When Arizona schools shut down more than a month ago, teachers and students had little time to prepare for remote learning. Classrooms across the state are still empty, but educators continue to re-work their lesson plans in an effort to keep students on track.
Samantha McBath is a first-grade teacher at Country Meadows Elementary School in Peoria. She’s been teaching for eight years but never imagined she’d be interacting with her students through a laptop.
“I only have about five out of my 18 kids who have been consistently, every day logging on to do their lessons,” McBath said. “So that’s been really hard.”
McBath’s classroom has been replaced by Microsoft Teams, where instead of handing out worksheets, she posts “online learning opportunities.” Her students receive them each night and are given the next day to complete them.
“I give them activities they can do for each subject,” she said. “I just keep it really basic. Like for reading, read a book from home 15 minutes a day or activities that go over skills they learned before the school closure.”
But unlike older students, first-graders need a parent’s permission to call or email their teacher if they have questions. That means they can’t get immediate help like they would in a classroom.
“A lot of the activities we do in a first-grade classroom are hands-on,” McBath said. “There’s a lot of tools that we have in the classroom that are not readily available to them.”
She also sets up a weekly video chat for the class and answers questions via an online chat window throughout the day. But technology isn’t even her biggest hurdle.
“I don’t really speak Spanish and the majority of my families do, so explaining to my families how to get online and how to access everything has definitely been the biggest struggle,” McBath said.
Her district has made workbooks available for families that can’t get online, but that hasn’t fully bridged the gap between the classroom and their homes.
“Unfortunately, still a lot of those families just either don't have the time or they don’t have the means to do the work that’s assigned to them,” McBath said.
So, if a student is unable to complete their assignments while school is closed, what does that mean for their report card?
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“For first-grade students, everything has to be through the parents,” she said. "So if they’re not turning anything in, we can’t hold them accountable for something that they’re not able to do because their parents aren’t able to access it.”
This year, students will get either their third-quarter grades or an average of the first three quarters, depending on which score is higher.
Many Valley teachers are facing similar technological learning curves and managing language barriers. Now, consider taking those two obstacles and adding in a student with a disability.
Aran Kelly is a special education teacher at Alhambra High School in Phoenix.
“These students thrive on consistency,” Kelly said. “They don’t do well with change. Obviously, this is a massive change and it’s throwing a lot of these students off course. One student who is a senior, I spent over two hours on the phone with just trying to get him to log into the computer.”
Kelly oversees 16 students, and he calls them every day.
“Depending on the disability, you have confidence issues with students,” he said. “That comes up quite a lot. They tend to have low confidence when it comes to multi-step directions and that’s all incorporated in online learning. So, it has not been an easy transition.”
Special education teachers have to abide by each student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP). That’s essentially a guide for how each student learns.
An IEP outlines a student’s strengths and challenges, as well as any accommodations they’ll need. For some students, that means hard copies of assignments.
“So, there’s been an effort to send documents through the school,” Kelly said. “There’s a 24-hour quarantine period where we drop documents off and then 24 hours later, having sat in a room by themselves, parents can stop by and pick those up.”
Alhambra is a Title I school, which means many of its students come from low-income families. That creates even more challenges as they try to tackle assignments from home.
“They’re not in situations that are really conducive to their learning, so we have to fill those gaps on a daily basis,” Kelly said.
Many students have single parents who can’t be home to help them during the day. Other teens are playing the parent by taking care of their siblings. Many of them still rely on free meals provided by the school.
“Alhambra’s remained open for free food for students,” Kelly said. “But we’re dealing with a population that’s highly underserved and at high-risk in terms of their safety and their future.”
Some schools have been a bit luckier, like Scales Technology Academy in Tempe, which offers preschool through fifth grade.
“Our preschool teachers have been going on Zoom each week with their kids talking about some activities they can do in the house,” Principal Andrew Lebowitz said. “It’s been really cool for our preschool teachers to stay connected with their 3- and 4-year-olds.”
Because the school already integrates technology into its curriculum, making the switch to online learning was less of a challenge.
“The kids and teachers have all used the platforms,” he said. “My wife who teaches in Gilbert had some very intense online training about how to use Google Classroom and it was very stressful.”
But even with a slight advantage, Lebowitz said nothing can replace the bustling activity of a real-life school.
“We just miss the kids,” he said. “I mean I can’t stress it enough. It’s been really difficult not having our kids at school every day, keeping an eye on them and making sure they’re safe.”
