Like organizations across the country, the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri has had to be resourceful in how we protect our staff and advocates during the coronavirus pandemic while still working to improve education in Missouri.
The necessary social distancing has stripped us of our most reliable tools, in-person events and meetings, but we have quickly brainstormed and planned for the ways we can be most effective and useful from the safety of our homes.
Using a variety of virtual tools, CEAM is utilizing its resources, talented team, and our statewide network to be responsive during this unusual time.
We realized that we needed to do what we are best at:
What many are coming to call crisis schooling or home learning has strained schools, educators, parents and students as we all try to figure out how to continue learning from our homes.
To help everyone in the education ecosystem, CEAM quickly assembled (and continue to add to and refine) a new resource page at www.ceamteam.org/covid. This page includes resources for schools and families who are struggling to figure out how to educate their children at home.
We also started tracking how the education world is responding to the pandemic and created two RSS feeds of curated news articles that are updated several times a day. The main RSS feed tracks news on how the pandemic is impacting education with a focus on Missouri while the second RSS feed tracks innovative ways that schools and educators across the country are responding to the crisis. To follow these feeds just copy the links and add them to your favorite feed reader or see the news feed here or the innovation feed here.
Finally, we started a series of Facebook Live events every Tuesday evening at 7:00 p.m. where we bring on experts to share their advice for how families can learn, survive, and strive during the pandemic. If you have not already done so, please visit us on Facebook and “like” CEAM. You will get a notification before we go live.
Over the years, CEAM has worked with a wide variety of families across Missouri, but the nature of our work, helping to improve education for every Missouri child, has led to strong and long-lasting relationships with many families in disadvantaged communities.
Knowing that this crisis would hit those families the hardest, we quickly started developing the #CEAMCares Family Emergency Relief Fund to help some of the families we have gotten to know so well over the last several years of advocacy work. We can’t help everyone, but our close, personal relationships with advocates means we can quickly understand needs and help eliminate barriers.
In just the past two weeks we have been able to raise thousands of dollars to help these families.
The donations have helped purchase Chromebooks to keep kids learning from home and helped families cover basic bills like rent and utilities so they can focus on education.
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