American Federation of Teachers New Jersey, AFL-CIO

As part of new gun reforms unveiled April 15, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has proposed a measure authorizing the Department of Education to establish trauma-informed and age-appropriate standards for lockdown drills.

“I think of the tens of thousands of Newark schoolchildren who returned to their classrooms this week for the first time in a year … and as I do, I know that we must do everything in our power to ensure that they are safe not just in those classrooms but as they make their way to and from home every single day,” Murphy said at an appearance in Newark.…

Cognitive routines, visual routines and discussion protocols are instructional strategies “that can have a big impact on student learning,” writes educational consultant Angela Di Michele Lalor in an April 14 post for Edutopia.

“When teachers select instructional strategies that actively engage students and develop those methods as routines for student learning, they’re equipping students with strategies for approaching the new and unknown,” she writes.…

School districts can expect greater age differences in kindergarten classrooms this fall and should prepare for wider skill disparities among those children, according to a report by the nonprofit organization NWEA.

“Among the many ways in which schools are being transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the change in public school kindergarten enrollment is one likely to have important consequences in classrooms across the nation,” write Beth Tarasawa, Angela Johnson and Christine Yankel.…

The plan for the start of the 2021-22 school year is to have in-person learning for all students, no matter if they have received COVID-19 vaccines, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s director.

“We should anticipate, come September 2021, that schools should be full-fledged in person and all of our children back in the classroom,” Dr.…