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As schools pivot to remote learning in the midst of the pandemic, some kids aren’t logging in or calling back. And that’s got educators worried.
In the North Country Supervisory Union, Superintendent John Castle said connecting with certain students had been an issue right from the start. Principals in the sprawling supervisory union repeatedly bring up the concern, he said, and on Thursday, Castle sent his school administrators a survey to gauge how many students were still missing.
“What’s happened, in a number of cases, is that folks really fell right off the radar,” Castle said.
Schools are trying a variety of methods to maintain contact with students. In many cases, that’s meant working with local internet service providers and families one-on-one to get them connected for free.
Districts are also still providing bagged breakfasts and lunches to families – often using buses to make drop-offs – and those bus runs have become a valuable way to check in. When that fails, Castle said, school staff are reaching out to neighbors and relatives.
“People are pretty good at turning over every rock,” he said.
Castle said he was glad staff’s efforts had paid off – in general, the number of children unaccounted for had significantly declined from when schools initially closed their doors in mid-March. But in many NCSU towns, a handful of students still haven’t been reached. A slightly larger subset are checking in, but only a couple times a week.
The Agency of Education is giving schools some latitude in how they monitor attendance in this new era of distance learning. Students who make “some form of contact with their classroom teacher or other instructional staff in a day” can be counted as present, according to guidance from the state.
Alison Sylvester, an elementary school teacher in Springfield, said she feels lucky she’s been able to connect with every one of her students at least once. Many of her colleagues haven’t.
The veteran educator has always tried to be careful about setting clear boundaries. She doesn’t let her students connect with her Facebook, and keeps a landline so that she doesn’t have to give out her personal cellphone number.
“Those kinds of boundaries are quickly becoming easier to break. Because at this point, I just want to know that you’re safe and that your kid is safe,” she said.
In the Slate Valley Unified School District, Superintendent Brooke Olsen-Farrell said the districts were working with a few dozen families to get them connected using mobile hotspots. But some families have also been rejecting outright the school’s attempts at outreach.
“While there’s some families that really don’t have access, there’s also families that don’t want access,” she said.
Some families don’t want their children educated online, she said, and so the schools have had to simply send paper packets home. But others are balking in general at the idea of teaching from home.
“Some parents are extremely overwhelmed. I think it’s a big ask in general,” Olsen-Farrell said.
Lynn Cota, the superintendent in the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union, said a few families, overwhelmed by the moment, had been difficult to contact.
“The reality is we have to meet people where they are,” she said. “We have people in crisis all around us. And I think we need to keep that in mind when we’re thinking about expectations.”
Cota’s districts have also worked hard to get those children who didn’t have internet at home a connection. But even those students that are now technically online can struggle to participate in school work. The internet is poor across large swaths of the supervisory union, and in many cases students are competing for bandwidth with siblings or parents now working from home.
“Getting the internet is one of the barriers. But then getting the bandwidth that you need in order to interact successfully is another barrier,” she said.
Mike Campbell, a social studies teacher at BFA-St. Albans, said he’s also worried about how well students will actually be able to participate in online learning, even now that a basic connection has been established with nearly every student. Schools are making this dramatic pivot on a dime, and he’s concerned perfectly well-intentioned educators are inadvertently bombarding kids with too much information.
“We’re overwhelming them with Zoom or Google Meets,” he said. “The student on the receiving end – they’re getting 20 emails.”