‘Bittersweet’: MPS begins its school year online
Early-start schools act as a dry run for full system
The hallways of Milwaukee School of Languages were empty Monday morning.
There were no students excitedly catching up on their busy summer break. No lockers slamming or announcements over the loudspeaker. No one running to get to class on time.
Spanish teacher Marielle Rivera sat in a sunny corner of her classroom, flags of the United States and Latin American countries overhead and Black Lives Matter posters on the front of her desk. And she laid out her expectations for the school year for her eighth-grade students, whose faces she sees on the computer screens in front of her.
“I want you to pay attention actively. Can someone explain to me what actively means?” she asks in Spanish.
“All the time?” they want to know. “Well, perhaps not all the time,” she said. “But actively means you’re not playing with your friends or siblings or you’re not playing video games, you’re paying attention to what’s in front of you.”
Variations of that conversation likely took place in hundreds of virtual classrooms Monday as Milwaukee Public Schools opened for the first day of school in the midst of a global pandemic that is reshaping the educational landscape across the country.
Like many districts in large, urban cities that have been disproportionately hard-hit by the coronavirus, MPS and a number of smaller charter and voucher schools are beginning the year online, hoping to phase in in-person instruction in the coming months.
About 40 MPS schools, all on the early-start calendar, resumed classes Monday. Their startup will serve as a kind of dry run for the remaining 90plus schools, which begin Sept. 1, as the state’s largest district continues to hammer out the logistics of educating more than 66,000 children online.
It is likely to be a school year like no other in memory. Some teachers are working in classrooms, some at home. There will be no football games or other sports, at least for now. Schedules are truncated to give students time to work on assignments and allow teachers to check in on those who need extra help. MPS has estimated it will cost an additional $90 million to safely operate schools this year, much of that on new technology and connecting families with Chromebooks and internet devices.
MPS was widely criticized for its delay in offering online instruction when schools closed abruptly in the spring, caused in part by an arrangement with the teachers union that allowed teachers not to work for several weeks. Superintendent Keith Posley said it will be different this fall with structured schedules, rigorous instruction and grading standards.
Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association President Amy Mizialko said Monday that the union “is committed and stands ready” to assist MPS families with whatever they need to access academic content.
There were some glitches Monday. Some families had difficulty signing in. But Posley said around 9:30 a.m. that that had been resolved earlier.
“If someone would have told you five years ago that they had navigating a pandemic in their five-year plan, no one would have believed it,” Milwaukee School of Languages Principal Juan Baez said at a news conference outside the school.
Posley said that the district has had to provide about 30,000 families with internet access, at a cost of about $500,000 monthly.
He said MPS was still working to connect with some students and families, though he did not have an exact number. MPS, which serves primarily low-income children of color, has thousands of students considered homeless and high rates of student mobility because of evictions and other issues. And last spring, after schools closed abruptly, it lost track of about 6,800 students.
Tracking down those students, Posley said, is a “top priority.”
“We’re going to do our 110% due diligence to make sure we’re able to locate and get each one of our students actively engaged in the education process.”
At Milwaukee School of Languages, a 6-12 school that is one of MPS’ higherperforming schools, Baez called it a “total team effort” to make contact with families, saying staff members made phone calls, visited some homes and reached out on social media.
That paid off, at least for Rivera’s class. On Monday, she said, all but about nine of her seventh and eighth graders were signed in and ready to go.
About a quarter of MSL’s teachers were working inside the building at North 84th Street and West Burleigh Avenue on Monday, Rivera among them.
“It was bittersweet,” she said, coming into the building to see the hallways empty and the desks and chairs in her classroom stacked up along the walks. She has spent the summer getting up to speed on the technology she needs to connect with her students, and she was thrilled to see their faces.
But it’s not the same as greeting them at the door one by one as they walked in every day.
“I miss that more than anything else,” said Rivera, her voice breaking. “It’s that personal connection. There’s something that’s lost through the camera. That just means I have to do my best to continue that communication.”