The schools shut down a year ago: Here’s what’s ahead
One year ago, on a Friday the 13th, administrators and the press packed a room on the ninth floor of Miami-Dade County Public Schools headquarters. There wasn’t a mask in sight.
The leaders in charge of educating the majority of Miami-Dade students gathered together for the first time anyone could remember: Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and the School Board; charter school titan Fernando Zulueta and Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski.
They declared what, just the day before, they had said was unlikely: Schools would close for two weeks. Minutes earlier, President Trump went on TV and declared a national emergency to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
The staff at MiamiDade’s nearly 340 traditional public schools scrambled to give a laptop and, in many cases, an internet hot spot to every student. They would join millions of students around the world in experimenting with remote learning during a global pandemic that has lasted far longer than two weeks.
Schools are a pillar of society. Here in MiamiDade, they serve as an economic engine, a launching pad for the future and dictate the daily rhythms of families.
Learning was different, but it never stopped, despite the disastrous implementation of online learning and the quarantines that jolted students in and out of school.
One year later, a majority — 52% — of students are still learning online. Six percent of educators are teaching from home on medical exemptions. And enrollment from last February to February 2021 is down a staggering 13,600 students. Of those, 500 are still unaccounted for.
It all takes its toll, not just on students but on staff, too, says Frank Zenere, district coordinator of the M-DCPS’ Student Services Crisis Program. He said there has been an uptick of students seeking help, especially among those learning from home.
“I think without a doubt this [year] has been the most challenging of all,” said Zenere, who has spent 35 years working for the district. “With the pandemic, yes, but with the social unrest and the political concerns.
“I think it’s all kind of come together in a perfect storm, so to speak, that’s created such an atmosphere of stress that’s challenged even the best of us who have skills to manage it.”
Joan, a special education teacher in northeast Miami-Dade, is exhausted from teaching third- and fourth-graders together, both in-person and online, at the same time.
“Day by day, I have to take one day at a time,” she said. “With the kids on face-to-face, I think I can reach them more than the ones that’s online.”
She explained: “Those online, to me, have just shut completely down. They don’t want to use classwork; they don’t want to do homework.”
But officials say it’s getting better.
Approaching the last quarter of a school year like no other, Carvalho recently announced a “one-size-fits-none” summer school program for those who have fallen behind.
Hundreds of teachers are being vaccinated daily. In-person graduations are even becoming a possibility, a bright spot for María
Martínez, a senior at School for Advanced Studies North and the student adviser to the MiamiDade County School Board.
The Class of 2020 got their senior breakfasts; her class didn’t. Martinez only got to wear her homemade senior crown for just one day on Zoom.
“What keeps me going is knowing that I’m graduating,” she said. “Yes, this is an uphill battle, but the end is a big reward.”
Martinez’s reward: Going to Columbia University without test scores. “And that’s something that would’ve been impossible any other school year.”