Charter schools in DC offering innovations in pandemic-era education
WASHINGTON » Returning to school in the nation’s capital during the pandemic has proven to be an ongoing experiment in learning — and not just for students.
Tall, three-sided partitions were set up at Meridian Charter School to protect students against COVID-19 — until administrators learned that the enclosures wouldn’t do much to prevent spread of the virus. Now the cardboard is optional, but more than half of the students still use them as personalized organizers — taping up calendars, decorations and schedules.
“It’s all a learning experience, and it’s all playing out in real time,” said Matt McCrea, Meridian’s head of school.
While most of Washington’s 52,000 public school kids are dealing with computer screens and Zoom rooms in a remote learning environment, about a dozen charter schools have essentially chosen to become medical-educational experiments, offering inperson instruction for select groups of students.
Smaller and more nimble than the D.C. Public Schools system, the charters have been able to adapt and modify practices on the fly, trading information and pushing the limits of pandemic-era education.
“This is our attempt to redesign school,” said Myron Long, executive director of the Social Justice School, which is offering inperson instruction to about 15 of its 50 total students. “Our size is our best asset.”
It’s a process that the D.C. Public Schools system has watched closely as it plans its own return to the classroom.
Mayor Muriel Bowser had planned to start the 2020 school year with a hybrid model combining distance learning with two days a week of in-school instruction. But the city was forced to abandon that plan at the last minute amid safety objections from the teachers union.
The city surveyed the charter experiments “to see what’s working, what are best practices, what we can learn from and what they can share with us,” Bowser said. “We think we can learn from some of their experiences, but DCPS will have to make decisions that affect … 60 buildings, 50,000 kids and over 4,000 employees.”
The new DCPS reopening plan, announced Monday, seems to draw heavily from the charter schools’ experiences. One option would offer direct in-class instruction to a select group of students with special-education needs, those learning English and students experiencing homelessness or otherwise deemed to be at-risk.
That’s essentially the same criteria that most D.C. charters used in selecting their own student groups for in-building instruction.
“We wanted (the spots) to go to students and families that had the greatest need,” said Justin Lessek, executive director of the Sojourner Truth charter school, which is providing in-person instruction for 20 of its 93 students. “We knew we had families that wanted it and we wanted to be able to provide it as long as it could be done safely.”
In some cases, spots were made available to the children of essential workers. Meridian was forced to turn away some parents, but Social Justice was able to accommodate every student whose parent expressed an interest.
“Some parents contacted us and just said, ‘We have nowhere for them to go during the day,’” Long said.
Charter schools educate about 46% of Washington’s public school students. Each charter is classified as an independent “local education agency,” or LEA. Some larger LEAs run multiple schools in multiple buildings, but most are self-contained solo entities. DCPS is technically classified as its own massive LEA.