Teachers keeping hold on barely functioning system

Three weeks into a COVID-19-driven, half-at-home, half-in-school schedule for students across the state, the one conclusion that many parents can agree on is that whatever we are paying teachers in our towns is not nearly enough.

This was the scene in my house a few days ago as one child logged on via Chromebook to synchronous learning with about a dozen other kids around town, while another handful sat in the classroom behind face masks following along in person. The teacher, whose years of experience can’t possibly have trained her for all this, stood in her classroom patiently trying to explain to an 8-year-old in a different location how to find the address bar on her laptop.

“It’s up on top. Up there by your tabs,” she explained.

“I don’t see it,” the child responded. “You see those letters and numbers up near the top of your screen there? Where we type in where we’re going?”

“I don’t know where it is,” the increasingly despondent student said back, with each passing moment making it less likely any actual learning was going to happen in this particular session.

Eventually, after some intensely patient back and forth, the problem was solved and the work again got underway. How many remote students drifted off to do something else during that time, or many others like it, was undetermined.

Parents at home who are meant to be shepherding this process have their own challenges. Remote learning doesn’t take up the entire day; there are scheduled meeting times three to four times throughout the school day, each taking up an hour or so. In between, while students in the classroom are eating a snack, having a mask break or taking part in any number of other nonlearning activities, the children at home are left to their own devices. In other words, it’s time to tell your parents you’re bored.

How this system is supposed to coincide with a functioning economy is hard to figure. Parents can only work alongside their remote-learning children if they have extremely flexible schedules. Not everyone is so lucky. In my family, both my wife and I have been out of the office since March, doing nearly all our work from the kitchen table. That theoretically leaves us able to provide help for our children when an assignment is unclear or the computer isn’t working. Realistically, it means everyone is struggling nearly all the time.

There are signs that things may be due for a change. If the infection rate stays where it is and enough parents are comfortable with the idea, our school system may change to a four-day schedule, with everyone online only one day a week. That would be an improvement, but would still require flexibility on the part of parents to cover the online-only component. There is no talk yet of a five-day school week.

Plenty of districts haven’t made it that far. There are school systems that remain exclusively online a month into the school year, and others have had to make moves in that direction. Every infection, every outbreak, puts the entire operation in jeopardy.

It’s not hard to think how different things could have been with even a minimally competent federal response. Instead, people at the highest levels of government would prefer to pretend the crisis is over, or maybe that it never really happened at all. Whatever else that means, it leaves schoolchildren around the nation stuck with a barely functioning school plan while parents try not to go out of their minds keeping up.

Teachers, meanwhile, keep adapting to the changes and carrying on as best they can. Nothing in their training prepared them for this moment, and no one would argue everything has gone smoothly. But to parents of school-aged children, they increasingly seem like the only ones holding the entire system together.

Let’s give them a raise.

Hugh Bailey is editorial page editor of the New Haven Register and Connecticut Post. He can be reached at hbailey@hearstmediact.com.