2 school systems, 2 divergent paths
City parents have called for live-streaming of classes, but in Norwalk, where it is happening, teachers and parents say it isn’t a panacea
STAMFORD — During a recent virtual meeting of the Stamford Board of Education, Associate Superintendent Amy Beldotti was giving a presentation on the challenges of live-streaming when she suddenly lost her connection and disappeared from attendees’ screens.
She came back a few moments later, but not before Superintendent Tamu Lucero chimed in.
“I think Amy wanted to give this as an example of what could happen when you’re in the middle of a lesson teaching,” she joked.
Technical difficulties are part of the reason why
Stamford has not mandated live-streaming of classes for students learning from home, unlike some other surrounding communities.
Some Stamford parents have expressed frustration over the lack of virtual face-to-face instruction for their children on their days at home, which they say feel mostly like homework for their kids.
Beldotti said the district is hoping to slowly ramp up live instruction for at-home students, but she said it won’t come without challenges.
Besides technical issues, such as bandwidth and Wi-Fi and device access for students, in-class instruction will look a lot different if teachers are expected to teach students in the classroom and simultaneously provide instruction to those following from home, educators said.
That has been a challenge in Norwalk, where such a model is in place.
“Juggling plates”
Mary Yordon, head of the Norwalk teachers union, said it’s been a tricky task for teachers so far The experience is being described as being a disc jockey or juggling plates,” she said.
At the elementary level, students are allowed to go to school five days a week in Norwalk. But because of social distancing guidelines, not all instruction is contained in one classroom. Yordon said there are instances in which an instructor is teaching to a class of students in-person, while another contingent follows along virtually from a different classroom in the building, and yet another group watches from com
puters at home.
At the middle- and highschool levels, students come to class half of the time and follow virtually on the days they are not in the building.
Then there are the athome learners, who never come into the buildings, but can tune into live streaming of their classes every day.
The result is a complex teacher experience, Yordon said.
“You are required to be online with your students and engaged with them during the school day at the same time you are engaged with students in your class,” she said. “We do see that the requirement to teach remote and in person is not ideal for the teacher. It has a great deal of detriment to the instruction and to the learning of students.”
Beldotti has repeatedly said that such an outcome was one of the reasons Stamford decided to scrap the idea of live-streaming,
at least on a large scale. She said central office administrators decided it would be best for teachers to focus on the students in front of them, instead of splitting their attention between those in the room and those on the computer screen.
That has not been an issue with the Stamford district’s Distance Learning Academy, for students who have opted to learn from home full time, and which has its own dedicated roster of teachers. Students in this model receive virtual live instruction every school day.
But students in Stamford’s hybrid model, who split time between inschool and at-home learning, are generally not getting any live instruction on their home days, which some parents have found problematic.
Problems with each approach
Rachel Shanen, the
mother of a Westhill student in the hybrid model, praised her daughter’s teachers and school administrators, but wishes her at-home days were different.
“Would I prefer that she be streaming? Absolutely,” she said. “Because that’s what I thought we were going to get.”
Liz Levy has two children at Westhill, and she recently sent an email to the Board of Education explaining her frustrations with the school system, which include the lack of live-streaming.
She noted how the reentry plan prepared by Stamford schools states that students in the hybrid model “may still participate in the instruction in their classroom virtually.” That language is still in the plan, which is available online.
“I would have never chosen a school program where my children only learn (two-to-three) days per week — it simply is not
sufficient and not a fair learning environment,” Levy wrote. “We are cheating our children of their right to an education and there is nothing worse.”
Diana Christopher has two young children in the Norwalk school system and while she has noticed issues with the live-streaming approach, she still values the fact that her children get to see their teachers’ faces every school day.
“In terms of worksheets versus live in person, I definitely see value in face time with the teachers,” she said.
But she said she’d prefer that her children have dedicated teachers in an “online academy” who could more closely pay attention to those at home.
“I’m a little jealous that Stamford is doing that,” she said.
Yordon, who praised the efforts by Norwalk administrators to reopen schools, said her preference would also be to create a separate model for at-home learners, which would free up teachers in classrooms to cater to those present.
“In that type of separated model, each instructor could focus on needs of the students more effectively,” she said.
That’s not surprising to hear for Beldotti, who said she has fielded calls from other districts about Stamford’s academy, which is unusual for the region.
“I think that was a huge win for us, although it took a long time for us to get it up and running to where it is right now,” she said during the school board meeting
But the academy has also presented a number of challenges for the district, which it is still working through.
For starters, students moving from the hybrid model to the academy, and vice versa, since the start of school has set off domino effects causing schedules to shift and requiring teachers to move from one model to the other.
Parents have described classes that were suddenly dropped when a teacher was moved to the academy, for instance. When a teacher is moved, all of his or her students end up displaced, forcing the district to scramble to find alternatives for them.
Since the beginning of school, the number of students in the academy has increased by roughly 20 percent, from 3,210 to 3,843, causing a number of adjustments.
Norwalk Superintendent Alexandra Estrella said her school district does not have to worry about that.
That’s because every chose student remote in Norwalk learning .“who was assigned a seat in a classroom. That way, if the student decided to switch to in-person, their spot would already be waiting for them.
Ultimately, she said the decision to provide some form of direct instruction to students every day was a major driver of the model Norwalk chose.
“To us it was very important that the students felt connected to the classroom and the teacher,” she said.