With less than two weeks until school starts, parents from Somerville and Newton say they have yet to get any details on what classes will look like for their children and whether remote learning will be better than it was when schools suddenly shut down last spring amid COVID-19.

“Families cannot live in a state of uncertainty,” said Keri Rodrigues of Somerville on The Codcast. “I am two weeks away from the first day of school in Somerville. I still don’t have a specific hour-by-hour schedule of what remote learning is going to look like, when my child is expected to be on Zoom. I don’t even know who my kids’ teachers are going to be and frankly they don’t know my kids either. I just spent six months with my children. I have a lot of information I’d like to tell their teachers about who they are, how they learn, and what they’re capable of. And there has not been any communication with me and … what this is going to look like when it gets down to brass tacks.”

Jack Cheng of Newton says he and his two teenagers are also in the dark. “They don’t know what school is going to be like and they’re frustrated,” he said.

Cheng is urging school officials to think outside the box, and is offering up specific suggestions for learning during COVID. “It seems like there’s a chance now to sort of reinvent what the school is going to be,” he said. Rodrigues, a mother of three boys in second, third, and seventh grade and the CEO of Massachusetts Parents United, is demanding answers to her many unanswered questions and looking outside the Somerville schools for help.

Parents across the state are having similar responses, and former state education secretary Paul Reville thinks this heightened parent activism “could become a tipping point for educational choice and, in its extreme form, the privatization of public education.”

One thing is clear: Cheng and Rodrigues are paying close attention to what’s going on in their schools. Cheng said 2,000 people joined online for a recent meeting of the Newton School Committee, which in normal times attracts less than a dozen attendees. “It’s the talk of the town,” he said of the upcoming school year. “There’s a lot of conflicting information. There’s a lot of rumors.”

Rodrigues said parents are getting a look behind the curtain at what goes on inside schools. “This is all playing out in our living rooms. So now we’re seeing directly how much academic instruction is happening, how much information and interaction our kids are having with teachers. We are more engaged now than ever – by necessity. So that’s not toothpaste you can put back in the tube very easily. We now know there are options,” she said.

The infighting between the Baker administration and teachers unions over how to return to school has overshadowed the bigger question for many parents of how schools should operate, how technology should be deployed.

“We’ve injected politics into the situation and kept families and community out of it. In the end, the kids are lost in the shuffle here,” said Rodrigues, who thinks parents need to have a much bigger say. “The fact that we’re not authentically engaged in co-collaboration and creation of these things is insane. People are not going to stand for that.”

Cheng is less confrontational than Rodrigues, but he would like to see more experimentation in teaching remotely. He acknowledges the challenges for schools, with COVID tolerance varying dramatically from family to family. But he thinks many of the policies being pursued are weak attempts to replicate the status quo. He said a neighbor told him her son, a special needs child who has an individual education plan, has been promised some in-person instruction this fall. “She said what that means is they’re going to set him up with his laptop in the school library or cafeteria and he’ll Zoom with teachers who may actually be in the school but it’s still going to be remote. It’s all kind of absurd,” he said.

Rodrigues said some teachers are balking at teaching remotely from their actual classrooms because they don’t want to come into the schools. She said she would like teachers teaching remotely from the schools, where they can collaborate with each other and be held accountable. “We’re throwing science out the window,” she said. “You don’t get COVID from being in an empty classroom.”

Rodrigues said she keeps hearing there will be very little actual teacher-student instruction this fall, which worries her greatly. “Time spent on learning and structured learning time are regulated by statute” and the Massachusetts Constitution guarantees all students “access to a high-quality education,” she said. “Those are actionable and we’re going to be holding these districts and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education accountable for these statutes, for these requirements. These things were not waived because we’re in the middle of a pandemic.”

BRUCE MOHL

FROM COMMONWEALTH

Would ranked choice voting have changed the outcome of the 4th Congressional District race?

The MBTA says the truck driver who drove into the Silver Line tunnel to South Station had no “malicious intent.”

Employers are facing a huge hike in unemployment insurance taxes.

The Boston Public Schools paid out $762,000 in settlements to 17 employees over a nearly two-year period.

Cambridge arts groups seek city COVID relief funds after a council meeting in July tabled the issue.

Despite pandemic and record unemployment, state tax revenues hold steady.

In victory, Jake Auchincloss calls himself a “pragmatic progressive.”

Opinion: Steven Tolman of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO says essential workers need a bill of rights.….Massachusetts should not mandate telehealth prices, says Josh Archambault of the Pioneer Institute….Jack Cheng, a father of two teenagers in Newton, says we need to think outside the box on remote learning….CDC eviction moratorium raises constitutional questions, says real estate attorney Richard Vetstein.

FROM AROUND THE WEB             

BEACON HILL

The Baker administration has been inflating its claims of spending with minority businesses, according to a GBH investigation.

An appeals court decision could cost the state millions of dollars in fees it was counting on from the operator of 1,200 mile fiber optic network. (Berkshire Eagle)

MUNICIPAL MATTERS

With less than a month left to go in the census count, Massachusetts has counted 90.7 percent of its population. (MassLive)

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte pardoned a New Bedford Marine on Monday in a surprise move that will free him from imprisonment in the 2014 killing of a transgender Filipino woman that sparked anger in the former American colony. (Associated Press)

HEALTH/HEALTH CARE

The chief executives of nine major pharmaceutical companies pledged not to seek regulatory approval for a coronavirus vaccine unless it has cleared all standard safety and efficacy tests, a statement prompted by concerns that President Trump will look to rush a vaccine to public use before the election. (Washington Post)

Nursing homes are preparing for a second wave of COVID-19, in the hopes that this time they will be better prepared. (Telegram & Gazette)

Boston startup Orig3n logged hundreds of false-positives as it processed COVID-19 tests for dozens of Massachusetts long-term care facilities. (Daily News)

WASHINGTON/NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL

The House Oversight Committee will launch an investigation of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy following reports that he reimbursed employees at his former company for contributions to Republican candidates, a practice that, if true, would be illegal. (Washington Post)

ELECTIONS

Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu will challenge Mayor Marty Walsh next year, but the news came not from the at-large councilor herself but from Walsh who stepped on her announcement by telling the Globe she called him Sunday to give him a courtesy heads-up. (Boston Globe)

Maura Healey joins 24 other attorneys general in telling people that voting twice is illegal, despite what President Trump may suggest. (MassLive)

Adam Gomez and Orlando Ramos, both Springfield city councilors who won legislative primaries last week and have clear paths to election in November, will bring diverse representation to the Legislature. (MassLive)

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

The Salem Ferry, a commuter service between Boston and Salem, will shut down early for the season on Tuesday because of low ridership. (Gloucester Daily Times)

Wedding venues are having to find new ways to hold weddings, without the lavish, large-scale affairs they are used to. (Telegram & Gazette)

Restaurants are thinking about creative ways — including outdoor igloos — to accommodate diners this winter when outdoor dining will no longer be appealing. (MassLive)

EDUCATION

College and university faculty members have been boning up on their skills at offering online instruction. (Boston Globe)

A former Boston school principal says she was targeted by politically connected parents and teachers at her West Roxbury elementary school. (Boston Globe)

A new report shows that black girls are nearly four times more likely than white girls to be punished in school in Massachusetts. (MassLive)

Eileen McNamara says Northeastern University can suspend students for failing to comply with COVID-19 campus protocols, but it shouldn’t send them packing and pocket their tuition money. She calls that theft. (WBUR)

Remote learning may mean that snow days are a thing of the past. (MetroWest Daily News)

ARTS/CULTURE

Artist Ricardo Gomez takes his message to the streets — literally — in Roxbury. (WBUR)

Cape Cod Maritime Museum and Chatham Historical Society’s Atwood Museum executive directors, each at the beginning and end of their tenures, have had to deal with major changes to their institutions due to the pandemic. (Cape Cod Times).

TRANSPORTATION

Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack, in a Globe op-ed, says practical, need-driven planning — not a pie-in-the-sky costly wish list — should drive decision-making on the Allston Multimodal project that the state will soon make a recommendation on.

With a slight increase in post-Labor Day ridership anticipated on the MBTA, the Globe has a rundown on changes the agency has made to deal with the pandemic outbreak.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS

A judge deems the evidence “thin” against former Worcester District Attorney candidate Blake Rubin who was indicted for conspiring to bail out a witness who was set to testify against his client. (Telegram & Gazette)

Boston University students team up with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism to discover that even Massachusetts’ strong tenant protection laws during the pandemic were not enough to stop landlords from filing — sometimes illegal — eviction notices. (Salem News)

Attorney General Maura Healey’s office identified nearly 13,000 employees affected by labor rights violations in fiscal 2020 and addressed 6,000 wage and hour complaints, according to a report released on Labor Day. (MassLive)

MEDIA

A new MTV documentary “16 and Recovering” follows nine students at Northshore Recovery High School. (The Salem News)