From Bad to Worse – Update on DRP – Apr 3, 2020 Complete Transparency for My Backers Sometimes you feel like if you did not have bad luck, you would have no luck at all. (Jan 12th – Jan 31st) We delayed our development program for three weeks to allow Nesda to deal with a critical issue with another client. (Feb 1 – Feb 7) As soon as the development restarted, 4 programmers were ill with the flu for the best part of a week. (Feb7- March 16) – Contacts with our Rotary International pilot project with New Orleans charter schools hits continuous delays despite our efforts. (March 16 – ???) Our market collapses – 92,000,000 kids stay home from school. Our NOLA pilot charter school program is put on the shelf because we have neither product and nor kids to teach. (March 15) Indiegogo and their financial distributor, Stripe, have lost our account and have refused to pay out the $5,100,00 of holdback funds. This despite the fact that they have sent me a payment as recently as March 5th. The battle continues. (April 3 -???) Our key programmer at Nesda becomes unavailable. Development is delayed again. This is what can happen with projects, especially software projects. We decided to help out parents who have become their kid’s teachers as Plan B.    We implemented Plan B – Providing free lessons on our website that parents can use to homeschool their kids. Parents have been suddenly thrust into teaching. All are unprepared and most are afraid. We have 400 lessons in reading, writing, math, spelling and even cursive writing that function like recipes. At our Rotary Learning Centre at the YMCA, for a dozen years, we taught high school senior to be good tutors of children at risk. If the tutor follows the steps as they are written, they and the child will succeed. We are preparing these to go up on the www.maloneymethod.com website for parents and teachers to download for free. There is also free testing and free training.    We have to make some minor changes to the website and should launch the first 70 lessons (reading, counting skills and fractions) within a week to ten days. Given that many school districts have written off the rest of the year, these will be a huge help to parents and kids until September. They are researched, field tested and have 35 years of use with kids, even kids at risk of school failure. They work.     Many publishers are pumping out untested lesson plans on their websites for use by dazed and confused parents. They mean well, but they will create more fear and loathing than progress good will. When a parent has no real idea what this is doing, if it is doing anything at all, they are going to be even more confused and frustrated. Again, through Wilf Wilkinson, we are hoping to use Rotary clubs and Rotary international to distribute the lessons widely until the schools open again.    During this crisis, everyone is trying to help. This is our way of helping. There will be no financial benefit to Maloney Method, but it should heighten our profile and hopefully bring customers back once the pandemic is done.     If fortune had been more favourable, we would have just finished our testing and would have been ready to sell subscriptions to all of the parents with beginning readers. Ah well, There are always kids who need to learn how to read. Our efforts are far from over and this pandemic will end.
