After school buildings across the state were closed last March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rockwood School District, like school districts across the state, was forced to navigate the last two months of the 2019-2020 school year with teachers at home trying to teach students miles away at their homes.
Most teachers, students and parents tried their best to deal with a difficult situation, but it wasn’t ideal. So, Rockwood school officials are working on improvements in case students can’t return to school buildings when the fall semester starts on Aug. 24, said Shelley Willott, Rockwood’s assistant superintendent of learning and support services.
“It was an emergency solution to a situation where we didn’t have a ton of time to put things together,” she said.
The alternative learning plan, known as the ALP, that was used at the end of last school year went as “well as could be expected,” Willott said.
But, that’s not good enough, she added.
“It’s really important to realize that what we did was not online teaching and learning,” Willott said. “It was a virtual solution to an emergency situation, and I think it’s really easy to say, ‘Oh, this was online learning, but it really wasn’t.’”
In an effort to address the shortfalls, Rockwood school officials are implementing several changes they hope will improve instruction for students if the ALP is still in place next school year.
Rockwood school officials and staff created the ALP over the spring break when they knew students would not return to school buildings because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If the ALP has to continue into the fall semester, the “stakes” will be higher, Willott said.
“You’ve got a lot more new content at the beginning of the year; you’re trying to build relationships with students,” she said. “We are going to have to be very thoughtful about which learning standards we hone in on and what instruction and an online environment looks like.”
Willott said the way teachers grade work also will have to be addressed if the ALP continues. She said students’ grades could not be lowered after school buildings had to be closed, but students could improve their grades through the online assignments they received during the final months of the 2019-2020 school year.
Willott said another thing Rockwood will try to improve in the future is communication with parents.
“Our parents were bombarded with emails from everywhere, especially if they had a secondary school student,” she said. “So, we have already taken steps to streamline that process for next year.”
Willott said parents will have one location for all communication if ALP continues at the start of the upcoming school year.
Rockwood parent Amy Beeson said her previous teaching background made it easier for her to help her children with their school work. Her oldest child, Emmett, was a seventh-grader at LaSalle Springs Middle School; Garrison was a fourth-grader at Blevins Elementary School; and Maeve was a first-grader at Blevins.
“It was not without its hiccups and stress, but it wasn’t all bad,” she said. “We had weeks where it was great. We got through all the required stuff here, and it was let’s try some of that extra stuff. Then there were times when it was a struggle just to get through the bare basics.”
Beeson taught third grade about 10 years ago, and she said a lot has changed since she was in a classroom.
She said Emmett did not have a hard time learning online since he already was used to doing homework online.
Beeson said every week she gave her older children a checklist of tasks to complete, and she gave her first-grader a daily checklist. Beeson said she found giving her children the freedom to work on assignments when they needed to worked well for them.
“We’d sit down for a little bit, if they were getting overwhelmed,” she said. “We’d take a break. We would go for a bike ride, have a snack, color a picture or watch TV.”
Beeson said her children’s biggest struggle was not being able to socialize with their friends.
“We’re social people; it’s human nature,” she said. “It’s one thing to play a math game with your mom. It’s way more fun to play a math game with your peers and your classmates.”
Beeson said she is not worried about her children falling behind, but she is a bit worried about the upcoming school year making connections with new classmates and teachers.
“I feel like that will be a very difficult thing for them to make those connections, because it’s just not the same thing when it’s over a computer screen,” she said.
Geggie Elementary School second-grade teacher Megan Hubbard said she found the hardest part of virtual learning was staying connected to her students.
“I offered three optional (online Zoom meetings) every week,” she said. “Some kids came to all of them to stay connected and other kids only made a few.”
Hubbard said she tried to create activities that every student could complete at home, like a shape hunt around the house.
“You can’t recreate the classroom and all the materials we have at home,” she said.
Hubbard said she is not worried about students who may have fallen behind in their studies, because she believes they can catch up quickly when school resumes.
“I know we’re all in the same boat, and I know that the district is going to have plans to support us as teachers,” she said. “When we do get back, it is going to be focusing just on their emotional health and transitioning them back into a routine. Then the academics will come.”
Hubbard has been teaching at Geggie for 13 years, and this was her first experience teaching online.
“I think the weirdest thing was getting used to seeing myself and hearing myself on video,” she said.
Hubbard said she gave each of her students a “flat Mrs. Hubbard.”
“It’s a laminated (likeness) of me that they can take wherever they go this summer and take little pictures of themselves with,” she said. “That’s kind of something fun to stay connected.”
Hubbard said she set up her dining room to look like her classroom, which included a table from her classroom, a special lamp and an Einstein stuffed animal.
“I went into school when I knew this was kind of all looking like it might happen, and I got a table that the kids would know,” she said.
Eureka High School teacher Lauren Schoellhorn was used to teaching students online before buildings had to be shut down for the school year.
“I’ve been teaching online for Webster University for seven years,” she said. “So, I kind of came in with this idea of what works. One is definitely frequent communication, not only with students, but with parents.”
Schoellhorn, who teaches advanced placement world history, advanced placement art history and psychology, said most of her students continued completing their school work, even after the ALP was put in place.
Rockwood parent Kelley Grossman’s children attend LaSalle Springs and Eureka High. Her oldest child, Rachel, was a junior last school year; Becca was a freshman; and Sarah was in seventh grade.
“I’m really lucky,” Grossman said. “My kids are very self-motivated, and school is not super hard for them. I did nothing.”
Grossman said while her three girls did not struggle much academically, she monitored their mental health.
“Their emotional well-being, mental well-being was far more important to me than any particular assignment,” she said.
Grossman said she did find trouble with overlapping schedules. She said sometimes her girls were scheduled to be on two different virtual meetings at the same time. She said she found prerecorded lessons helpful because her girls could complete them at their own pace.
Willott said Rockwood will work on ways to help students who might have fallen behind on skills during the last months of the school year.
“We’re going to be putting our heads together on that in the next few weeks and start that process so that we’re ready for August,” she said.