Learning coaches help kids, teachers with tech
Election by mail now underway would ensure their continued funding
Santa Fe Public Schools’ mail-in-ballot election could ensure continued funding for positions.
At noon on a Thursday, most of Piñon Elementary School is enjoying lunch or recess. Away from the noise, Amulya Mulakala and two friends are spending their recreation periods building a robot that can pick up and carry a Frisbee.
“I can’t find any more of these small screws,” Maylin Gonzalez laments.
“I think I saw some here,” Marcia Gallegos responds, with her hand in a toolbox.
The sixth-graders at the south-side school were taking part in teacher Felicia Maestas’ Science, Technology, Engineering Arts and Math lunch club. Earlier in the day, second- and thirdgraders used circuitry kits to build FM radios, and fifth-graders employed an app on an iPad to simulate budgeting the operating costs of their own pizza restaurant.
Maestas, a digital learning coach in Santa Fe Public Schools, oversees these informal classroom sessions, which offer students the chance to collaborate on hands-on science projects over cafeteria food. The popular club already is fully booked through spring break.
But in her role as a digital learning coach, Maestas also works with teachers in the classroom — training and assisting them as they implement modern technology in their lesson plans.
This month, voters are mailing in ballots to decide whether to renew a property tax that provides traditional public and charter schools with an Education Technology Note worth $11 million over five years. In addition to a host of upgrades that will keep the district in the digital age, part of that revenue pays the salaries of Maestas and the 15 other digital learning coaches spread out across the district to ensure efficiency with education technology.
In all, the coaches will account for about 13 percent of the money in the technology note.
In 2019 and beyond, district officials say, the combination of the instructional support learning coaches provide and new classroom technology is necessary to help Santa Fe students in the digital age.
“For an elementary school, computer science is not an elective. But kids crave it and learn from it,” said Piñon fifth-grade teacher Delara Sharma, who has taught in the district for 11 of her 22 years in the classroom. “So we have to find creative ways to incorporate it into the curriculum. That’s where Felicia comes in.”
On Thursday, Sharma’s students were assigned to read the first half of a short story about a pigeon before working in pairs to finish the narrative. In addition to testing reading comprehension and storytelling skills, the students programmed code for a golf ball-sized robot to act out their original ending.
Not far away at Santa Fe High, Kate Gomez is in her third year as the school’s digital learning coach. Ten years ago, she worked in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. She recalled walking into her classroom one day to find a Smart Board — an interactive and modernized version of a whiteboard that doesn’t require a marker.
“The first day, I wrote on it with an Expo [dry erase] marker. I was clueless because they just dumped this new technology on me,” Gomez said. “It’s a touch screen that works with your computer. You definitely should not write on it.”
Gomez has come a long way since then.
In a week at the high school, Gomez said, she might help a teacher organize email inboxes, teach students to produce podcasts for a National Public Radio contest, assist culinary and dance students in creating digital portfolios, and find apps that help special-education students practice pronunciation.
All of the coaches are former classroom teachers who still understand the job’s time constraints.
“It took me three hours to figure out how to use that Smart Board on my own. Now, when there is a new teacher, it takes a tutorial of 30 minutes,” Gomez said. “And that’s a huge difference. Teachers aren’t able to take time away from lessons to learn new technology, nor should they. I can do that for them.”
The district spends millions of dollars on equipment. At a cost of $267 per device and $5 per year for maintenance, Santa Fe Public Schools provides takehome Chromebook laptops for all of its students between seventh and 12th grades. Second- through sixth-graders all have access to laptops and tablets at school.
“Kids who don’t have access to technology don’t know what’s out there. By giving them access, we give them a glimpse of what their future could look like,” Maestas said. “Technology in the classroom, and to take home, broadens their world in a way that wasn’t possible before and isn’t possible if they don’t continue to have access to these devices.”
But some of the funding directly touches paychecks. Thirteen percent of the technology note funding pays for the digital learning coaches. District officials fret that if voters strike down the technology note, the coaches could be out of jobs.
“[Digital learning coaches] are 100 percent paid out of the ETN fund because they provide training and support for the equipment and technology we buy with the funds,” said Tom Ryan, the district’s chief strategy and information officer. “It would be terrible to lose these jobs, but I’m also really worried about the negative impact it would have on our students and their ability to learn with technology and be competitive in today’s college and job markets.”
Those concerns seemed miles away for the kids in Felicia Maestas’ lunch club, as students happily manipulated technology in hands-on projects.
“With Mrs. Felicia, we’ve learned a lot from hands-on projects that don’t feel like you’re sitting there listening to a teacher talk like most classes,” Amulya Mulakala said while examining her and her friends’ robot. “She gave us a lot of new ideas for how approach giving presentations, building things and really school in general.”
“It would be terrible to lose these jobs, but I’m also really worried about the negative impact it would have on our students and their ability to learn with technology and be competitive in today’s college and job markets.”
Tom Ryan, SFPS’ chief strategy and information officer