DB Response: LG – Leadership

Please provide a brief response to the following post. Thank you!

DB Post:
The last year and a half has been very different in public schools. With COVID-19, travel restrictions, having to quarantine, vaccination requirements, and especially the mask mandates, we have been faced with challenges in serving our students. The 2020-2021 school year is like no other. Whether a school is 100% remote, 100% in-person, or adopting a hybrid model, the days and responsibilities are likely very different from previous years (Matteson, A., 2021). When school began in August 2020, many schools gave parents the option of letting their children attend school virtually or face to face. Many, including myself, decided to keep my son home because I was not comfortable sending him back to school. It also gave me something to do because I was off work on medical leave nursing a surgically repaired arm and rotator cuff. The virtual option created an added stress for some teachers because they were having to hold class virtually while teaching the students who were there in person. My son is younger, so logging into his classroom every day was no big deal. The live sessions lasted about one hour, and they had assignments posted in the homework section of Google classroom. He attended virtually the first nine-week session. We were given the option to switch to face-to-face at the end of the first quarter, and we did simply because he was lacking the social interaction necessary for a six-year-old, and he wanted to see his friends.

The initial idea of a hybrid school year sounded good on the front-end. For grades K-3, there was not really an issue of logging in to the classrooms or submitting work for the most part. The issue arose with the high grades. The students were not logging in, especially high school students. I began working in our school district in January 2021. Some children that were face to face before Christmas break transitioned to virtual learning, and vice versa. I work with fourth and fifth graders, some of whom were behind from the end of the previous school year. What went right was the transition for most students to a virtual classroom. They had been provided at the end of the previous school year with Chromebooks to do their work. In virtual and hybrid classrooms, those who were most likely to succeed were students with higher self-regulation skills, whereas those most dependent on the teacheror those who had teachers who over-orchestrated their classesstruggled the most (Hattie, J.,2021). What went wrong was that the students in the higher grades were not completing their work assignments. We had students who literally logged into their classes two or three times the entire semester. When it was time for grades to come out, the phone lines were ringing off the hook from parents wanting to know why their child(ren) was failing. It was simple- they are doing the work. We had to schedule parent meetings and conferences to show parents the lists of assignments, what was completed and what wasnt.

The leadership had to approve the methods of delivery for instruction, the programs that were used, what teachers would teach virtually, and who would teach face to face. One thing I wish they could have done was making it mandatory for the students who were virtual and failing before Christmas break to return to in-person learning when we returned to school. We had parents whos student was failing send them back to school in person three weeks before school was out for the summer. I do not know if they were expecting a miracle because there was no way any teacher or paraprofessional could have helped those students raise those grades in that very short amount of time. It was very frustrating as a parent, but more so as an educator because I cannot fathom the idea of knowing my child is not doing well in his educational environment and I do nothing about it. Hopefully, things will be better when we begin school in two weeks, but this year is going to be different just like last year. Administration changes from the superintendent, assistant superintendent, principals, and several first-year teachers within our district. This will also be a trial-and-error year.

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