Educators strive to contact no-show online students

HARTFORD, Connecticut — After a knock on his door, third-grade student Jamie-Lee emerged to see his school principal smiling at him from his doorstep. She held out her arms, offering a socially distant “air hug,” and told the boy how much she’d missed him since the pandemic closed their school building.

As they chatted, Principal Tayarisha Batchelor picked up on a clue to the question that brought her to the apartment. The boy was not looking up from a smartphone. Twice, she asked what he was doing on it before he confirmed her suspicions: He was playing video games.

“I like playing games,” Batchelor told the boy as his parents looked on, before suggesting he spend more time first on his daily schoolwork. “I want to make sure you’re still learning, OK?”

Nearly a third of her students at Rawson Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut, have been unplugged from distance learning. On a Friday afternoon, as she visited some of their homes, she saw many of the reasons why: Internet service is unreliable. Parents are away at work. Some are uncomfortable with the technology. Still others think their children are doing fine when they are actually using the devices for other things.

As the academic year nears an end, districts have been racing to get large numbers of no-show students back on track. It’s one thing not to participate this spring, when expectations are lower because of the crisis. It will be another if distance learning resumes in the fall, when the stakes are raised by the return of formal grading and attendance tracking.

Students who were struggling before the pandemic are the ones falling farthest behind. Across the Hartford school system, roughly 80 per cent of students are at least partially active in distance learning. Among students considered most at risk because of issues including past absenteeism, disciplinary problems and poor academic performance, less than half are participating at all.

Batchelor made her first stop the home of a student whose mother works late, hoping to catch her. The girl’s older sister, a high school student, often watches her. But there was no answer at the door. Batchelor left a voicemail on the mother’s phone.

“How do we get in touch with the kids? This is it. This is like our last effort before the summer. For me it’s trying to figure out, what exactly is it that we’re missing?” Hartford Superintendent Leslie TorresRodriguez said. “First of all, are they safe? I just want to know if they are safe.”

Many districts report engagement has improved since the scramble of the March transition to distance learning, but it’s nowhere near full participation. Some students still have not been heard from at all.

On her visits to families in Hartford’s north end, an area with high poverty and low rates of home internet access, Batchelor brings books to give the children. She is accompanied by a representative from a community agency that helps families with food, clothing and finances.

At the 4,800-student Jamestown Public Schools in the southwest corner of New York, superintendent Bret Apthorpe said about 75 per cent are engaged and most of the others participate at least somewhat. Around one per cent, he said, have “fallen off the map.”

“Of everything through this virus, that probably has worried me the most,” said Apthorpe, whose district has been reaching out to students and their families through school administrators, counsellors and, as a last resort, attendance officers.