Chalkbeat

These Memphis schools were the first to get a COVID scare last year. Their experiences warned of the challenges to come.

2021-03-19T21:44:41+00:00

A year ago, the shared Treadwell elementary and middle school campus was the first in Memphis to feel the effects of what would become a world-shaking pandemic.

An employee at one of the schools went into quarantine after coming in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 — one of only four cases reported in Tennessee at the time. A robocall to parents set off a mild panic, with a line of cars assembling to pick up students early.

Now, as most students in Shelby County Schools continue to learn remotely, the two schools can claim some of the highest in-person learning rates in the 88,000-student district. Hand sanitizer stations are set up in the hallways and students have assigned seats spaced out at lunch.

This is about as close to “normal” as school can get these days in Shelby County Schools — and it’s far from that. Only a third of the district’s students signed up to return to classrooms.

What happened at Treadwell was a preview of the challenges and successes to come in pandemic education, from spotty communication and shaken trust in school leaders’ ability to keep communities safe to moments of joy and connection.

On the day the quarantine was announced, Treadwell Middle School teacher Tasha Casey let students use her phone to call their parents. Looking back to the pandemic’s early days, Casey said she most treasured the moments when she and her colleagues posted video messages to students on social media. She always ended her segments with the words “We will be OK.”

“I was more concerned about the kids and how it was affecting them and adjusting,” said Casey, who has been teaching in Memphis schools for 20 years. “Honestly, as a teacher, the most difficult thing was not being able to disseminate information the way I want to, not to see them, not to hug them.”

The Treadwell campus sits just north of Summer Avenue in Memphis, an international district with restaurants and shops representing countries from Colombia to Somalia to China.

Before the pandemic, the neighborhood was known for block parties where cultures mingled. Soccer and basketball games at the Treadwell campus were natural meeting spots where people who normally would stick to their own groups could get to know each other.

In the wake of Memphis classrooms closing last March, there was a “loss of neighborhood identity,” even as neighbors needed each other more than ever, said Jared Myers, who leads the Heights Community Development Corporation.

“Families were not being shared on information from the district on what to expect,” he said. “Everything happened so quickly.”

Treadwell parent Tameka Patterson learned of the quarantine not from a robocall but from TV. She was at home on the couch resting in the last days of her pregnancy when the initial reports aired.

The footage, which drew national attention, showed just how little the public knew about the virus at the time. One father sprayed his son with disinfectant before picking him up. A grandmother showed up with plastic bags wrapped around her clothing as protection.

Patterson headed to school to pick up her two daughters and son at the elementary and middle schools. By the end of the day, almost half of students at the middle school had left early.

“I was puzzled,” Patterson said. “But I was also, ‘I really don’t understand what’s going on but it sounds serious — let me go get my child.’”

Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray visits Treadwell Middle School the day after the district announced the employee’s quarantine in March 2020.

Three days later, Shelby County Schools announced every district school would close its doors.

While many large U.S. districts quickly pivoted to online learning, the Memphis district took a different approach, handing out paper lesson packets and televising instruction while the district worked on a plan to purchase laptops and tablets for virtual learning using federal relief money. Last spring, district officials only had enough laptops for half of their students.

By the start of the new school year in August, the district secured laptops, tablets, and Wi-Fi hotspots for students who needed them and provided some teacher training for online instruction.

When virtual learning started, Patterson reduced her work hours instead of returning fulltime to her job as a McDonald’s cashier after maternity leave so she could help her three older children adjust to online classes. With her youngest school-age child in pre-kindergarten, Patterson said she needed a lot of patience to help her daughter and learned about what teachers go through.

But communication with her children’s teachers was scarce. She felt the switch to virtual learning was too sudden and unorganized. It’s hard for her to see any upsides of continuing online learning. And since Shelby County Schools is keeping all instruction online the rest of this school year even if a student returns in person, Patterson said sending her children back to classrooms has felt like a waste of time.

“With her being inside the building, she still not getting that hands-on learning,” she said. “She’s doing the same learning she would be doing at home.”

Treadwell Middle School teacher Tasha Casey

Lack of updated contact information for parents and guardians in the district’s databases has been a challenge since the pandemic first disrupted education. By the fall, Shelby County Schools was searching for 3,000 students who hadn’t picked up a laptop or attended classes.

Casey, the longtime Memphis teacher, saw her relationship with parents and students change dramatically during remote learning. Before, she prided herself on working out issues with students one-on-one in class and helping them take responsibility for their actions. She only called parents as a last resort when a student was missing work or misbehaving.

During the pandemic, parents began emailing her more frequently — sometimes to her delight and sometimes excessively. Parents have more access to what their children are doing in virtual classes and often rush to intervene, Casey said. She’s still getting used to it.

“Some of them wear the email out,” she said of parents.

As districts across Tennessee reopened school buildings this school year, Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray held firm that remaining remote was the best path, citing the health risks and community sentiment as the virus continued to exact an awful toll.

But Gov. Bill Lee pressured school leaders in Memphis and Nashville to reopen classrooms, saying, “you can’t say you’re putting the needs of students first and keep schools closed.” State legislators threatened to cut funding.

Finally, last month, Ray announced that the Memphis district would begin returning to buildings March 1.

Students leave Treadwell Elementary for the day following afternoon dismissal.

At afternoon pickup at Treadwell last week, eighth grader Romeo Vasquez said he felt there are “a lot of people protecting us from the virus” at the school.

That wasn’t always the case. When the Treadwell employee was quarantined last March, all six janitors at the schools quit, eliminating the first line of defense for hygiene supplies and cleaning. That left one manager from the district’s contractor to fill the enormous gap at a critical time, said school board member Althea Greene.

The situation and ensuing complaints caused district leaders to re-evaluate their cleaning routines. During the announcement about reopening buildings a month ago, a top official announced that custodial staff at all schools would be required to restock soap and paper towels daily instead of waiting until the dispensers were empty.

Though minor, staff across the district noted the change as a sign their complaints might finally be addressed.

Since reopening classrooms, school leaders have noticed more students submitting assignments and returning students being more engaged than they were online. Even students who sporadically attended online classes came back to the classroom focused and ready to learn, Casey said.

Ray said recently that some version of online learning will continue even after the pandemic. He hasn’t released details, but said he’s thinking about how to apply lessons learned during virtual learning to prepare students for life after high school.

“People tend to think in our community that once we get back to ‘normal times’ — whatever that is — the devices, they’re going to go away,” Ray told board members during a planning meeting last month. “Absolutely not. We made a major investment.”

Treadwell sixth grader Leonardo Vasquez, Romeo’s brother, said he is learning more in person even though teachers are still instructing over videoconferencing. The lessons are more interactive and he can get instant help from a teacher if he needs it, he said. Before classrooms reopened, he said he felt “basically trapped up in your own room.”

Now, he feels like he’s experiencing all the “firsts” of middle school in a way he couldn’t online.

“When there’s school, you can meet more people,” Leonardo said. “You can talk to them to see if you can become friends.”

These are the lessons from remote learning I’m taking back to campus

2021-03-13T00:10:33+00:00

I lost my mom on October 1, 2016. Even though every day is difficult without her, the days leading up to the anniversary of her passing are always the hardest.

We lost school as we knew it on March 13, 2020, and even though school quickly transformed into something new, I find myself having pangs of sadness as we approach the year anniversary of the day the mayor announced that all Philadelphia school buildings would close, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

March 13 is a day of remembrance. Since then, so many and so much have been lost. As schools, we must recognize the pain that students, teachers, families, and community members have endured and are still living through. But we must also take stock of our joys and accomplishments during this time. This week, I reflected on the growth our school, Kensington Health Sciences Academy, made this year. Despite the difficulties, there have been gains — gains that should be noted, celebrated, and continued after we return in person.

1:1 Technology
Let’s start with the biggest gain: Every child in my school now has a laptop and has exponentially improved their technology skills. Our teachers have learned new ways of presenting content, and our children have new ways of showing us that they are learning. Our school’s midyear survey revealed that technology is the area in which students feel they are learning the most.

1:1 Advising
As a school community, we came together in July 2020 to devise a schedule that would be more conducive to virtual learning. One of the best outcomes is a flexible period in which we hold one-on-one meetings with our students. These meetings allow teacher advisors to discuss attendance, grades, and other issues with students. As of March, every student has met with their advisor at least eight times, which has helped to keep them on track and remind them that an adult is looking out for them. Our teachers believe that this individualized attention has contributed to our daily attendance being close to 90%. And our midyear survey showed that 72% of our children said that one-on-one meetings were the best part of their day. The flexibility of the virtual environment has allowed our administrative team to become advisors, too; this is definitely my favorite part of the day.

Home Visits
When a student’s virtual attendance begins to drop, our support team — mainly our school climate manager and school safety officer — stops by their home to see if the student is having trouble with their computer or with the internet. In a city that does not provide free public transportation to students, home visits have been essential, especially when children need tech help and may not be able to leave their homes due to cost, safety, or sibling care. While visiting homes was always considered a best practice in schools, the hustle and bustle of the traditional school day often did not allow for such quality attention for our families. Our climate manager and safety officer have conducted over 350 visits this school year, and we recognize that we must continue this direct communication with families for our students to succeed.

Anti-Racism Focus
In response to the murder of George Floyd last summer, members in our school community formed anti-racism groups. The virtual setting allowed our teachers to come together over the summer with ease and regularity. Once the staff anti-racism group formed, a student anti-racism group came together, too. These gatherings have led to the most honest conversations we have ever had about how we need to improve together.

Special Guests
From a museum curator in Chicago to a celebrity chef in New York, we have had the best guest speaker line-up in our school’s history. Council members Helen Gym and Kendra Brooks inspired the Class of 2020 last spring with their virtual commencement addresses. City Commissioner Al Schmidt talked to our senior government class about election fraud. Superintendent William Hite participated in our online pie-eating contest. Now, our sophomore class is beginning a virtual exchange with students in Japan. With the world gone virtual, we’ve found scheduling impressive speakers and events has been easier than ever.

After school buildings closed almost exactly a year ago, I was afraid of what would be lost during a year online. But our students and teachers have found new ways to grow together and build our community. As we approach March 13, 2021, I am thinking about how we have prevailed this past year, and what practices we will continue when we are back in our buildings. I hope you’ll do the same.

Nimet Eren is Principal of Kensington Health Sciences Academy in Philadelphia.

‘I don’t want to forget him’: How a close-knit Detroit school coped with the death of a mentor and role model

2021-03-12T18:29:36+00:00

Every once in a while, Latrell Maxwell turns to the photo of Thomas Fields that sits on the dresser in his bedroom, and he has the kind of conversation he used to have when Fields was alive.

He tells Fields about his school day. He talks through any problems he’s having. And he imagines Fields giving him the kind of pep talk that made so many students feel seen at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy in the Detroit school district.

Do well in school, Fields would often tell them. Make your education a priority. Don’t give up.

Melissa Redman’s son Latrell holds a photograph of Thomas Fields. He keeps the picture on his dresser and talks to him.

“It feels good to know that even though he’s not presently here, he’s spiritually here,” said Latrell, an eighth grader at the school. “I just try to remember all the good times we had.”

It’s been a long, emotional year since Fields died from coronavirus complications, leaving a deep void at the school where he was the school culture facilitator, a role that required him to work with students who have behavior problems. In the midst of a harrowing public health crisis that hit the city particularly hard, this tight-knit school community has sought to cope with his death and honor his memory.

But the grieving process has been challenging. The school, which has an African-centered focus, hasn’t held face-to-face classes for a year. And for parent leaders like Aliya Moore, who are used to seeing students regularly in the building, that means “I still can’t wrap my arms around our babies.”

Field’s death came March 30, 20 days after the first positive COVID-19 case was recorded in Michigan, and shortly after schools shut their buildings and shifted to remote learning. In the wake of his death, the Detroit Public Schools Community District provided counseling to students and staff. The PTA held a socially-distanced outdoor memorial and released balloons. Graduating students each received a key chain with a photo of Fields.

But many are still grieving, and school leaders know they need to continue helping students and staff cope with the loss of the staff member who often cheered them up.

In the year since his death, Field’s name frequently comes up — in classroom chats, during a Black History Month celebration, and in everyday conversations. Fields, Principal Jeffery Robinson said, managed to connect with students in ways others couldn’t. It’s one of the reasons Robinson had frequently encouraged Fields to pursue a teaching degree.

“He was that good,” Robinson said.

Fields, who was 32, didn’t have a long tenure at the school, having been hired in 2019. But he already had a deep connection.

Years ago, when Malcolm X Academy and Paul Robeson Academy were separate schools with a focus on African-centered education, Fields was a student attending Malcolm X. Robinson, a longtime educator in Detroit, was a teacher at the school. He and Fields remained in contact over the years, and Robinson has described hiring Fields as a proud moment.

Schools like these were built around the idea that Black children need to understand their history and culture to succeed academically. Such schools once thrived in Detroit, and the model was replicated elsewhere in the country. But now, there are only a few of these schools remaining in the city. More than a decade ago, Malcolm X and Paul Robeson were combined, with Robinson taking on the principal’s role. He’s led the school for 12 years.

Thomas Fields, far right, is shown during his middle school days at Malcolm X Academy, which later merged with Paul Robeson Academy. Fields was the school culture facilitator at the combined school when he died March 30.

It was at Malcolm X that Fields learned about the importance of community and the school family. Adults are called Mama and Baba, African terms for mother and father. And the schools place a premium on developing connections between the staff and families that help raise strong children.

By the time Robinson approached Fields to work at the school, the latter had already earned a degree from Grambling State University and was a U.S. Navy veteran. He spent most of his time working closely with students who got into trouble because of bad behavior, giving them tools and encouragement to make better choices. Fields, Robinson said, took the job because he wanted to give back to the school that had given him so much.

He had a knack for reaching some of the most troubled children and he became so popular that at least one boy got in trouble on purpose so he could spend time with Fields.

“He never forgot the feelings and emotions of being a youth,” Moore, the PTA leader, said.

One day in late September, weeks after the school year had begun, Robinson and several staff members were hit with a wave of grief while in search of a place to store technology equipment.

Thomas Fields, the school culture facilitator at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy, is shown with Melissa Redman, the school’s parent action leader. Fields died March 30 from coronavirus complications.

Long before the pandemic, Fields had pushed Robinson to OK the purchase of board games and video games that would be an incentive for good behavior. Robinson had given his blessing for the purchase earlier in 2020, then thought little of it. So when he opened the door to the storage room, he saw that not only had the games arrived, but Fields had organized and marked them with numbers.

“All of us stood there and cried,” Robinson said. “Nobody had been in that room since Thomas had been there.”

It was another reminder of how much they miss Fields. He was the person who greeted students at the front entrance every morning, hyping them up for the day’s lessons. He played basketball with the kids and taught them old-school games like red light, green light. He was someone who encouraged and inspired students. And Fields, an avid cook who frequently posted videos of himself in the kitchen, had made plans to teach students how to cook.

Just last week, Melissa Redman, Latrell’s mother, recalled running into Fields on the last day classes were in session in the building. Fields was in the gym during his lunch break, cracking jokes. With the anniversary of his death approaching, Redman has been thinking about that day lately, her thoughts often turning to Fields..

“I keep his picture around my neck,” she said, referring to a blue lanyard with Field’s picture attached that she wears every day. “I don’t want to forget what happened a year ago. I don’t want to forget him. I always want to keep his name lifted.”

Fields’ loss came at a devastating time for the city of Detroit, which was confronted with many COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early months of the pandemic.

The passings reverberated across the city as some prominent community leaders lost their battles with the virus. In school communities, students, staff, parents — many of them lost relatives or knew someone who died.

Robinson felt the deaths intensely. Just days after Fields died, Robinson suffered an even bigger personal loss. His mother, Evelyn Grace Robinson, died alone in a city hospital. It was Easter Sunday, and she had COVID-19. The year before, his granddaughter and a grandmother had died.

Also a minister, Robinson has officiated at nearly 70 funerals in the last year. In a typical year, he does about a dozen.

“I haven’t properly grieved,” Robinson said of the deaths of his mother, Fields, and so many others. “What I know of psychology and being an educator for 30 years … I know I have to. It has been a rough couple of years.”

Robinson said he finds solace in seeing to the needs of others. The school has been handing out food boxes to those who need it.

“That’s where I sort of grounded myself,” he said.

There is a wall outside the main office at Paul Robeson Malcolm X that pays tribute to people who have passed who had a connection to the school. Soon, Robinson will add Fields to that wall. He knows his students need closure, for many different reasons.

“Our kids have lost people, and they’re going to bring that (grief) back,” Robinson said.

The school is one of a small number in the Detroit district that hasn’t returned to face-to-face instruction — a decision Robinson made with input from parents. Most parents and teachers, he said, aren’t ready to return due to safety concerns.

Robinson wants the school to hold some type of event that will help students get the closure they need. It may be another balloon release ceremony. It may be something else, like a tree planting.

“We have to do something,” Moore said. “It’s about healing and it’s about mental health. I have faith that between administrators, teachers and us being parents, we will wrap our arms around these kids and focus on their mental health.”

But she knows that the first day back to in-person instruction — whenever that will be — will be a difficult one, since students became so accustomed to seeing Fields greeting them at the door.

“To come to the door and no Baba Fields? …”

Latrell will be graduating from Paul Robeson Malcolm X this year and heading to Cass Technical High School in the fall. He said he won’t forget Fields, and how well he understood students.

Thomas Fields, the school culture facilitator at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy, also loved to cook. He died March 30 from coronavirus complications.

“We talk about him all the time,” Latrell said. “We just talk about all the good times we had with him. He used to play basketball with us. He helped us with our science fair projects.”

Moore said it’s important for students to understand that one of the best ways they can honor his memory is to remember what he taught them.

“He’s still with us,” she said. “Your behavior, what you do moving forward, will continue his legacy.”

Robinson will need to hire a new school culture facilitator for the upcoming school year. But he doesn’t like to say Fields will be replaced. That, he said, is impossible.

“I tell the students, ‘Close the book, but remember the story.’ “

Five things we learned about schools in the pandemic

2021-03-12T12:30:00+00:00

It can be hard to draw lessons from a crisis when you are still in the crisis. While hope is on the horizon, we are definitely still living with the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing impact on education. Many school buildings remain closed. Those that are open face daily challenges around testing and social distancing. We don’t know what shape next year will take.

But one year into the closure of school buildings in America’s more than 13,000 school districts, some lessons and takeaways are already emerging around the importance of school communities, disparities that have worsened, and the support that students and families need.

Here are some early takeaways Chalkbeat has drawn from a year of pandemic disruption.

Schools can transform themselves.

When the pandemic struck and buildings were shuttered, educators had to reinvent their schools in record time. Suddenly teachers went from standing in front of students to logging into Zoom, mastering Zearn and Epic and all of the other learning platforms in a matter of days.

Creativity and improvisation were on display in every facet of schooling during the early months. Teachers held virtual office hours, while librarians offered home delivery of books. Buses were outfitted with WiFi and sent to disconnected neighborhoods, and bus drivers without routes were repurposed as social workers.

When schools began reopening, fast thinking and ingenuity were needed once again. Complicated hybrid schedules had to be drafted to abide by social distancing and limit the number of in-person students. Physical education was often moved outdoors. Plexiglass dividers were erected, while some teachers learned how to live-stream their lessons to students watching at home.

Not every innovation was a success — there was Zoombombing, problems with test and trace programs, concerns about classroom ventilation hacks. The pivoting and reinvention continued.

Will these changes reshape schools for years to come? It’s too soon to say. But the effects will still be with us in the next school year. New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has already said he expects to have an in-person or fully remote option for families. Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has similarly said virtual learning will be an option for skittish families as well — but with substantive changes.

The digital divide shaped everything.

Uneven access to the internet was a concern for families long before COVID-19, but the pandemic made clear that some communities would have an especially tough time making remote school work. From the start, some schools struggled to get Chromebooks and iPads into the hands of all children and WiFi for families without it. There were bumps in the road, from cable company policies that punished families with unpaid bills to a lack of political will to expand broadband networks.

Internet and computer access has improved since a year ago, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, but remains a challenge for 5% of students. While many schools have found ways to deliver devices to families who need them, expanding WiFi has proved trickier, even for ambitious programs to expand access such as Chicago Connected.

Schools provide so much more to students, particularly a food safety net, than many realized.

Widespread school shutdowns made it clear that many children rely on school for healthy meals. Before the pandemic, public schools in the U.S. provided about 30 million free or reduced price meals a day. With the economic hardship of the pandemic, even more families need help keeping kitchens stocked. A June Census Bureau survey found that 14 million children are hungry due to financial strain — more than five times the 2018 number.

School communities have stepped up, making pick-up convenient even when schools are closed or delivering meals to families uneasy about waiting in line. Perhaps this is no surprise — studies have shown the connection between hunger and academic achievement.

Relationships are critical.

When schools closed last spring, students suddenly lost access to a world of interactions with peers and adults. The resulting isolation has been hard on students. Many lost motivation to turn in assignments or participate in class. For others, mental health struggles worsened. The lack of face time has made it harder to spot students who need help, worrying educators.

The pandemic and remote learning did give some parents a front-row seat to their children’s education for the first time. Suddenly they were observing teachers greet children in the morning, read stories, instruct them in math and social studies. And many parents were called on to do far more, particularly for younger students. They assisted with art lessons, sometimes even acted as test proctors. And particularly for students who are fully remote, teachers have had to build relationships with families to support the children’s learning.

Numerous teachers have told Chalkbeat that even once school buildings fully reopen, they hope these strengthened bonds remain. “When parents go back to work and students go back to school, I hope this partnership carries on,” Queens teacher Christina Armas wrote. “We should be sharing more of our professional knowledge and experience with parents.”

Schools are political entities — and engines of the economy.

Governors, state lawmakers, mayors, superintendents, and school boards have all fought to control school reopening decisions and sometimes clashed with one another. Research has shown that reopening decisions have tracked more closely to an area’s share of Trump voters, not its virus case rates. Teachers unions have had a big influence. And while surveys indicate that reopening decisions have mostly aligned with parents’ desires, conflicts over school safety have caused real rifts in many communities.

The push to reopen schools also made clear how schools allow our economy to function. Closed schools exacerbated a child care crisis that pushed women from the workforce this year. And while schools appear likely to avoid big budget cuts now, for much of the year, a financial crisis loomed, which could have cost many of the country’s 8 million education jobs.

A ‘daunting, dark and difficult’ time: How a Brooklyn school moved forward after losing its leader to COVID

2021-03-12T12:30:00+00:00

High school student Etienne Musole remembered one of his first interactions with principal Dez-Ann Romain. She asked point blank whether he wanted to graduate.

It was a high stakes question at a place like Brooklyn Democracy Academy, an alternative high school in Brownsville serving students who have struggled at traditional schools and are at risk of dropping out.

After the 19-year-old Musole said yes, Romain never let up. “Every day she sees you from that point on, she’s going to be on you,” Musole said.

Dez-Ann Romain photographed in 2019.

For many students at the school, Romain was the first educator they felt they could trust, and she deployed a mix of support and tough love. One former student said she counseled him after he broke down in tears over a failed Regents exit exam and let him walk at graduation anyway. (He eventually passed the exam.) Sometimes, she challenged basketball players to pushups if they were goofing around in the hallway instead of heading to class, Musole said.

But just days after city officials shuttered school buildings citywide in March due to surging coronavirus infections, Brooklyn Democracy Academy suffered a devastating blow: Romain was dead. At age 36, she was the first known New York City education department employee to die after contracting the virus.

Her death drew national headlines, as relatively little was known at the time about the coronavirus or who was most at risk. It also plunged a small alternative high school into a series of head-spinning challenges: How to give students and staff space to grieve when they were not physically together. How to quickly transition to virtual learning without the school’s instructional leader. How to keep students, who often struggle with absenteeism in normal times, from slipping through the cracks.

Even more pressing: Brooklyn Democracy Academy had no assistant principal at the time, making it unclear who would step in to help answer these urgent questions. If Romain was the glue holding the school together, it was easy to imagine it could fall apart without her.

“Everything was so uncertain, and I didn’t have any answers,” said social studies teacher Dexter Hannibal. “It was just really scary.”

He learned about Romain’s death from a hospital bed during his own debilitating fight with the virus.

In the days leading up to Romain’s death and after students were sent home, teachers were still asked to report to their buildings to prepare for remote instruction, a move that generated pushback from educators across the city. Around the time of Romain’s passing, the principal of another school that shares the building was also hospitalized, though the education department didn’t confirm at the time whether she had the coronavirus.

Brooklyn Democracy Academy where Dez-Ann Romain, the former principal, died from COVID in the early months of the pandemic, is a transfer school in Brownsville.

Despite the fear that was coursing through the city, Brooklyn Democracy Academy was perhaps better situated than many schools to weather the crisis. As an alternative “transfer” program that serves students who are older and off track from graduating, the small and close-knit school already prized deep relationships with students to keep them engaged enough to graduate. A small group of “advocate counselors,” for instance, are specifically charged with doing everything from calling students to make sure they come to school to offering support if students are struggling with a crisis of their own.

While some schools may have scrambled to figure out how to keep tabs on students, that wasn’t the case at Brooklyn Democracy Academy. “When we went to remote, it was kind of picking up with what we normally do,” said Lashawn Doyle, the school’s community coordinator and basketball coach.

The immediate responsibility for charting the school’s path forward fell to Yesenia Peralta, an education department administrator who helped oversee transfer schools. She offered to be “the person on call” and then ended up stepping in when Romain became seriously ill.

Her first order of business last spring was making sure the community had space to process, including a vigil, “grieving circles,” and access to counselors, who were also made available to parents. She was especially concerned about her staff’s mental health because she knew if they weren’t emotionally prepared, it would be difficult for them to help students process everything that was happening. Most of all, she didn’t want to “dismantle anything” at the school.

“The students didn’t know me,” she said. “Having that friendly face was the most important thing in that moment.”

In spite of the crisis, she felt compelled to stay on as the school’s interim principal — and has continued in that role this school year.

“We were in a place in a city at that moment that was just so daunting, so dark, and so difficult, and I wanted to do the right thing,” she said. “This community had lost their leader — someone they really loved and respected — and they had gotten to know me, and I didn’t want to abandon them.”

Yesenia Peralta, the new principal of the Brooklyn Democracy Academy, made sure the school had time to grieve.

It wasn’t just the death of Romain that worried the school’s staff. Students and their families were also dealing with the toll of the virus, which has killed nearly 30,000 city residents. About 80% of Brooklyn Democracy Academy’s students are Black and 17% are Hispanic, populations that have been disproportionately impacted during the pandemic. More than 80% of the school’s students come from low-income families, and some students took on part-time jobs to help make ends meet, teachers said.

At the same time, the crisis disrupted some of the ways the school typically keeps students engaged. Due to uncertainty about how the virus was spreading, counselors eased up on home visits for the next several months, visits that were often used to re-engage students who were having attendance problems. The school’s Adidas-sponsored basketball team, a big draw for some students, was on hold. And staffers also grappled with how to keep college or career planning on the front burner since that’s a crucial piece of keeping students motivated to graduate.

A team portrait of the Brooklyn Democracy Academy basketball team.

Counselors “were very worried about picking up a phone to talk to a student about applying to college when on the other end was a kid crying because their grandmother died,” said Lucinda Mendez, the director of transfer schools at New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit that has partnered with Brooklyn Democracy Academy.

But even if imperfect, staffers found workarounds. New Visions supported virtual career events and worked with counselors to continue forging college and career plans while remaining sensitive to students’ emotional needs. The organization helped consolidate the school’s management of student data, including attendance, engagement with digital schoolwork, and even whether students had reliable internet access — information that is often scattered in different places. Each morning, advocate counselors made phone calls to check on students’ academic or mental health needs.

“Our students are used to: If they have an issue, they can just walk into anybody’s office and talk to them,” said Sheena Rue, a program director at the Mission Society, the community organization that provides the school’s advocate counselors. “We had to adjust,” she added, noting that her team relied on everything from video calls to social media to connect with students.

Inside virtual classrooms, teachers also worked to maintain a sense of normalcy, creating space during class to meaningfully connect with students. Peralta has emphasized the importance of deescalating students’ stress levels and developing plans to turn their negative emotions into more positive ones, hopefully inspiring them to complete their work.

“Before I start any lesson, the first five minutes is down time,” said Hannibal, the social studies teacher. “I have a couple of kids who are big anime watchers, so before I start [I’ll ask]: ‘did you watch that new ‘Attack on Titan’ episode? If you can talk about what they enjoy, some other stuff starts to come out.”

If Hannibal gets the sense that a student is overwhelmed, he might adjust their assignments to take some of the pressure off. He noted the school’s constant communication led them to discover one student’s mother was in hospice after a surgery and was not allowed to return home due to the virus — and the student was missing a functional remote learning device.

“We delivered a new computer to him,” Hannibal said. “We’re checking in with him every single day.”

Since the shutdown last spring, teachers across the city have been wrestling with how to shift their lessons into an online environment. That challenge is particularly acute for Shawn Dawkins, who teaches popular hydroponics and aquaponics courses, since the classes involve lots of hands-on work tending to tanks of lettuce, basil, cilantro, and tilapia. The lab got a big boost under Romain, who helped secure funding from the borough president to expand it, an effort to promote urban agriculture and supply fresh produce to the surrounding community.

After the pandemic forced the school building to shut down in March, and canceled plans for a farmers market supplied by the hydroponic garden, Dawkins asked Peralta if he could continue returning to the building once a week to keep the plants and fish alive — a request she granted.

Courtesy of Shawn Dawkins, the Brooklyn Democracy Academy’s hydroponics teacher.

Dawkins uses the lab in some of his remote lessons and even created a backup hydroponic setup at his home in case he was unable to get into the campus for an extended period. The school is now planning to send small hydroponics kits to student’s homes, including seeds of basil, swiss chard and kale.

“That’s not going to make up for the lack of normalcy,” Dawkins said, referring to his efforts to keep the school’s hydroponics lab going. “But maybe that will give a little tiny bit of it.”

New York City high schools opened in October, but shut down less than two months later when rising coronavirus rates triggered a systemwide shutdown. Officials are planning to reopen high schools later this month, though the vast majority of students opted to learn exclusively from home.

There are signs that the city is turning a corner, as vaccine distribution is expanding and Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised a “full” reopening in the fall. But Brooklyn Democracy Academy also faces headwinds.

The school graduated 87 students last spring, almost half of its student population, as some students felt motivated to honor Romain’s legacy by finishing their coursework. Additionally, state officials canceled exit exams that often trip students up.

Meanwhile, far fewer students appeared to be switching into alternative schools. Brooklyn Democracy Academy’s enrollment plummeted by 31% this school year to 122 students, the fourth largest drop of any school in the city, and far higher than the 4% citywide decline, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. Transfer schools, and other campuses in Brownsville, have seen some of the biggest drops across the five boroughs.

Officials said the drop in enrollment at transfer schools could be connected to policies that have given students more time to complete their coursework in their current schools, reducing the need to transfer to schools like Brooklyn Democracy Academy to catch up. Some students may have obligations to care for relatives or pick up jobs to support their families, taking them away from school altogether during the pandemic.

Officials said they expect enrollment to rebound as the pandemic subsides, but the losses could have big implications in the short term, as funding is tied to enrollment and schools can be asked to return funds mid-year. (An education department spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the city is clawing back money from the school’s budget.)

Brooklyn Democracy Academy student-athlete Etienne Musole.

For his part, Musole, the Brooklyn Democracy Academy student, said he’s excited to get back in the building and was overjoyed that his basketball team will be allowed to play this spring and defend last year’s championship season.

He’s aiming to graduate in June, though because the season was postponed, he is nervous about losing out on some opportunities to be noticed by college basketball programs. Yet like some other students, Romain is still echoing in his mind, coaxing him across the finish line.

“I got to finish strong because when she first spoke to me we agreed on one thing: ‘You’re graduating,’” Musole said. “She’s not going to be there to see me do it, but I still gotta get it done.”

Yesenia Peralta is the principal of the Brooklyn Democracy Academy where Dez Ann Romain, the former principal, died from COVID in the early months of the pandemic.

I’m 17. Here’s how this pandemic year changed me.

2021-03-11T21:35:46+00:00

I’d wake up at noon with no plans. Would I spend the remainder of my day wallowing in self-defeat, or would I manage to get something done?

Pretty soon after the pandemic began, I found myself consumed by gloom doing the most menial tasks. As I helped out my father with our weekly grocery runs and completed assignments, it seemed as if the whole world was circling around me, watching as I stood still. This went on for months. When would I finally be able to go back to school? When would everything go back to before?

Leonel Ramirez

Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, I’d say I had the average day-to-day experience of any high school teen living in New York City. It would start off with waking up ridiculously early with enough time to catch the L train and a cup of coffee before my AP U.S. History class. After that I would participate in my culinary-centered courses and socialize with my peers.

“We’ll be back in no time,” I said this to myself every day as I scrolled through social media and saw all the amazing things people were still managing to get done in the midst of the tragedy. I wanted that to be me, but instead I spent long stretches reminiscing about life before the coronavirus. I was exhausted, and I wanted more than anything to return to school.

But I also realized that, even before the pandemic — back when I bathing in my accomplishments and taking part in new things — I spent a lot of time living up to everyone else’s expectations of what I should be and how I should act. That’s hard to do, especially when this notion in your head is secluded from the outside world and all its tribulations.

Until that epiphany hit — that realization some people have in the shower or right after you wake up. While in the middle of my weekly shopping outing, I realized it was time to stop feeling so sorry for myself and take action before this new world.

Alongside my peers at Food and Finance High School, I helped in create a first-of-its-kind magazine celebrating chefs of color, Pass the Spatula. We got all sorts of media attention, from the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Taste. I knew right away with all the momentum we were getting that I had so much more to do.

I knew I had to use this as an opportunity to highlight not just people that had the same interests as me, but people from different walks of life. I soon began to branch out and met amazing creatives. Scholars with successful careers in academia, peers who were, like me, taking a summer class at Columbia University, and people who worked in the field of mutual aid, all making strides in their community.

Among them, there was Carmen Lopez Villamil, a Beacon High School student who is the campaign lead at the youth activism organization Teens Take Charge. There was LA Ramos, a student at the Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies, and a member the Youth Leadership Council, the Puerto Rican/Hispanic Youth Leadership Institute, and many other groups. And there was Anais Aboab, a Gramercy Arts High School student who has brought to light issues facing impoverished communities through her work in mutual aid and film.

Regardless of where we come from and the different work we do, these individuals and I have this in common: We work in environments that are made to defy us. We are constantly negotiating the apparatus and redefining the system that has confined us to this one image. In the end, we don’t owe anyone anything but remaining authentic to our true character.

I won’t say that I came out of this pandemic a different person. Just as someone with new experiences, new goals, and a new interpretation of what it means to be a teenager working his way up.

Leonel Ramirez is a 17-year-old student at Food and Finance High School in Manhattan. Leonel is a member of YVote and the Youth Leadership Council.

‘I never ever imagined this’: How the pandemic tightened bonds between parents and teachers at one southwest Denver school

2021-03-11T12:30:00+00:00

Alicia Garcia was cleaning up the remnants of the cupcakes she’d brought in for her daughter Eliyana’s 7th birthday at Denver’s Newlon Elementary last March when she heard the schools were closing for an “extended spring break” in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. At that point, there were 49 cases in all of Colorado.

“The teacher was like, ‘Okay kids, go to the [classroom] library and take as many books you want to take,’” Garcia recalled. “It was crazy.”

What began as a three-week break has turned into a year learning at home for Eliyana, now a second grader at Newlon. The close-knit school in a working-class southwest Denver neighborhood, where 95% of students are Hispanic, is open five days a week for in-person learning. But about half of its 300 students are learning from home, a reflection of the greater skepticism about returning to classrooms among communities of color.

Eliyana Hernandez works at her desk at home.

Like many of her classmates, Eliyana has been learning to spell compound words and add dollars and cents from her bedroom. Her mother works as a caregiver for Eliyana’s great-grandmother, and the family can’t risk any exposure.

“I never ever imagined this. I never thought we would live through this,” said Garcia, who was an active parent volunteer before COVID, bringing her newborn son with her to PTA meetings. “It was hard on all of us because everybody was so close and it was taken away so fast.”

The past year has been difficult for all schools in Colorado, a state where there have been more than 436,000 cases of COVID and 6,000 deaths. In the absence of a statewide strategy or mandate, each of Colorado’s 178 school districts have made reopening decisions on their own.

Denver Public Schools, the biggest district in Colorado with about 93,000 students, has taken a fairly cautious approach. Denver started the school year virtually, and then opened and closed school buildings as cases rose and dropped. But the volume of families choosing to stay remote at elementary schools like Newlon even after students were welcomed back full time has been an added challenge for teachers, who had to adapt to instructing students seated in front of them at the same time as those behind laptop screens.

Eliyana’s teacher has discovered a surprising upside, however: a strengthened relationship between parents and teachers, who are truly partners in educating the students.

“Parents will text me and say, ‘They’re not understanding how to make the ‘oo’ sound in ‘book.’ Can you double check in with them tomorrow?’” second-grade teacher Callie Gonyea said.

That level of communication was not something Gonyea had experienced in her 5-year career.

“A lot of the time, parents are used to teachers talking to them,” she said. “They’re not as used to teachers listening to them about areas they feel a student might need a little help.”

On any given day in Room 116 at Newlon, Gonyea is juggling teaching 18 students in person and eight at home. With a computer propped on top of an upside down trash can, and a speaker and camera balanced on top of a bucket, she keeps a running tally in her head: for every two students she calls on in class, she taps one at home.

“Who’s going to be my first friend to show me their board or put it in the chat?” she said to the remote students during a phonics lesson last week. Her class was practicing writing the compound word “countdown,” in which the tricky “ow” sound is spelled two different ways.

The students in class were writing the word on mini whiteboards. The kids at home had whiteboards too, but most had their cameras off, preferring to type their answers. Of the students whose cameras were on, one was lying on a pillow in her bed. Another was wearing headphones in a room with a sibling. A third was eating breakfast.

Gonyea called on the girl who was eating to spell another compound word: “underground.”

“What part do you see in the word ‘ground’ to help you out?” she asked.

There was a long pause — 12 seconds, longer than most teachers would wait under normal circumstances — as the girl figured out the answer and then clicked the unmute button.

“The ‘ow’ sound?” the girl finally said.

“The ‘ow!’” Gonyea repeated. “And what letters make that ‘ow’ sound?”

Still unmuted, the girl answered quickly. “O-u?” she said.

“O-u!” Gonyea acknowledged.

This type of simultaneous teaching is a far cry from what Gonyea and other teachers were doing last spring. Instead of live video calls that spanned the school day, Gonyea assigned three literacy and three math lessons per week. She recorded short five-minute videos explaining the assignments and let students complete them at their own pace.

But many students struggled with the technology, Gonyea said. The school was eventually able to distribute enough laptops and get most families connected to the internet, but Gonyea’s second-graders didn’t know how to type on a keyboard or toggle from one tab to another.

“It didn’t feel a lot like teaching, what we were doing,” Gonyea said. “I spent a lot of time thinking about, ‘Am I doing enough? What more can I be doing?’”

Gonyea spent most of her days calling families. It was a schoolwide strategy to check in with each family at least once a week. Newlon was finishing up a four-year grant on improving social and emotional learning, and Principal Rob Beam said the focus “was to keep that alive, almost before instruction. Nobody learns well when they’re scared.”

If the academic part was stressful, Gonyea said improving her relationships with families was a silver lining. “When I’d call to check in, I’d ask, ‘What did you do over the weekend? What’s something you’re looking forward to?’” she said. “It allowed me to get to know them even more as people. ... You get to know your students very well, but you don’t have a dedicated time to have a 5-minute unstructured conversation with every kid twice a week.”

It’s an approach she’s carried into this school year. Although she no longer has the time to call each student twice a week, Gonyea spent the entire first week of school getting to know them and their families. She started by reading a book called “Alma and How She Got Her Name,” about a father explaining to his daughter the origins of her very long name.

Gonyea then had the students interview their families and write reports about the origins of their own names. When Gonyea made those first phone calls to families in August, she used the name origin stories as conversation starters with parents.

Jessika Espana remembers her daughter Isabelle being slightly disappointed to learn her parents chose her name to match her older brothers’, which also begin with “I.” Espana convinced her daughter to write about the nickname her family calls her at home: Chabelita. She remembers Isabelle giggling when Gonyea said it on the call.

Espana, who has two children at Newlon, has noticed the difference in the level of communication between parents and teachers. She said she appreciates that Gonyea always answers her questions, even if she texts late in the day.

“We didn’t have teachers’ phone numbers last year or any year before,” Espana said. “This year, I have all my kids’ teachers’ phone numbers in my phone.

“I go through the M’s and its ‘Miss this’ and ‘Miss that.’”

Alahnna Salcido went back to Gonyea’s class in person this fall, but when coronavirus cases began spiking in October, her mom switched her to remote learning for the rest of the year.

Alahnna is a loving 8-year-old whose mother, Angelique, describes her as “a real joy.” She’s also a motivated student. Learning from home, Alahnna said she misses playing with her friends at recess but she’s grateful she still gets to draw in virtual art class. She recently drew a story about a caramel ice cream cone named Carmy whose friends didn’t like him at first because he was different. But Carmy told them it’s important to accept everyone the way they are.

Alahnna Salcido reacts to receiving an award from school.

An upside to remote learning, Alahnna said, is that it’s easier for her to see the teacher’s screen at home than it was in the classroom, spaced 6 feet apart and wearing a mask. It’s also easy to participate in class discussions and answer Gonyea’s questions, she said.

“I like to unmute so I can share my ideas with speaking, but I also like [using] the chat because whatever I’m talking about to describe, I can use the emojis,” she said.

Gonyea’s second-graders are now whizzes at typing and tabs. They easily mute and unmute themselves on Google Meet and use the “raise hand” button when they have something to say. And the academics are going much smoother. Gonyea has gotten through more of the curriculum this fall and winter than she did last year before COVID-19.

“There was part of me that was fearful that with all of this weirdness going on in the transitions and the schedule: Would there be learning?” Gonyea said. “It looks different, but it’s still very much there. I’ve seen reading levels go up a lot. I’ve seen students come out of their shells socially and emotionally. That makes me feel good.”

Gonyea said she’ll never look back on this year as the best of her career, but she appreciates how it challenged her, made her grow, and helped her prioritize what’s most important.

“I don’t think I will ever go back to the way I interacted with families before,” she said. “I think I will now always be a teacher who is reaching out to families as much as possible.”

Beam, the principal at Newlon, said he’s seen all of his teachers grow tremendously in the face of adversity, even if the teachers themselves might not realize it yet.

“Teachers now are much better at their jobs than they’ve ever been before — they just don’t know why or how yet,” he said. “And we need to give them a chance to catch their breath.”

Eliyana, the student whose classroom birthday celebration coincided with the beginning of the pandemic in Colorado, is set to turn 8 on Sunday. Since she’s learning from home, she won’t be able to eat cake with her classmates in person this year.

But her mom has come up with an alternative: She plans to call Gonyea and ask if it’s possible to leave some boxes of cupcakes outside the classroom door.

‘This is what I do’: How a Newark teacher called, texted, and trudged through the snow to reach her students during COVID

2021-03-10T12:30:00+00:00

Joicki Floyd woke up early one morning last week just before Newark rumbled to life. She folded laundry while her children slept, savoring the quiet she knew wouldn’t last. At 8:30 a.m., it was time for school.

Floyd, who teaches ninth-grade English, logged into a video chat and waited for her students’ faces to appear. Her 11-year-old son, Sir, was nearby getting ready for his online school. Her 8-year-old daughter, Donnell, sat beside Floyd on the well-worn living room loveseat, mother and daughter each with laptops balanced on their legs. Any barrier between Floyd’s personal and professional lives had long ago collapsed.

After a few minutes, she texted some students: “Where are you?” As they started to arrive, she complimented one student’s new hairstyle and told another to turn on his camera. Only six of 10 students showed. But that’s typical for virtual school during the pandemic, so Floyd launched into her lesson.

Joicki Floyd teaches remotely while her daughter, Donnell, looks over her shoulder from their home in Newark.

This week will mark one year since the families of some 36,000 Newark Public Schools students got a Friday evening phone call saying school buildings would be closed for at least two weeks. The next day, Newark reported its first confirmed coronavirus infection.

Twelve months and more than 880 deaths later, there are hopeful signs in Newark. The daily death count has dropped from dozens at its peak to the low single digits, and more residents are getting vaccinated every day.

Yet it’s jarring just how much hasn’t changed. As two weeks turned into 52, Newark remains one of a dwindling number of districts across New Jersey and nationwide where classrooms are still fully closed. Teachers still are giving lessons remotely. And some students — including many of Floyd’s — still are not showing up.

Over the past year, Floyd watched the virus tear through the city where she was born 45 years ago and grew up, where she is now raising her own children and teaching others. She watched the disease strike down her neighbors and colleagues, adding to the list of COVID-19 casualties who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

She watched her teenage son graduate high school last spring without prom or commencement. And she watched her students at Weequahic High School in Newark’s South Ward wrestle with fear, loneliness, and boredom as the pandemic gripped the world and wouldn’t let go.

Through it all, Floyd kept teaching. She gave lessons on “Native Son” and “Romeo and Juliet” over video, responded to students’ texts and emails late into the night, and trudged through the snow to track down teenagers who went missing. What became clear is that the skill she had sharpened over 20 years of teaching — her gift for connecting with students and drawing out their inner strength — had equipped her for this all-consuming crisis.

“This is what I do,” she said in August, one of a series of interviews that started last spring. “If I didn’t do it, I would feel frustrated. I would feel empty. I would feel like I’d be cheating my community and the children.”

Everything changes

Joicki Floyd settled on her life’s mission when she was still a child.

Growing up in Newark’s South Ward, she listened to her mother tell stories from her own childhood, when she faced abuse at home and bullying at school. Floyd decided then to protect and nurture young people.

“If I could save children,” she recalled thinking, “it would help me deal with the fact that my mom was a child who no one helped.”

After college, Floyd became a teacher. Eventually she returned to her old neighborhood to work at Weequahic High School.

One of Newark’s most storied schools, Weequahic High School first welcomed students in 1933.

Housed in a 1930s Art Deco building, Weequahic is one of Newark’s most storied schools. The writer Philip Roth, who depicted Newark in his novels, graduated from Weequahic in 1950. In 1963, it earned the distinction of having more alumni with Ph.D’s than any other New Jersey high school.

At the time, the surrounding neighborhood, also called Weequahic, was home mostly to Jewish families. But after Newark’s 1967 unrest, when Black residents protested decades of police brutality and government neglect, white residents fled to the suburbs and middle-class Black families settled in Weequahic.

The high school remained a proud institution, where New Jersey’s lieutenant governor, Sheila Oliver, was a student and Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was vice principal. Today, it boasts a celebrated marching band, popular Black history classes, and an active alumni association.

But the disinvestment that followed Newark’s white flight left Weequahic’s residents with fewer resources and opportunities. Pre-pandemic, more than 30% of children in the area lived below the poverty line, a rate twice the statewide average. The challenges seep into Weequahic High School, where only a third of graduates in the class of 2019 enrolled in college — the lowest rate in the city.

After Floyd arrived at the school five years ago, she quickly developed a rapport with her students. They would stop by her classroom for lunchtime tutoring, then confide in her problems they were having with family and friends.

Bashir Muhammad Akinyele, a longtime Weequahic teacher, said students see in Floyd a Black woman who has excelled despite the racism that she and her students endure.

“She grew up in Newark in some of the toughest neighborhoods and became a great educator,” he said. “The kids really admire that, they respect that.”

Floyd was teaching 11th grade English last year when the Newark school district announced on March 13 that it was temporarily closing school buildings due to the escalating coronavirus outbreak. The rest of New Jersey and the country soon followed.

Floyd had hoped the temporary shutdown would give her time to grieve the loss of her ex-husband, whom she met as a teenager and remained close with until his death that February. (The official cause was “respiratory complications,” which Floyd now believes might have been due to COVID-19.) However, concern for her students soon consumed her.

Some could not get online. Others took on jobs to help pay the bills, including one of Floyd’s students who started working full time at her family’s bodega. Other students worried the virus would find their loved ones — a nightmare that came true for one student who lost the grandfather who had raised her. Still others clashed with family members during the indefinite lockdown, including a student who was kicked out of her home despite being pregnant.

“School was their escape,” Floyd said last April. “Now, it’s like they’re trapped.”

She tried everything she could think of to reach her students. She had her teenage son contact some through social media, stopped by the bodega where one worked, and spent hours at a time calling all 94 of her students. Still, some she couldn’t track down. It was as if they had vanished.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus ravaged Newark. Inadequate health care, multigenerational households, and essential jobs outside the home had left many residents — 86% of whom are Black or Hispanic — especially vulnerable to the virus. When the first wave peaked in April, Newark averaged 200 to 300 new cases and dozens of deaths each day.

The city sprung into action. The district loaned out laptops and school employees set up food distributions. Mayor Baraka tried to educate the public about the virus and took steps to limit its spread, while the city health department coordinated a sophisticated system for identifying and isolating infected people. By June, the share of COVID-19 tests that came back positive had dropped to under 10% — down from nearly 70% on April 5 — and daily new cases plummeted from the hundreds to the 20s.

Despite the strange new distance between them, Floyd and most of her students made it to the end of the school year. That June, she texted a student to praise her hard work. The young woman replied that she couldn’t have done it without her teacher.

“No,” Floyd texted back, “we did it together.”

Not yet normal

This school year was supposed to begin the return to something like normal.

Instead, many districts, including Newark, repeatedly delayed reopening classrooms as the pandemic’s second wave erupted. Yet the prolonged closures were not spread evenly. In New Jersey and nationwide, Black and Hispanic students have been far more likely than white students to continue attending school remotely.

Floyd felt that was for the best. While she longed to hug her students, she feared bringing the virus home to her children. Already, she had seen it claim the lives of several district employees and so many others in her community.

“I want the dying to stop,” she said in August.

Floyd calls a student who didn’t show up for virtual class.

Remote learning is much improved this school year. But that hasn’t solved the problem of students not showing up to class. This fall, more than 1 in 5 Newark students were chronically absent — a figure that does not include students who miss virtual class but submit work, which the district counts as present.

With more businesses reopened, Floyd had students who worked at the mall, the movie theater, fast food restaurants, and the laundromat by her house. Others still had internet issues, while some were fed up with online learning. On most days, only about half of her students attended her video classes.

Floyd decided to give those missing students a nudge. Each morning, she called one oversleeper to say, “Get up, let’s go!” She visited McDonald’s during a parent’s shift to discuss her son’s attendance. She started walking to missing students’ homes since she had gotten rid of her car the year before. During a winter storm that shut down the state, she took her daughter on a snowy hike to find a student who hadn’t been doing his work. She figured it was the perfect time to catch his family at home.

“Students need to know — more so now than ever before — that people care,” Floyd said. “Once I started knocking on their doors, they were like, ‘Wow, you really care.’”

A few months ago, one of Floyd’s students and her family had to temporarily move into a hotel after a fire destroyed their home. The student had lost most of her possessions, including the laptop she used for school, so Floyd told the student to borrow hers.

“That was a great feeling,” said the student, Tanira Roberts. “I feel like she really cares for me, and I really care for her.”

Mirabel Chukwuma is one of the students who appears on Floyd’s screen each day, ready for class. She is a driven freshman who plans to become a pediatrician and had looked forward to meeting “mature people” in high school. When Floyd said early in the school year that she likes when students ask lots of questions, Chukwuma said to herself, “Oh, we’re going to be friends.”

Still, staying motivated after a year of remote school has been a challenge even for her. She’s texted her cousin for advice and searched YouTube for inspirational videos; she likes ones that show how to organize your binder. But it’s Floyd, and the encouragement and affection she showers on her students, that motivates Chukwuma the most.

“She’s the main reason that I want to go to class,” the ninth grader said. Last month, on Floyd’s birthday, she texted her teacher to say thanks for being “an amazing, strong, funny, uplifting person.”

“She is a strong woman,” Chukwuma explained, “and that’s what I like about her, because strong women are able to do a whole lot of things.”

During a break from teaching, Floyd gave her daughter a math lesson.

After Floyd’s morning lesson last week, she video chatted with students. One ninth grader had been turning in his work but hadn’t attended a single virtual class before that day. Another student was falling behind; she told him, only half joking, that she would come to his house if she had to. In between classes, she checked on her son and taught her daughter a quick math lesson on a giant chalkboard in the kitchen.

By day’s end, she was exhausted. But she had decided that, no matter what came next, she would keep going — for her students, her city, and herself.

“Now I’m really walking in that,” she said recently. “I’m going to stay strong.”

Floyd rested for a few moments after teaching a class and checking in on her children.

Erica Seryhm Lee contributed reporting.

I’m a first-year teacher during the pandemic. Here’s what helped me find my footing.

2021-03-09T14:00:00+00:00

I’ve been told that your first year of teaching under any circumstances feels like building a plane while flying it. This year, it’s even more complicated.

Teaching during the coronavirus pandemic has been draining for all teachers. Scrolling through Reddit, I’ve seen countless posts from dedicated educators who have reached their respective breaking points since school buildings first closed almost exactly a year ago. But first-year teachers like me face an additional hurdle: our own inexperience.

Canwen Xu

First-year teachers haven’t built up our confidence reserves just yet. And that means being plagued with doubt.

Every single day I wonder if I am failing my students. I wonder if I’ve lost too much class time introducing another virtual learning platform. I wonder if socializing in breakout rooms is enough to meet students’ social-emotional needs. I stress over how much longer everything takes — how the flow of every lesson is punctured by Wi-Fi issues, audio issues, log in issues, and messages from parents such as “can you let us back into the call?”

All teachers, regardless of their experience, face these problems. However, first-year teachers must navigate them alongside grasping the basics of teaching. How can I be mindful of my “economy of language” — that is, minimizing words and maximizing clarity — when my students with unreliable internet connections can’t hear what I’m saying half the time? How do I provide “multiple means of representation” — or teaching with an eye toward different types of learners — when everyone is staring at a computer screen? I worry that everything I learned about classroom management and lesson planning doesn’t seem to apply in a virtual setting.

However, after my first few months of teaching, I’ve discovered some things that have helped me become a better teacher during this “unprecedented” first year in the field.

I thought my mistakes meant I had failed — until my colleagues taught me otherwise.

During the first month of teaching, I missed a meeting with two members of the school staff because I set the wrong time on my Google Calendar. It was such a silly mistake, but I felt like a complete failure. I thought I needed to be perfect 100% of the time and that any lapse in my job performance would mean letting down my students. Later that week, I confessed what had happened to four other first-year teachers during a Zoom call. To my surprise, we all ended up bonding over how we had all missed meetings that week. Being around other first-years helped me understand that I should extend grace to myself when occasionally things slip through the cracks. Otherwise, I would quickly burn out.

I scoffed at “self-care” — until I learned to embrace it.

Until I started teaching, I always thought “self-care” was a marketing ploy to sell juice cleanses and gym memberships, or, more recently, face masks. But I quickly realized that if I practice real “self-care,” I couldn’t be there for my students. The first few weeks of teaching, I found talking to a computer screen for six hours a day every day to be incredibly exhausting. All I wanted to do when the clock struck 3 p.m. was sleep. This tiredness trickled into my teaching. To combat it, I started waking up earlier, eating a balanced breakfast, and exercising more. Students absorb much less of your energy when you’re over Zoom than in-person, so I discovered it’s even more important to be alert and enthusiastic during class.

I struggled to find my footing — until veteran teachers helped.

It took me a few weeks to find my “teacher voice.” I wanted to sound warm and demanding; at the same time, I didn’t come across as very demanding. Fortunately, three different coaches visited my virtual classroom to observe. They pointed out ways I could keep my students engaged and told me what was working for me virtually and what wasn’t. For instance, students could more clearly see my work when I annotated on the virtual whiteboard than when I wrote on a physical whiteboard. Similarly, students seemed to absorb more of the lesson when they could type answers to questions in the chat. I also found it helpful to observe other virtual classrooms. When my class merged with another class for a week of testing, I learned a lot by watching a more experienced teacher lead an English Language Arts and math lesson and borrowed some of her strategies for teaching virtually.

I never expected that I’d spend my first year teaching over Zoom. I also never expected to form such close bonds with students I’ve never met in real life. I’ve felt empowered by the knowledge that I’m not alone — that there are other first-year teachers experiencing pandemic learning right alongside of me and there are veteran educators from whom I have so much to learn. Without them, I would be far less confident in my ability to navigate this school year and those to come.

Canwen Xu is a third grade teacher in the South Bronx. She graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. She is also a freelance writer and content strategist for iris, an AI-powered dating app.

They sent early SOS signals about COVID and schools. Here’s what life looks like for them, one year in.

2021-03-09T12:30:00+00:00

In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Education set up an email inbox to field questions about the new virus.

Hundreds of messages poured in.

I am a senior. I was wondering what is going to happen in our school as COVID-19 spreads.

I’m very concerned about my relative who is a custodian having to clean up the school. Will he be forced to do this work?

My student has chronic asthma, and he has a history of becoming extremely ill due to colds and flu. What provisions is the Dept of Education recommending for these sensitive group students???

There is a lot of confusion ... Please help me understand!!!!

Chalkbeat obtained the emails sent to the inbox during the chaotic first two weeks of March 2020 through an open records request. Some of the first questions, like whether students should still gather in the lunchroom, would be answered in time, as public health officials learned more about how the virus spread. Others foreshadow what would become the most stubborn challenges, like how to serve students with disabilities remotely and how to know what exactly should trigger a school closure.

Together, they paint a picture of educators, parents, and students grasping for knowledge at the very start of a crisis for America’s schools.

One year later, we asked some of those who sent those first distress signals to tell us about that moment — and about how they navigated the challenging months ahead. Here’s what they told us.

12:19 p.m. March 9: ‘Do you have any guidance for students with IEPs who are participating in long term online learning?’

After 30 years, Beth Jones is very familiar with the intricacies of serving students with disabilities. So when the pandemic began closing school buildings, the assistant superintendent of Barrington 220 schools in northwest suburban Chicago knew her district was facing thorny questions about how to comply with students’ special education plans remotely.

When she didn’t hear back from federal officials, she sought advice from her school district’s lawyers and the Council for Exceptional Children, a national group for educators who work with students with disabilities. Then she advised her team: “Don’t look at the overwhelming amount of stuff we have to do.” Zero in on the most important goals in students’ special education plans, she told them, and above all, make sure they’re getting online.

When then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made it clear there would be no “wiggle room” when it came to federal special education law, Jones’ focus turned to making sure students received every minute of the services they were entitled to, like speech therapy. A few weeks in, special education teachers and assistants in her district — which is relatively affluent, and provided students with iPads before the pandemic — had gotten into a rhythm.

In the fall, her district brought many students with disabilities back into buildings so they could meet with physical therapists, school psychologists, and occupational therapists in person.

“Was it the same as it would be? No,” Jones said. “Were there things that got in our way and obstacles? Yes. But the thing we never strayed from was: You have to meet the minutes, you have to provide the services, and you have to communicate with families.”

She wishes she could have known last March about the many positive things that would come out of the pandemic. The stronger relationships she’s built with her staff. The impressive work she’s seen teachers do. The struggling parents who now reach out for help.

Back then, “we all felt so doomed,” she said. Now, “they’re letting us into their lives and we’re getting through it.”

7:51 a.m. March 9: ‘Should teachers over the age of 60 or with health problems avoid going to work?’

Before the pandemic, Linda Mendel spent her whole day with students. In the early morning, she was the school crossing guard. During the day, the Portland paraeducator would work with students with disabilities or students who needed extra academic help. And in the evening, she would teach students to sew and to take apart engines at an after-school program, which also served supper. “I know some of our kids are missing that,” she said.

Schools closed quickly after Mendel emailed federal officials, and the spring was a scramble. Without their usual materials or the ability to sit beside students, she and her colleagues improvised — sometimes, one paraeducator would hold a book up to the computer camera while the other worked with a student.

This school year, which has been entirely remote, has gone more smoothly. She’s been impressed by the way the schools created delivery systems for school supplies, hotspots, library books, and free meals. “One of my favorite things is seeing kids who don’t raise their hands participate more,” she said. “It’s let our shy kids shine.”

Still, certain aspects of in-person class just can’t be replicated. The students with autism she works with, she noted, have less access to social cues from their classmates when all they can see are each others’ faces on screens. “Students who use those visual cues, they’re losing a lot,” she said. “I don’t have a way to fix that.”

11:21 a.m. March 10: ‘My seven year old daughter has a pre-existing lung condition that puts her at risk.’

When parent Star Atkeson wrote to the education department suggesting officials require schools to teach hand-washing techniques, she didn’t expect a response.

But she felt compelled to reach out in part because her daughter, Isabel, who was in first grade in Boston Public Schools when the pandemic began, has allergies and has needed a maintenance inhaler. As a young child, she had to be hospitalized several times for asthma. “I was nervous about her,” Atkeson said.

Early in the pandemic, Star Atkeson’s daughter, Isabel, worked on a sewing project.

Atkeson envisioned schools holding assemblies to talk about hygiene — maybe teaching kids to sing the “Baby Shark” song while they washed up. Looking back now, she said, her note reveals some of the early confusion about the main way the virus spreads.

“We thought it was all hand washing, but it wasn’t. It was breathing shared air,” she said.

When her daughter’s school went remote, they experienced feelings now familiar to many families: frustration, boredom, stress. “There was just a lot of looking for passwords under pressure,” Atkeson said.

But there was one upside. Atkeson realized her daughter had been purposely moving slowly through her work, or randomly guessing on math games, because she was afraid to ask for help. Seeing it allowed Atkeson to intervene.

“I do feel more in touch with Isabel’s learning now,” Atkeson said. She says her daughter has started to internalize her nudges, too. “She will say: ‘You told me to ask questions.’”

1:54 p.m. March 11: ‘What would it take to close a public school?’

Kelly Griffith, the schools chief in Talbot County, Maryland, has been an educator for 38 years. She’s run the school district for the last eight, and she’s also the president of the superintendents association in her state.

“You’re supposed to be the educator with all the answers. When you don’t have those answers, you start trying to find those answers,” she said.

So in early March, Griffith got on White House conference calls and emailed the education department: What happens next?

She didn’t hear back any time soon. “I don’t think anyone had the answers,” she said.

In the year since, Griffith has been at the forefront of a local campaign to get internet access to families in her rural district. She’s cried happy tears watching one of her kindergarten teachers connect with her students through a screen. And she got students back into buildings part-time for most of this school year with no evidence of COVID transmission.

That’s been an extraordinary logistics challenge. But she’s tried not to lose sight of how it’s all felt for students. When a group of high schoolers told her back-to-back virtual classes were wearing on them, she pushed schools to lengthen the traditional five-minute class changes to offer students more time to move around and decompress.

“Too many times, we’re trying to find technical solutions to all of the issues we have during a pandemic, and we lose sight of children,” she said. “That resonates with me on a daily basis. And I stop and think about our kids.”

10:57 a.m. March 13: ‘We are getting a lot of questions about our homeless students. We need help.’

When Melinda Dyer wrote to federal officials, Washington state was “ground zero” for the coronavirus. Dyer works for the state’s education agency assisting school district liaisons who work with homeless students, and she was desperate for information to pass on to districts from anyone in a position of authority.

“There was a lot of concern about students that were very high risk and not being able to have eyes on them on a daily basis,” Dyer recalls. “There was a level of crisis that I’ve not seen before.”

Melinda Dyer in her home office.

In Washington, many small school districts are in rural areas without internet providers. Centralized meal distribution hubs can be a challenge for homeless families to access if they are staying outside the district’s boundaries or don’t have transportation. It took a lot of creative work from school districts — like sending school buses to deliver meals, Chromebooks, and power strips — to get students what they needed.

Now, one of her biggest concerns is making sure schools are actively identifying students who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Dyer says the identification of homeless students in Washington has decreased significantly, as it has elsewhere in the country. In some districts, it’s down by half.

“Having them vanish and districts not knowing where they went … that’s really concerning,” Dyer said. “It needs to be corrected.”

For Dyer, that means doing Zoom check-ins with districts, training school district liaisons, and reminding districts about their obligations to do things like hang notices in churches and on grocery store bulletin boards to let families know about their rights. She’s seen efforts vary. One district knocked on the door of every known address of a homeless student, while others “need a lot more help.” When the national eviction moratorium eventually lifts, she knows her department will need to provide even more support.

“This is a long haul,” she said. “There is a lot of work to be done, I believe, in just reconnecting and helping people feel safe and connected to schools again.”

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‘Constantly on edge’: An Indiana district fully reopens for classes, sports, musicals — and quarantines

2021-03-08T12:30:00+00:00

With three weeks to go before she was set to star in the school musical last fall, Alexa Margolius watched as dozens of students were pulled out of school after one friend caught the coronavirus.

She fervently hoped she wouldn’t be quarantined — or, worse, get sick. The cast of “Bright Star” hadn’t yet rehearsed the entire show, and she had 11 solos and 12 costume changes to practice. It was supposed to be the highlight of her senior year at Avon High School.

Alexa made it almost through the end of the week before the assistant principal came looking for her. She had been exposed, too. When her mom picked her up to start her quarantine, Alexa sat in the car and sobbed.

In the suburbs of Indianapolis, the Avon district is trying to have as normal a year as possible in the midst of a pandemic — but it comes with the challenge of students and teachers spending weeks, sometimes adding up to months, out of school for quarantines as a cautionary measure to prevent the spread of the virus.

Since throwing its doors back open in late July for full-time in-person learning, complete with extracurriculars, the Avon district has reported more than 600 cases of COVID-19 among the roughly 10,000 students and staff who returned. Thousands of students and staff have been ordered home to isolate, peaking at more than 850 people quarantined one week in January.

“That’s been the part that has been the most exhausting,” said Avon Superintendent Scott Wyndham, “is the constant rotation of quarantines, and how to help students stay up with their coursework so that they’re not behind when they come back.”

This was a consequence of coming back five days a week in person. But it was a risk Wyndham and the school board were willing to take, with the blessing of the local health department, so students could learn in person and participate in the sports and activities that are often what students love the most about school. And 89% of district students have returned.

Unlike so many students across the country — some of whom still haven’t returned to classrooms — Avon High School students have been allowed to play football games, perform in band concerts, and wrestle in state championships. The chess club, the calligraphy club, and the history club all meet in person. Students have raised money to throw a pie in their favorite teacher’s face, done crafts in the library, and dropped eggs off the second-floor balcony for physics class.

While students say they’re thankful to be back, they’re also on edge. They describe the year as messy, chaotic, and uncertain, wondering every day whether they’ll have school and activities taken away from them.

“We just don’t want to get our hopes up,” Alexa said, “to just get disappointed.”

“None of our time together is guaranteed,” senior Skylar Jakresky, center, told the all-girls show choir that she leads at the beginning of the year.

After being the first Indiana district to close one year ago when a student became the state’s third reported coronavirus case, Avon schools reopened in July with mask requirements, cleaning supplies, and distancing where possible.

Other schools in Indianapolis took a more cautious approach. But at Avon High School, home to about 3,000 students, masked teenagers flooded down the hallways and ate lunch in assigned, spaced-out seats in the cafeteria.

Within the first few days, the school had positive COVID-19 cases — and its first quarantines.

Sophomore Noah Jakresky doesn’t know who exposed him to the coronavirus in those first few days or where it happened. All he knows is he fell within the six-foot circle of where that person sat.

It was the first of four times he’d be quarantined so far this year.

“It sucked,” 15-year-old Noah said emphatically.

For two weeks, his routine at home went like this: “Wake up, get your laptop, see if your assignments are there, and if they aren’t, then you’re screwed.”

He had wanted to return to school in person for two reasons: to run track and to stay focused. But Noah’s first-semester quarantines added up to more than a month out of the classroom, and he often came back to mountains of make-up work. His grades yo-yoed as his missing assignments were marked as zeroes until he turned them in.

He ended up failing Drawing I, “one of the easiest basic classes,” because he said his teacher didn’t accept all of his late work.

Holding a quarantine-free streak has been cause for excitement. Noah hasn’t caught the virus, but he worries when he sees other athletes sidelined with lingering side effects.

He looks forward all day to track practice, though his coaches make the whole team do push-ups when someone shows up without a mask. He has grown tired of arguing with students who don’t want to wear masks, or trying to say “mask up!” with a lighthearted tone or an eye roll.

“I just give up at this point,” Noah said.

During her quarantine, Alexa Margolius still played the lead in the musical in rehearsals — by Zoom.

A laptop with Alexa and other quarantined cast members on screen sat atop a cart that was rolled around on stage, so the students at school could dance, sing, and talk to them.

Sometimes, as they rehearsed the musical set in the 1920s and 1940s, they forgot about Alexa, leaving her sitting in her kitchen wondering what was going on. Or the lag in the video chat led to awkward pauses and missed timing.

But quarantine afforded Alexa time to catch up on her sleep, and “in the end,” she said, “it was probably best, because if I was at home, I had no chance of getting COVID.”

When she finished the requisite quarantine without developing symptoms, Alexa returned to school with just a week until showtime. She asked her teachers if she could sit far away from everybody else to minimize her risk.

As the opening of the musical approached in mid-November, Alexa’s anxieties climbed alongside Indiana’s coronavirus outbreak, which rose to an average of about 6,000 new cases each day. A cast member was sent home and replaced with an understudy.

But despite her fears, the worsening pandemic didn’t cancel the show. The stage lights came up on Alexa behind a plastic face shield, her reflection and voice bouncing back at her as she appeared in front of an audience limited to a fraction of the usual size.

Avon High School’s production of “Bright Star” had to be slightly modified for the global pandemic. The love story lost its kissing scenes, with the teenage couple only allowed to get close enough to dance together or embrace briefly.

Alexa poured her emotions, including her stress, into her role for her last senior performance. Backstage between scenes, she wiped the tears off her face shield with tissues.

“It made me believe in myself a lot more, knowing that I can do that for my future and work under pressure,” she said.

“The times where I would have to fake cry, it was definitely not fake,” Alexa said. “And I would just have tears dropping down my face shield.”

The week after the musical, cases at school ticked up quickly.

Senior Sriya Koganti had been cautious all year. She came back to take a full load of AP courses — six in the fall, five in the spring — but found being around so many other students rather nerve-wracking, especially in the beginning.

Instead of eating lunch in the cafeteria, the only time during the seven-hour school day when she took off her mask, Sriya ate in a classroom with a teacher and one other student.

The speech team, which she has led for three years, competed virtually. Sriya gave her speeches in an empty room to a computer screen. Sometimes, she never even saw the judges when they left their cameras off.

Despite these precautions, she learned in November that she sat next to a friend whose parent had tested positive for COVID-19. They shared a two-person table with no divider between them, distanced from other classmates but not each other.

Sriya decided to quarantine herself.

A few days into Sriya’s voluntary isolation, Avon High School shut down its classrooms and turned to remote learning amid the rising cases. With about 750 people quarantined across the district, school officials said they didn’t have enough teachers to run in-person classes.

Avon High School saw some of its highest case counts while closed for e-learning, which would only be matched by the first few weeks after winter break.

Through contact tracing, administrators said they believed the virus was spreading through sports, sleepovers, and gatherings outside of school — not from the classroom setting. They took that as a sign that high school students are safer in school than out of school.

“They’re washing their hands, they’ve got access to lots of hand sanitizer,” said Wyndham, the superintendent. “We are providing seven hours a day for kids to be masked and protected.”

During her time at home, Sriya competed in a virtual national speech tournament, sending in a 10-minute video that won first place for original oratory. In it, she took on the topic of toxic positivity, criticizing remarks about the pandemic such as, “I don’t live in fear,” “This thing will pass,” and, “You’ll be fine.”

Those comments, Sriya told the camera, plant “false narratives, false hopes, and diminishing empathy.”

Instead, she called for compassion and support.

“Simply put,” Sriya said, “It’s OK to not be OK.”

Students returned from winter break to a spike in cases at the start of the second semester.

Star wrestler Ke’Shawn Dickens wasn’t really worried about catching the coronavirus — “sometimes,” he said, “I forget that it’s even a thing” — but the pandemic was upsetting his senior year.

The year was crawling by, and Ke’Shawn found himself “constantly on edge at all times,” he said, wondering “if school was going to shut down, if my season was going to end, if I was going to lose my next match.”

In February, Ke’Shawn got his final shot at wrestling. He had missed three competitions during a double quarantine — his exposures overlapped for a three-week quarantine — and had to work to keep his weight down without practices.

Ranked ninth in the state, he made it to the state finals at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, the NBA arena downtown.

Ke’Shawn wanted to treat it like any other match. But he missed the fierceness of what’s typically a packed arena, muted by capacity limits.

He went for it — a little too hard, though, and lost in overtime.

“I think I had a really good season,” Ke’Shawn said. But was it the senior year he imagined? “Nowhere close to it.”

Despite their weariness of quarantines, none of these students or others who spoke to Chalkbeat are particularly interested in re-litigating whether Avon made the right decision to open back up.

“This is our new normal,” said junior Faith Kipkulei.

In recent weeks, quarantines have started to lighten, lifted by falling cases statewide and loosened state health rules. In certain instances, schools can now reduce the distance for determining close contacts and the length of quarantines.

Wyndham, the Avon superintendent, said he hopes the state will continue to roll back requirements.

“We’re sending home thousands of perfectly healthy kids for days, and they never develop symptoms. They never test positive. They just miss a lot of instruction,” he said.

At the high school, teachers are exhausted, juggling quarantined students with their regular classrooms, and sometimes also handling virtual or credit recovery classes. Before Indiana teachers became eligible for the vaccine last week, some added volunteer shifts to their days through the local hospital in order to qualify for a shot.

With three months left in the school year, the pandemic burnout is getting to the students, too. Some say the lack of motivation is compounding senioritis. Prom plans are still being finalized. Graduation seems like it will feel as much of a relief as an accomplishment.

As senior Skylar Jakresky puts it: “I’m not happy. But I am glad to be in person.”

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A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, school as we know it has been transformed

2021-03-08T12:30:00+00:00

A teacher in Newark trudges through the snow to find students who haven’t logged into her all-remote class, a sad ritual of tracking down teens that began for her last March.

A student in Indiana gets the lead role in her school musical — only to rehearse over Zoom after she’s quarantined.

An alternative high school in Brooklyn grapples with twin crises: the death of their principal and how to keep students who have previously struggled on track during remote learning.

On the first anniversary of a cascade of nationwide school shutdowns, Chalkbeat is looking back on this toughest of years in education through those who experienced it firsthand: educators, counselors, students, parents. Some of them will be familiar to our readers, compelling figures we met early in the pandemic who we wanted to revisit. Others we have met since and felt their stories powerfully spoke to this remarkable year.

School during the pandemic looks different for every district, every school, every family. For some there are plexiglass dividers and face shields; for others, Zoom and Google Classroom. Where one teacher eagerly attends class in person, another is filled with fear. The random testing, the grading systems, the hybrid schedules vary wildly. But one thing unites them all — school as we know it has been completely transformed.

The first inkling of how vastly American education would be disrupted by the pandemic came during a Feb. 25 Centers for Disease Control press availability. It was almost an afterthought, really. Nancy Messonnier, a CDC director, was spelling out “non pharmaceutical interventions” to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus when she suggested Americans talk to their school about plans for dismissals or closures.

“Ask if there are plans for teleschool,” she said. “I contacted my local school superintendent this morning with exactly those questions.”

Just two days later, Bothell High School in Washington state became the first school in the U.S. to shut down.

Last spring, Chromebooks and iPads suddenly became as much a part of students’ daily lives as chalkboards and notebooks. Terms like live instruction, asynchronous learning, and Zoom bombing were suddenly part of everyday education parlance. Graduations were canceled, standardized tests were scrapped, grading systems were upended. A reality that reopening school buildings would require masks, distance, plexiglass, and money — lots of money — was setting in.

Just as the virus has taken a greater toll on communities of color, education disparities emerged almost immediately as well. The digital divide created inequity from the start, with some students struggling to attend virtual classes while sharing devices, relying on unreliable internet, or without a device at all. When jobs evaporated, families were left worrying about having enough food for their children and whether they would need to suddenly leave their homes. While wealthy families created pandemic pods and hired private teachers, other parents who worked outside of the home had to scramble for care.

In the darkest days, educators stepped up in creative, inspiring ways. Teachers dropped free school meals off at their students’ homes so fearful parents didn’t have to stand in lines. Educators who are parents themselves juggled teaching while overseeing their children’s remote learning. Teachers mailed homework packets and arranged device drop-offs.

Once schools began reopening, the divisions deepened. Districts with mostly white students were more likely to be open for some in-person learning. In some large cities that offer in-person school, the majority of families have declined seats and opted for virtual — particularly families of color who are more likely to be impacted by the virus and whose trust in schools has been eroded. Meanwhile, enrollment has dropped in districts and states across the country, especially as parents found other options for their youngest children, a trend that could shape budgets and enrollment trends for years to come.

As the year anniversary of shutdowns approaches, the debate over whether and how schools should reopen continues to roil. Some studies show schools aren’t major sources of transmission, as long as the larger community’s rates aren’t high and precautions are taken. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new guidance urged districts to reopen full-time where community spread is low or moderate — and even where it’s high with enough testing.

Meanwhile, all sides of the complicated debate worry about the long-term impact on students and how teachers will make up for learning loss. Ideas abound for how to address these two disrupted years, from an influx of federal money to longer school days to widespread tutoring programs.

While some districts are still struggling with whether and how to reopen this spring, others have their sights set on the fall, particularly with teachers across the country getting vaccinated. For some schools, there will be a super-charged summer school. For others, an early back-to-school date. And some administrators already feel certain some form of hybrid or virtual learning is here to stay.

A year into the pandemic, coronavirus is still here, and most schools are very far from normal. Parents, teachers, and students are struggling with the disruptions to learning. There is fear and, for many, there is grief. Intense disagreements about reopening persist, and divisions have been unearthed that won’t disappear with vaccinations. But many people are now pulling in the same direction and united in a common goal: how to give students the support they need and how to make school better.

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