Districts pull the plug on remote learning
Superintendents in rural areas around S.A. concerned about students not participating enough, falling behind; parents forced to make tough choices
Heather Aguillon panicked when she saw on social media that Poteet Independent School District, where her daughter attends fourth grade, was eliminating its remote learning program.
She and her husband discussed their options before breaking the news to 9-year-old Daisy that they’d decided to withdraw her from her school to enroll her in an online home-schooling program that has long been offered by the Texas Education Agency.
Although Daisy had already been learning remotely and wasn’t going onto her campus, she cried. She was afraid for her friends who would be returning to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic, her mother said.
As the fall semester came to a close Dec. 18 for most public schools, some rural superintendents were eliminating their remote learning programs, worried about the academic slide among students who weren’t sufficiently engaged with their classes at home.
The shakeout covered a large swath of territory outside San Antonio, forcing parents to make difficult decisions on tight deadlines.
Poteet ISD Superintendent Charles Camarillo published a letter online Dec. 7 informing parents of the decision. Parents without a medical exemption could withdraw their kids
and either home-school or transfer them to another district if they did not want to return for inperson learning.
Camarillo did not respond to interview requests.
Aguillon said teachers and principals reached out to parents to collect their decisions by Dec. 14, giving them just one week to figure out what they were going to do.
“I think it’s unfair. I think it’s cruel. I don’t think it’s compassionate at all,” said Aguillon, a former teacher herself who still works in education.
It would be hard for Daisy to transfer to a school district nearby that offered remote learning. Neighboring districts in Atascosa County issued similar letters. Pleasanton ISD had sent one Dec. 3, followed by Jourdanton ISD on Dec. 4, which noted that its trustees made the decision at a Nov. 9 board meeting.
Nearby Lytle ISD canceled its remote learning for children who were failing classes or regularly missing instruction. The district allowed kids who were succeeding with virtual learning to remain, but it does not accept transfer students from other districts, Superintendent Michelle Carroll Smith said.
Lytle ISD lost 26 students who chose to withdraw rather than return for in-person learning, she said.
Remote learning is not ideal for educators, who say they’ve seen students fall dramatically behind in their studies since the pandemic began keeping kids at home last March. The challenges seem to be more profound in rural areas, where internet access is more difficult for a variety of reasons, causing kids to miss more instructional time.
In Hondo ISD in Medina County, which in October became one of the first San Antonio-area districts to nix remote learning, 63 percent of remote learners had been failing at least one class and 80 percent of them had already missed a full week’s worth of instruction.
Superintendent A’Lann Truelock said that after she announced the decision, 39 students withdrew from the district, but nine have returned since then. The loss in state funding for enrollment amounted to about $160,000, she added.
The TEA’s “hold harmless guarantee,” which funds school districts the same amount they were receiving based on pre-pandemic enrollment, was a lifeline in Hondo ISD, Truelock said.
But the grace period expires at the end of the year. School administrators across the state, Truelock among them, hope the agency will extend the hold harmless period again.
“The issues that caused the need for the hold harmless in the first place haven’t changed,” Truelock said. “We still have families hiding in fear of COVID-19, we still have students without internet access.”
And Hondo ISD waited the entire fall semester for 500 laptops ordered over the summer from the TEA’s Project Connectivity initiative. The district received the laptops a day before students were let out for the holidays, a TEA spokesman said.
Truelock had braced herself for the drop in enrollment when she called students back to classrooms. More important was catching kids up in their schooling — it’s paying off very slowly, but their grades and attendance are improving, she said.
“I can say that our failure rate went down more than 15 percent from the first six weeks to the second six weeks,” Truelock said, but she added a caveat: “It’d be wrong to characterize this year as experiencing anything other than a significant increase in the number of students who are struggling in multiple classes.”
Hondo ISD teachers say there are differences in the speed and degree of comprehension between students who began the school year in classrooms and those who spent weeks in remote learning.
But parents such as Aguillon struggle to understand how the districts arrived at their decisions during a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. In Poteet ISD, it came just after the district closed schools for a week because of a local rise in cases.
On Nov. 28, Poteet ISD informed parents that all students would remain home the first week of December “due to the high number of cases in Atascosa County and in an effort to keep our students safe.” Students returned to campus Dec. 7, the same day the superintendent issued the letter revoking remote learning.
Atascosa County had 280 new coronavirus cases in the final two weeks of the fall semester, and it has had a total of 2,529 cases and 18 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
“Back in March, when all the schools shut down, there were zero cases in Atascosa County but we shut down completely,” Aguillon said. “Now we’re at the height of our cases, and we’re going to force them to all go back?”