BACK TO SCHOOL
Many excited to be back in classrooms, while others elected to continue learning virtually through May
Ashley Luna experienced a wave of emotions in March as she tried to decide if she was going to walk through the campus of Metro Tech High School again or finish her senior year from home.
Metro Tech, along with all other high schools that had been closed for the past year, welcomed its students back to its campus after an order from Gov. Doug Ducey that called for all schools to reopen by March 15 or after spring break.
Most students across the state had the option to attend school in person in some way since March of last year, but some districts kept learning remote for its students the entire year. Phoenix Union High School District was one of them.
Phoenix Union, the district Metro Tech is a part of, had plans of allowing students back at the end of March, but
the new order speeded up its plans. Now, students have the option to attend class in person or to opt to stay home and continue virtual learning.
Freshmen started their high school experience from their computer screens, and seven months later they were able to walk through their campuses for the first time.
Seniors lived a majority of their most momentous high school year from home. Now they have gotten a chance to reunite with their classmates and teachers before obtaining their diploma.
Students met some of their classmates and teachers for the first time. They felt excitement and sometimes awkwardness, as it had been a year since lockdown.
However, only one in three of them decided to opt in.
Some didn’t due to financial and familial responsibilities. Others just didn’t prefer it.
“Some just thrived in a virtual setting,” Principal Shawna Wright said.
The on-campus experience for students, faculty and staff who did return has not entirely been a return to normal.
A difficult decision
Luna, one of the top students in her class, is part of the district’s engineering Career and Technical Education (CTE) program.
After lockdown, her and her classmates shifted from learning hands-on to watching video lessons and turning in assignments online.
She lost motivation and saw a difference in her confidence when participating in class, she said.
“I was surprisingly really shy when it came to, like, turning on the microphone and stuff like that,” she said.
Then Ducey made the order. By then, the district had offered the Moderna vaccine to every full- and part-time public, charter and private school employee as well as all child care professionals in the Phoenix Union and Tempe Union high school districts. Many already had both doses.
Luna and her friends had many factors to consider before deciding whether to step foot on campus or not. Risk of getting COVID-19, convenience, family responsibilities, learning preferences and even social aspects were among them.
Luna only had a short way to go before graduating and struggled to see the point of a short on-campus experience, she said. It wouldn’t compare to what seniors before the pandemic had traditionally experienced.
She almost did not go back.
“I’m so glad I somehow decided to change my mind,” Luna said in an interview at the school last week.
Most students, however, are past the one-year mark of remote learning and are finishing off the year from home. Many of her friends as well as her sister are some of them. Her sister, who is a sophomore at the same school, decided not to return for social reasons, Luna said.
“I’m fortunate enough that I’m a senior, so I kind of knew some seniors here and there,” she said. “I felt bad for my sister who (is) a sophomore, and she didn’t know anyone in her classroom.”
What the school looks like
The school took a phased approach. Faculty returned first, then the freshmen.
They’ve gotten the “rhythm” of things and seem to know their way around campus now, Wright said.
“They seem excited to be here,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get them involved in like clubs and sports.”
Each grade that was left came back after phases, with seniors being last.
At the front gate of Metro Tech, students and staff got their temperature checked and were required to fill out a questionnaire focused on identifying symptoms of COVID-19 before entering the campus.
Only about a third of students at Metro Tech walked the halls and courtyards on campus. They and staff wore masks in and outside the buildings.
Hand sanitizers and cleaning supplies were readily available in each room. Seating arrangements were made to ensure six-foot distancing between
students in the classrooms.
Updated maximum occupancy paper signs hung on the walls and on bookshelves in every room of the school.
However, because only a fraction of students returned to campus, the school hasn’t had to make room changes to stay within the occupancy limit, Wright said.
The adjustments were not made at the last minute. Talks about returning to school were constant since the beginning of lockdown.
“We had been planning know, the end of school
Wright said.
Mario Murillo, a math teacher at Metro Tech, said the transition went smoothly thanks to the phased approach, but that technology is still a present issue as remote and in-person students attend the same classes.
In the classroom, teachers can rely on tech support to alleviate problems on their end. However, remote students face the inevitable connectivity issues and computer glitches.
Murillo modeled how to solve an algebra problem in front of the classroom on a Smartboard. A handful of students were present and the rest — the majority — attended virtually.
Only an average of 10 students in Metro Tech sit in the classrooms, while the majority join in virtually.
Students are not required to keep their cameras on. Most don’t, Murillo said.
“I was OK with that,” he said. “I was able to kind of work around it. So teachers since, you last year,” just kind of had to be creative with ways of keeping them accountable.”
He tries to be mindful of making his lesson equitable by ensuring that assignments can be done in the same way by both remote and online students.
In other classrooms, that balance is a challenge.
Luna is able to use the engineering lab and learn hands-on in her CTE class now. Remote students in that class still have to learn through videos and online assignments, she said.
Looking ahead
Over the past year, they became a one-to-one district, meaning every student has his or her own laptop to use for remote learning or to supplement inperson learning, said Anthony Camp, Phoenix Union executive director of teaching and learning.
He believes the district’s strong online learning system it has established is the reason for its slight rise in enrollment in the last year, unlike several districts across the Valley.
Gilbert Public Schools laid off over 150 and plans to close a school, and the Glendale Elementary School District is considering closing five schools, citing a decline in enrollment.
Since the transition, some students who had originally opted out in March are making the return.
“We’ve had more students that have opted to come in person once they talk to their friends, or see their teacher interacting with students in person,” Wright said.
Students will have the opportunity to walk the line at the end of the school year, a significant milestone for families that the Class of 2020 did not get to experience last year.
Phoenix Union has ceremonies scheduled for its schools May 17-20 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
Luna said she’s feeling like her old self again and is excited for an in-person graduation.
She is participating more, and is learning engineering hands-on, a subject she will continue to study in the fall at Smith College in Massachusetts.
Murillo said, “It’s nice to see them kind of flourish again. I think the mental health aspect of a lot of kids like staying home for a long period of time can be detrimental to some depending on situations, so I do think that it’s nice to see them blossom.”