Young learners are struggling
Virtual learning could leave lasting bad impression on kids
It was only a week into the school year when Jennifer Ortiz’s 5-year-old daughter started pulling on her hair and breaking down in tears.
Isabella’s first year of school at Jackson Elementary in Allentown is nothing like she imagined, her mother said. She is not
making friends or playing with them at recess. She is not sitting criss-crossed on a carpet as a cheerful teacher reads the class a story.
Instead, Isabella experiences kindergarten through a computer in her family’s east Allentown home. Rather than learning kindergarten rituals like sharing toys and reciting nursery rhymes, she’s mastered howto mute and unmute her computer’s microphone during her virtual class.
Every day is a battle to get Isabella to stay in front of her computer from 8:45 a.m. to 3 p.m., Ortiz said. She cries every morning when she’s told she has to log on for school. She developed a nervous habit when she doesn’t understand her work of licking her lips to the point where they’re raw. Ortiz has to sit with her daughter to make sure she listens to her lessons and does her work. That can be difficult when Ortiz’s other daughter, third grader Gianna, also needs help with her virtual lessons.
More than once, Isabella has told her mother that she wants to be in a real school with friends, like last year when she had preschool.
“Her mental health just declined since she’s been in virtual school,” Ortiz said. “I’ve done everything but physically hold her down to do the school work.”
School is challenging this year for students of all ages, but it’s the youngest children that education experts worry will experience long-term damage because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In Pennsylvania, and in most states, kindergarten is not mandated. But education experts have long identified kindergarten as being a significant time in a child’s academic development.
Chloe Gibbs, an assistant economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has researched the impact of kindergarten, said that first year in school helps children academically and also to develop social and behavior skills, like listening to their teachers, following rules and getting along with peers. These skills are harder to learn through a computer screen.
Kindergarten is especially beneficial to students from low-income or English-learning households, she said. Allentown, a district already academically behind its suburban neighbors, has gone fully virtual, forcing children to miss out on in-person classes, which could be catastrophic for some, Gibbs said.
“Not only do we think overall there could be effects, but this could widen gaps,” Gibbs said. “For our youngest learners, it’s probably going to have long-lasting effects.”
Ortiz praised Isabella’s teacher and said Jackson officials are doing whatever they can to make things easier. But Ortiz believes the stress of virtual learning during the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with not socializing with anyone but her sister, is setting Isabella up for a bad experience with education that could turn her off to school completely.
“She’s so focused on not wanting to do it, I don’t think she’s getting much of an education out of what she’s getting online,” Ortiz said.
While each Lehigh Valley district is doing school differently this year, school is not normal anywhere. In Allentown, all lessons are virtual for at least the first marking period. In other districts, such as Bethlehem, students come to school just two days a week on a hybrid schedule. Those in school must wear masks and desks are separated by 6 feet.
“For kindergartners, who are experiencing school for the first time, attending only two days a week makes it more of a challenge to get them into routines, which are so critical to focused learning,” Bethlehem Superintendent Joseph Roy said.
The unusual circumstance could explain why kindergarten numbers are down in some districts, nationally and locally. Rather than have a child’s first year of school be either in front of the computer or in a small classroom with everyone wearing masks, some parents have opted to wait a year to send their child to school.
In Los Angeles’ public schools, kindergarten enrollment is down 14%. In Nashville, Tennessee, public kindergarten enrollment is down 37% from last year.
On the first day of school this year, Allentown saw just a bit more than 800 kindergarten students, a decrease of about 300 students from last year. Bethlehem enrolled around 750 students in kindergarten this fall — down about 100 from September 2019.
Gibbs said educators need to be thinking about how to help children who are missing out on traditional learning experiences. That could include making sure they have books now or tutoring when the pandemic ends.
“We should be concerned about the inequity and the potential gaps,” she said. “And it should lead us to, how do we remedy that.”
Teacher perspectives
Promptly at 8:45 a.m., kindergarten teacher Kathleen Frey smiles into her computer’s camera and greets her Central Elementary students, who live in some of Allentown’s poorest neighborhoods.
Even though Frey isn’t physically with her students, she makes sure to ask how they’re doing and what their days have been like. She has them recite a mantra each morning: “I am kind, I am smart and I am lovable.” Early on, she wore a french fry hat to remind her students what her name was and to make them laugh. At the end of every school day, she tells them to give themselves a hug as they all say goodbye.
Still, the computer can’t replace the interactions and relationships she would form with her young students.
“By now, they’d be comfortable with me and high-five me or give me a big hug,” she said. “I miss that. I miss that interaction with them.”
More than a month into virtual learning, she and her students are used to the new normal, she said. But the first two weeks were mostly spent teaching the children and their parents howto use the technology and get on the computer’s camera, Frey said. For many of her families at Central, a computer was something they weren’t used to, she said.
A few of the 5- and 6-year-olds had grandparents or day care providers helping them log on.
“Talk about being chaotic,” said Frey, who has been at Central for three years. “I had parents texting, emailing me, and it was like, who do I even answer first?
The first two weeks were so stressful.”
On the first day of school, Frey had only eight students on her roster, a low number for Central, where almost 10% of students are homeless and 20% are English language learners. Typically, her kindergarten class has up to 25 students.
In past years, she and other teachers would meet students at community events during the summer and remind families to register for kindergarten, but with the pandemic going on, they weren’t seeing people.
School officials sent flyers about registration to churches and day cares, while teachers shared the enrollment link on social media websites. After that push, enrollment in Frey’s class jumped to 18 students. While it was great to see more children enrolling, it also meant every week Frey was welcoming new students and playing catch up with them.
“The first two weeks, it was like every day, newkid, new kid, new kid,” she said. “They’re still coming.”
To make sure students aren’t just looking at a computer screen all day, Central gave all students whiteboards and markers, enabling Frey’s students to do math lessons almost as they would in a classroom. The schedule also allows a 20-minute break during the morning, a 45-minute lunch break and a 15-minute break in the afternoon.
In Northampton Area School District,
where kindergartners are in classrooms two days a week and online for three, the pandemic poses a different set of challenges.
Sara Makovsky, a kindergarten teacher at Northampton’s Franklin Elementary, frequently has to remind children to pull their masks over their noses. Students can’t sit in groups or share toys and learning materials. And Makovsky tries to cram more lessons in during the days students are with her.
She sees half of her students Tuesday and Thursday and the other half Wednesday and Friday. Monday is an at-home day for all students.
There are some benefits to this schedule. One group has only nine students and the other 11, making them the smallest classes Makovsky has taught in her eight years.
“We are able to give the children more one-on-one time and help them out when they’re with us,” she said.
Makovsky said her students are rolling with what has been thrown at them. Part of that might be because as kindergartners, they don’t exactly know what has changed.
“They’ve never been to school before, so they don’t know anything different now,” she said.