These past 7 weeks, we have been in school for only one full week. Teachers and staff are frustrated that we have not been able to come to school as often as we should. However, these past 7 weeks have been filled with snowy-icy disasters. Recent talk and rumors around the board have been surfacing about if next year NTI will be a thing. The reason for the recent discussion is that students are treating these days to have a snow day, and not doing their work, showing up for attendance, or going to the Google meets.
I’ve asked some students and staff what they think about the new policy and what they think would be a better solution than cutting out NTI and making up all of those days. I asked Fatima Brown, a junior at Ballard High School. She stated, “I think that we should be punished for the weather if there is an option to not be punished after this winter outbreak, I don’t want it to cut into my summer, if it’s for 7 weeks, I feel like there should be some type of emergency days we could use instead if were so worried about making those days up and NTI. People don’t realize that NTI won’t ever compare to in-person days. Some teachers are assigning so much work that we get flooded with work, and it makes us not want to do it even more!” After asking her what possible solutions would be, she stated,” If it is that big of a deal, why don’t we go back to the height of COVID where we had a schedule of Google meets where the teacher was teaching us and we could interact and have that time to ask questions. Sure, we have a Google Meet now, but if it was required and everyone did it, I think everyone would learn more.”
After these continuous NTI days, teachers have been taking more action and assigning homework quizzes when we go back in person to be sure everyone is learning.
After talking to more students who would agree, I decided to ask some staff. Abbi Long, a current employee at JCPS, has some insight on what she thinks NTI will be like in the future, “I don’t think NTI is going to go away, we couldn’t do it without going into mid-June for summer, not to mention seniors have deadlines to graduate, and some people have already scheduled vacations for that time, it’s just not feasible.”
So currently, we don’t have any update on whether NTI is going away or not, In the next 6 weeks we will have had no NTI days.
