of in-person learning. Our kids have suffered from the isolation. So, we are desperate to get them back to some normalcy. But we also need to be honest about where we are in this pandemic,” Liz D’Angio, a Georgetown parent whose children attend Holy Trinity School, told The Georgetowner.

“I am agonizing for the single parents, the parents of children with special needs that require skilled interactions, the children in abusive homes and especially those in situations where there is no place to study and even little access to food,” said former Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Monica Roaché, who lives on P Street and works for Arlington County Schools.

One size doesn’t fit all. Remote learning can be fine for some, even many. But not all. Health concerns related to the trends in COVID-19 cases and mortality rates differ by state, by region and even by ward in the District.

Coronavirus statistics are collected daily by the District Department of Health and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Aug. 6, D.C. reported 12,443 cases and 587 deaths. Last week, COVID-19 mortality rate in D.C. was 4.7 percent, higher than the 3.7 national percentage and those of Maryland (3 percent) and Virginia (2 percent).

The risk of school children getting severely sick from the disease appears to be extremely low at this time. In the District, almost 1,000 individuals under the age of 19 have tested positive for the virus since March, but there have been no deaths. In contrast, 43 patients between the ages of 20 and 50 — the age range of most teachers — have died of virus complications to date.

“Rising caseloads in July didn’t result in a spike in hospitalizations or deaths,” said LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the District Department of Health, on Aug. 5. “That might be the result of young people making up a growing proportion of new cases. What may be happening is that if younger populations are tending to be more impacted, their severity of illness may be less and death may be less likely in that age group.”

MAYOR BOWSER CHANGES HER MIND

Mayor Muriel Bowser unexpectedly announced on July 30 that all D.C. public schools would be operating online-only for the first term, running from Aug. 31 through Nov. 9. Throughout July, school officials were considering a mixed-option plan of in-person classes.

“The decision to go all-virtual was not based on any particular health metrics,” the mayor said. “There were lots of other considerations, but safety for school personnel and students was the overwhelming priority. We had to consider parental and student comfort and workforce and faculty issues.”

On July 28, public school teachers in Washington, D.C., placed body bags outside the DCPS offices to protest a possible partial return to the classroom. The American Federation of Teachers threatened “safety strikes” across the nation if schools opened in-person.

INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS LOOK AT OPTIONS

The mayor’s decision to keep public schools closed put pressure on the District’s many private, independent and public charter schools. Almost all have small class sizes, non-union teachers and their own regulations, which give them flexibility that the public schools lack. But they also have grave concerns about health and safety.

“We expect charter schools to follow the District guidelines and be all-virtual as well,” Bowser stated at her July 30 press conference.

As of Aug. 6, some had decided to close. “We have just announced that Maret School will deliver its academic program virtually beginning Sept. 8,” Head of School Marjo Talbott told The Georgetowner. “We will conduct small orientation meetings on campus for students and teachers to meet personally. And we will be watching the health metrics carefully. It could change even by October.”

Catholic elementary schools such as Holy Trinity are still in the process of making a decision. “We are sending out a parental survey and planning a town hall meeting next week to help make our decision,” said Courtesy of Fritz Photography.

a spokesperson for pastor Rev. C. Kevin Gillespie, S.J. As of this week, it looks like grades 3 and under will attend school five days with the upper grades meeting two days and going virtual for now.

Parents are also turning to private tutoring. Small education businesses are thriving. “All my classes of between one and five students filled immediately,” said Chloe Kaplan, founder of Amore Learning.

D.C. UNIVERSITIES CHOOSE VIRTUAL FALL

Last month, Georgetown, George Washington and American Universities announced that they would offer almost all undergraduate and graduate courses online. Campuses and dorms would be closed to all but a few hundred special-needs and foreign students who couldn’t get home. Catholic University is allowing freshmen and some transfers on campus

But, as private institutions, they will all charge annual tuition of more than $50,000 a year. Some students have threatened lawsuits in protest.

“Online classes should be fine,” said Eric Langenbacher, a professor in Georgetown University’s government department. “The university has provided us with training and access to equipment and apps to better transform our courses, interactive seminars and student counseling online. Most of my colleagues indicated they were uncomfortable to come to campus personally right now. And college undergraduate numbers may be down as well this year. Many of my son’s friends, who just graduated from high school in June, have decided to take this year off as a gap year.”