Online ed: Chester kids line up for Chromebooks
CHESTER » Unseasonably cool and windy conditions that included a few snow flurries did not keep several hundred Chester High School students and their parents from lining up Friday morning to receive Chromebooks, which were distributed, free of charge, by the Chester Upland School District. The moves in anticipation of online learning programs being instituted in the wake of Gov. Tom Wolf’s order closing all K-12 schools in the state. On Thursday, Wolf extended the order through the end of the academic year.
The line began forming well before the distribution began at 10 a.m. behind the high school on Penn Street. The dispersal was supposed to go until 12:30 p.m. By 11:10, though, there were no more laptop computers available. In all, 180 Chromebooks were distributed and that was on top of the 300 given out Wednesday.
“I made a decision that I wanted every student in the high school to have a Chromebook,” said Chester Upland Superintendent Dr. Juan Baughn. “So we gathered up all of the Chromebooks across the district and that’s what you saw being distributed. STEM high school already was a one-on-one school. They already had Chromebooks so we took the Chromebooks off of carts from across the district and that’s what we’ve been distributing to Chester High School students.”
Baughn said that not all of the Chromebooks in the district have been rounded up and he expects to have another distribution date sometime next week. A notice when that will take place will be put on the school district’s website. He hopes to distribute 500-600 Chromebooks to the students at the high school and then move on to the rest of the district.
“We are in the process of purchasing additional Chromebooks because what I want to do next is to make sure that the middle school students all have Chromebooks,” Baughn said. “After that I want to make sure all the elementary school students have Chromebooks. So we’re in the process of trying to garner more Chromebooks, but our priority was the high school.”
Meanwhile, in front of the high school at 10th & Barclay, educational resource packets were distributed for students in grades PK-8 who do not have internet access and/ or a computer device available to them, according to a notice on the school district website.
It’s all part of the educational process in the coronavirus era.
With schools closed for the remainder of the academic year by order of Gov. Wolf, online or remote learning has replaced inclassroom instruction. Computers and a stable internet connection are key tools in that process.
Superintendents throughout Delaware County have been meeting by Zoom several times a week for the past month to discuss ways to conduct online learning, Baughn said. The meetings were helpful and gave Baughn the idea to put together a team to design how the online learning process would work in Chester Upland. That team was headed by Dr. Jada Olds-Pearson, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and included distance learning coordinator Dr. Joanna
Jones Barnett and Mark McIntyre, the director of special education. They were given two weeks to come back with a plan for continuing education.
“I made a decision on the 13th of March, when we closed down for two weeks, that we were going to take our time and get this thing right, as least as right as we could, before we went to online learning,” Baughn said.
Chester’s online education process begins Tuesday.
The distribution was organized, and observed all social distancing recommendations. Four tables were set up on the pavement behind the loading dock, one for each grade 9-12, and placed 8-10 feet apart. Large X’s made out of duct tape were spaced
more than six feet apart on Penn Street, allowing for social distancing while students waited in line for their computers.
Every student and at least one parent had to sign a release for the laptop before the student received the Chromebook and power cord. The gesture was well-received by students and parents alike.
“It’s a good thing,” said
senior Andrew Melvin. “It’s a compromise with coronavirus. We have to finish our work.”
“It’s a beautiful thing they’re doing for these kids,” said J.J. Holmes, a 1989 Chester grad and the father of sophomore Jahid Majeed. “This virus
is a killer and this gives the kids the hope that they can move forward with their education.”
“It allows me to do my work,” Majeed said. “I want to get all the credits I can.”
Taylor, special education teacher and baseball
coach Dan Walters, behavioral specialist and former girls basketball coach Marvin Dukes, Brendan Bell, the vice principal at STEM at Showalter, and John Shelton, the dean of students at Chester High School, were among the teachers
and administrators who volunteered their time to make the process run smoothly.
“I missed the kids,” Walters said. “That’s why I volunteered to do this. I wanted to see them and it was good to see some of their faces.”