PANDEMIC ED
Teachers express uncertainty over school reopening
NEW HAVEN — Michele KingVazquez said she was overjoyed at aHartford protest Thursday, where dozens of teachers and parents gathered for a caravan to call for state officials to reconsider their position on having school districts ready to open their doors on the first day of school.
“We had so many teachers there and everybody was honking. It was an amazing event and we really sent a message,” said KingVazquez, a sixth grade teacher at Thomas Hooker School in Bridgeport.
Among the protesters’ demands was for the state to provide school districts with additional resources so distance learning can be done safely and effectively: giving students personal digital devices for instruction and internet access, training teachers in effective ways to do instruction over a computer and creating space for students to receive individualized instruction from a distance.
King- Vazquez knows how difficult distance learning can be after her close- knit class was forced to learn from home when school buildings were closed because of the coronavirus pandemic in March.
At the time schools were closed, she was on a medical leave and had prepared a long- term substitute for what her students needed to learn during her absence.
“We worked through what he needed to do in the classroom, but we did not go over what he needed to do outside of the classroom,” she said.
The week before she was supposed to return from her leave, she called her students’ parents to brief them on how her class would run over a computer. She said several parents were unhappy, but they understood.
King- Vazquez, who said she puts a heavy emphasis on relationships with her students, said the challenges of distance learning were immediately apparent.
“My issue with all of that is they’re online, but they’re not present,” she said. “Even I was more focused on washing dishes than reading assignments or grading papers.”
She received feedback from several students that they lost motivation when they weren’t in the classroom. She said one boy who excelled in her class then declined in the fourth marking period and he was honest with her: he spent his morning waking up, following along with her live instruction and then would tune out of school when the lesson ended. With his mother working outside the home as an essential worker, the student didn’t have external motivation during the school day.
“For the most part they hated it,” King- Vazquez said.
Leslie Blatteau, one of the organizers of Thursday’s caravan event and a high school social studies teacher at New Haven’s Metropolitan Business Academy, said the toughest part of schools closing initially was the impact it had on student and teacher stability.
“When a traumatizing event happens, that’s the hardest thing to do: to feel stable and to know where you are and what you can do,” she said.
Blatteau, who has advocated within the district to reduce an emphasis on high- stakes testing, said grades became less important during distance learning in the spring.
“Some kids were fully engaged, some kids were somewhat engaged and some kids for a variety of reasons were not,” she said. In one of her classes, she said between one- third to one- half of the students work part- time, and when their bosses learned they were not in school anymore they decided to extend their hours.
“Grades are less important to me than that the feedback loop be ongoing. In a scenario where not everybody has internet access, some kids are working, some families are sick, people are collectively mourning the loss of our in- person community,” she said.
Blatteau said one of her students was working on a research paper that he never completed, instead turning in a multi- page “memo” that detailed the research he did and would have used in his paper. Instead of writing the paper, he told her he was helping a friend of his to pass a math class so he could graduate. Blatteau said she thinks the commitment to community shown by that is “extraordinary work.”
As a teacher, Blatteau said she works heavily to individualize instruction, something she has maintained during distance learning. However, she wonders how it will be possible to do so if she’s on camera and teaching, removing her ability to quietly conference with a student about his or her work.
“I think I could do some pretty cool things from a distance by finding online resources, by creating some independent study projects, doing phone and video conferencing now that we’ve all learned to use Zoom better with chatrooms and breakout sessions,” she said.
“I think I could set myself up for some success there and I’m most likely going to be spending midAugust thinking about those things for the courses I’m set to teach,” she said.
As for what happens in late
August, Blatteau said she’s not thinking about it too much.
“I’m not tuning in too much to all the specifics right now, because I know they’re going to change,” she said.
Although Blatteau has followed along with the district’s planning — she is on the district’s reopening committee that helped to develop that plan — she expects the guidance and planning to evolve several times through August.
“I am not a fan of distance learning. It should be in person, but it can’t be in person,” she said.
She said the feedback she’s heard about professional development for distance learning has been all positive, and she’s happy New Haven school leadership has been “proactive and practical” with the elements they can control.
King- Vazquez said she hopes the return to school is gradual.
“For the first four weeks or so, depending on what the science says about the numbers, as we move to bring children back into the classroom let’s start with the ones that are struggling and get them back in classroom first,” she said. “It has to be equitable.”
As a leader in her local union, King- Vazquez said she’s heard many concerns; at least one teacher called her screaming with fear.
“Just for me, I’m a person with hypertension and that doesn’t go well with a lot of things,” she said. “I’m all for going back to school, but I know we’re not going to get the best out of our students. The first thing they’re going to be worried about is who’s got Covid and who they’ll catch it from.”
She said her daughter is teaching in South Korea where the pandemic was managed much more carefully at first and now in- person education is happening.
“You can’t dump them all in school at the same time,” KingVazquez said. “Percentages need to go down first around the entire
( U. S.) first. It’s not being managed well.”
Blatteau said she hopes the future will involve a collectivization of education in the same way as public health.
She said she worries federal leaders and venture capitalists may seize upon a crisis to privatize schools, citing Puerto Rico and New Orleans as two school systems where schools were shut down after natural disasters and made in to charter schools.
“We really only are as good as each individual,” she said. “We should think about what can we do to invest in our community together.”