San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
No good choices for school start
Even during the pandemic, keeping students at home has a litany of drawbacks
Cristina Noriega was elated to begin a new job in March with the San Antonio Independent School District Foundation, with an office at Mark Twain Dual Language Academy, where her daughters were in the second and fourth grades.
“This is going to be the best,” she told them. “We can go to work and school together.”
They did, for four days before
Spring Break. Then the coronavirus spread and schools never reopened.
Noriega and her children still were at work and school together, but at home — not the way she’d anticipated.
When her boss told her in a meeting last week that SAISD would start the school year teaching fully remotely until Labor Day, she broke down on the spot.
“I can’t work full-time and do this,” Noriega sobbed. “I just can’t do this forever.”
Every school district in Bexar County now will do the same, under an order by the Metropolitan Health District issued Friday that pronounced the virus transmission risk of in-person instruction too high.
Even after Sept. 7, if the order isn’t extended, the Texas Education Agency’s latest rules allow districts to keep campuses closed into October, an agonizing choice for administrators.
But at some point, Noriega and other parents will be forced to decide between two deeply flawed options: They can send kids to classrooms during a pandemic or face the strains of keeping them home to learn remotely, which might harm them academically and developmentally.
In a series of shifting rules, the TEA ordered schools to reopen every day of the week for students who want to come, though high
schools now can limit access using “hybrid” models that mix in-person classes with distance learning.
Districts can ask to delay reopening classrooms for up to eight weeks — except for students who lack the technology to learn at home.
As children begin their fifth month of isolation amid a surge of coronavirus cases and deaths, and as the rules and risks of reopening schools keep changing, school districts are scrambling to accommodate teachers and students with resources for any given scenario.
Among parents, a sense of helplessness and fatalism has set in.
“I just hold out a lot of hope that we’re going to get a vaccine within this year,” said Catherine Brackett, a mother of four elementary- and preschool-age children.
When schools shut down in March, districts only had a week or two to devise and implement remote learning. In San Antonio and across the country, many saw students fall through the cracks, their work incomplete, their families unresponsive.
School leaders have worked to improve systems for the fall, but they know remote learning still can shortchange students — those with substandard living conditions, limited access to health care, emotional difficulties or some special educational needs, and even those without such disadvantages — who rely on schools for in-person attention.
“Remote learning will never replace face-to-face learning with teachers and the social interaction that kids build,” said Anthony Jarrett, assistant superintendent of instruction in North East ISD.
The Aspen Institute held up San Antonio ISD’s transition to remote learning as a national model, but if it weren’t for the pandemic, Patti Salzmann, the district’s chief academic officer, would not want it at all. Some teachers are juggling their own children at home, and remote learning is hard on students of all ages, she said.
“I do not think fully remote should be a learning model for any child,” Salzmann said. “I think it’s excellent as a supplement, but I fully believe that learning is social and children benefit from being in community with others and learning from others.”
Fighting limitations
Noriega and her husband, busy with their jobs, couldn’t always make sure their young daughters were videoconferencing on schedule. In their English-speaking household, without dual-language classmates to talk to, their Spanish regressed.
They live with Noriega’s mother-in-law, who is in her late 70s, and everyone wants to protect her from the virus.
“I don’t think I would feel safe sending them to school,” Noriega said. “It feels wrong. But I want it.”
Brackett’s 2- and 4-year-old children attend a private preschool, while her older children are going into the first and third grades at Great Hearts Northern Oaks, a charter school.
After schools shut down, the older children started with paper packets, then moved to Google Classroom and Zoom. They adjusted well, in part because Brackett doesn’t work and her husband, who owns a construction company, sets his own hours.
The private preschool now is open, but Brackett has decided not to send her younger children back.
“I’m going to have to figure out something for my preschool kids because they’re just floating through life right now,” she said.
Brackett is a former public school teacher who was able to identify her children’s weaknesses and buy supplemental curriculum materials. She said her heart aches for students with two working parents and those who already were at risk of dropping out.
“I could argue on all sides of the debate happening in schools,” Brackett said. “I think what we have to do right now is everyone take a deep breath and realize we’re going to have to pause and change the way we’ve felt about education until all this has settled down, and know that there will be a time when we could get caught back up.”
Distance learning has been hardest on the smallest children, parents and teachers agreed.
Teresa Razo teaches 3-year-old dual-language preschoolers at Neal Elementary in SAISD.
During the shutdown, she began Zooming with them at 8 a.m. so she wouldn’t miss virtual teacher training in the afternoon. Some of the parents couldn’t get their toddlers on Zoom. Some students still were sleepy. Razo couldn’t hear some of them — they mumbled or there was too much noise in their busy homes.
She’s not sure how much progress they made.
“I have a master’s degree in educational technology and if it was stressful for me, I can only imagine how it was for those who weren’t tech-savvy,” Razo said.
But Razo has underlying health conditions and is terrified of stepping into a classroom at all in the coming weeks.
North East ISD Superintendent Sean Maika said the time that school buildings are closed will be used to prepare campuses and train staff and students on safety protocols.
“Our in-person learning is the best and we are doing our very best to provide as close as we can get through remote learning, but we’re all concerned about the slide,” said Donna Newman, the district’s associate superintendent of instruction and campus administration, using a catch-all term for academic regression.
Some students took optional year-end exams, but on the whole, shutdowns complicate efforts to gauge where they are academically.
North East and other districts planned in-person summer classes, set to begin this week, for those in danger of repeating grades — but as the pandemic worsened, those classes went virtual, too, a blow for students assigned to them because of struggles with distance learning.
Remote learning in the fall will be a drastic improvement over the spring, with methods adjusted, teachers better trained, and more social and emotional learning, said Jarrett, the NEISD assistant superintendent.
The new program will include teacher office hours, tutoring sessions and easier communication, said Jennifer Gutierrez, executive director of elementary instruction. Schools will provide laptops or tablets to students who don’t have them.
Students will log in every morning to learn from teachers in real time, collaborate with their classmates and practice independently, “mirroring what we would hope to have in a traditional space, but putting it in a virtual space to the best of our ability,” Jarrett said.
He still worries about children spending too much time on screens and teachers not being able to tell how well their lessons are understood. But on the whole, he and Newman agreed with leaders in other districts that some of the best things about remote learning will stick with schools forever.
More than 90 percent of the 49,000 students in SAISD come from families with low enough incomes to qualify for subsidized school meals.
In responses to surveys about the remote learning experience, SAISD parents said one of their biggest barriers was lack of private work spaces for their children.
The school district can’t change their housing situation, Salzmann said, but it will issue tips to parents struggling with the constraints of time, space and multiple children.
SAISD’s online learning will remain mostly flexible, but teachers in core academic subjects will conduct daily real-time lessons with every grade level, she said.
Many school districts administer the MAP assessment throughout the year to track student progress and now will give it at the start of the year — NEISD will do it remotely, and SAISD when schools reopen.
In the long run, students might not be drastically harmed if they fell behind in the spring, and master teachers will work in person with small groups of struggling students, Salzmann said.
“Learning is not linear, it’s dynamic and there’s different entry points,” she said. “Will we have to go back and reteach some things? Probably.”
Tech spending sprees
Even before Metro Health’s closure order, Southwest ISD had planned to start the year Aug. 24 and spend the first three weeks online-only. The new TEA directives give the district the option to wait longer to reopen buildings.
“It’s all really fluid,” Superintendent Lloyd Verstuyft said. “What’s always going to be first and foremost is the safety and well-being of our students and staff.”
Every district has been getting parents’ feedback, and that’s been fluid, too.
In a survey three weeks ago, 30 to 40 percent of Southwest ISD parents said they wanted some kind of face-to-face learning, Verstuyft said. The district started another survey last week, and soon hopes to know if those opinions have changed as coronavirus cases mount.
Verstuyft said he plans to ask his board to approve a plan similar to his initial one: to start online only, and then transition to in-person, ideally when “we’re in an environment where we can get out of the spike of COVIDness in our own backyard.”
He’s been hearing “a sense of fear” from a lot of teachers, he said, adding: “This is unprecedented. There are a lot of unknowns. I think teachers are rightfully cautious.”
In switching to remote learning, Southwest ISD benefited from putting some $10 million toward technology in its 2012 bond, ensuring nearly all students had access to a laptop computer. Before the pandemic hit, the district had 500 hot spots that families could check out if they had no internet at home.
It has ordered more, with the goal of having 1,500 available by the start of the year.
Judson ISD has had to gear up faster. The district has ordered more Chromebooks so every student — instead of every household — has one.
“We learned our lesson. We felt that when this happened, back in Spring Break, we didn’t feel prepared. We didn’t want to be in that same boat again,” said Jeanette Ball, Judson’s superintendent. “We have spent close to $5 million to get ready for this.”
Judson also has purchased more hot spots, along with software that will allow students to download educational materials by going to school campuses, which have Wi-Fi, then work on them at home.
But with all the new technology comes the challenge of making sure everyone can use it well.
“We are doing a lot of training. A lot doesn’t even begin to describe it,” Ball said. “Weeks and weeks of training opportunities for our teachers.”
The choice
The big question, Ball said, is how to provide “the safest environment for the staff and our students along with making sure that we have a rigorous program to offer (that) all our students can learn from.”
Judson ISD has been outfitting campuses with plexiglass shields and stocking up on masks, gloves and hand sanitizer.
At the same time, administrators have formed a “care team” dedicated to tracking down unresponsive students and getting them the resources they need to stay in online schooling.
“If I was forced to make a decision right now, I’d say the best thing would be to go virtual and maybe face-to-face with key groups that need it, maybe special (education) students or students whose parents are first responders,” Ball said.
“I long for the day we can come back and do what our teachers do so well, and truly take care of our kids to the capacity that we should be doing.”
But until then, she said, it’s important to watch and wait.
How long? At a South San ISD board meeting July 8, new Superintendent Marc Puig said teachers had told him they wanted the flexibility to stay virtual through December, and he agreed with them.
A too-early return to classrooms “doesn’t make any sense,” Puig said.
“Do you understand the chaos that’s going to happen on Day 1? When we try to put masks and face shields on kids? Imagine this. The bell rings and there’s masks and shields coming off,” he said.
Trustee Stacey Estrada Alderete and her son caught the coronavirus and she won’t vote for a back to campus plan, even in the face of TEA requirements.
“I, as a representative of these children and these teachers and this staff, will not make a decision or agree to put anybody at any type of risk,” Alderete said. “Whatever we have to do to protect our children and our staff and everybody down to the last janitor in that building, we need to do it.”
Northside ISD Superintendent Brian Woods, who also is president of the Texas Association of School Administrators, had worked with the TEA for months, advising and advocating for the agency to give districts the most flexibility possible.
He wasn’t happy with the TEA rules, and the way they have changed almost weekly. Friday’s new guidance was an improvement, Woods said, but it forced a restart of the planning process for how to teach the district’s 106,000 students while still leaving the timing of reopened classrooms in the state’s hands — or that of Metro Health.
“Families and staff want answers, and that’s justifiable,” he said. “We want it to be local discretion to decide what is a safe number of people in a building. That’s the bottom line.”
“As long as COVID is a thing, we want to have the discretion to decide what that appropriate enrollment is and base it on health metrics, not what somebody hopes is going to happen but on actual metrics,” Woods said. “Hope is not a strategy.”