Learning from home
Santa Fe Public Schools launches first day of distance education
Lori Brown slept Sunday night the way she does the night before a new school year starts. Which is to say, slumber came in fits and starts. Brown was excited, ready and apprehensive, all at the same time.
A veteran educator who teaches math and government at the Academy for Technology and the Classics, a public charter school, Brown was among hundreds of teachers in Santa Fe Public Schools facing what might be a new era.
As the district rolled out its distance-learning program Monday amid the COVID-19 crisis that forced statewide school closures, teachers and students throughout Santa Fe found themselves adjusting to a new reality.
Brown said the online program, which began just weeks ahead of the school year’s end, was a welcome beginning.
“It’s a big sigh of relief — you’re there, they’re there and school’s open,” she said.
Still, Brown and educators around the state and nation are learning there are lots of differences between teaching kids from a computer screen rather than in a classroom.
Teachers and students in Santa Fe are now relying on technology — Zoom videoconferencing to interact face to face; Google Classroom to share documents, questions and ideas; and Open Access to provide resources.
While New Mexico schools are not yet required to begin distance-learning initiatives to help students progress as they remain isolated in their homes, Veronica García, superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools, began
preparing early.
“The whole district is remote,” said García, who, like just about everyone else in the district, was working from home Monday.
In a sense, the district has been preparing for this moment for years; almost five years ago, it created a digital learning plan to ensure every student had their own computer device. Still, García said there are bound to be bumps as the district puts the plan into action. “There are going to be problems,” she said. “We have to be patient and work with one another as we get through this.”
After taking part in a conference call with principals late Monday afternoon and hearing their thoughts, she said the day “exceeded my wildest dreams.”
Santa Fe’s distance-learning plan leaves a lot of room for teacher autonomy and creativity, she said, noting the state Public Education Department has waived several requirements, including prescribed hours of instruction, to allow for such independence.
The department said students from prekindergarten to fifth grade should receive a maximum of 90 minutes of instruction each day, while those in sixth through 12th grade should spend 30 minutes online with each teacher and no more than three hours of total instruction a day.
As Brown launched into her day, she offered a video lesson in Exploding Dots, an online program that helps students learn the binary system. It’s not what she would normally teach at this time in the semester, she said, but it was an interactive way to get her kids connected to her and one another.
“I have to get to how the [online] platform allows us to interact. I’m discovering things,” she said.
So is Principal Erica Martinez-Maestas of Chaparral Elementary School, where administrators and educators spent the last week calling parents of about 275 students to prepare them for the transition.
The prep work paid off — almost the entire student body was ready to go Monday morning, Martinez-Maestas said. Though seven students did not have internet access at home and another seven did not have up-todate district technology on hand — some students went home before spring break and left such devices behind — Martinez-Maestas said the school is “in pretty good shape.”
García said about 10 percent of the district’s 13,000 students have no internet access at home. The district is working to set up hot spots where those students can access classes online, hopefully by the middle of next week.
Other challenges can be overcome with ingenuity and compromise, educators say.
The Early College Opportunities high school campus prides itself on a hands-on curriculum for auto mechanics, construction and welding — classes that would be impossible to re-create online. So the school’s leaders are “digging deeper” into the science and math behind those skills with online instruction, said Principal Michael Hagele.
Educators are having students demonstrate their proficiency by creating instructional manuals about the skills they learned in the classroom. ECO student Gabriella Garza said the approach is akin to “putting together a ‘how to change a tire’ manual of things we have learned. For welding students, it might be showing how to weld two pieces of metal together in a step-bystep process to teach other students.”
She logged in to her distance-learning program around 9:30 a.m. Monday, when her first course started. She soon found a computer screen filled with images of students and her instructor.
“Our teachers are reaching out even though we are not physically together in the classroom,” she said. “They are emailing us, calling us, calling our parents. They want to make sure we are learning.”
Despite the school’s dependence on in-class work with hands-on equipment, Hagele said, a temporary distance-learning setup is “a huge opportunity to really embrace the online component of 21st-century learning and get better at it.”
Brown agreed. She said kids are accustomed to navigating the internet and will adapt.
She and other educators at the school often tease the kids by telling them “school is your job,” she said.
And now, everyone has a different worksite.