|
This week the learning packets also are being
distributed, according to grade level, on different days, at
the students’ home schools or the schools within their
communities.
For Elberta Ann Smith, the principal of Ella
P. Stewart Academy for Girls since the start of the
2019-2020 academic year, the shutdown has demonstrated the
ability of all parties to step up to the challenge.
“My teachers have been phenomenal during this
process,” she notes. “They hit the ground running.”
The notification by Gov. Mike DeWine that
schools were closing left teachers and the district office
with little time to prepare learning packets – then called
“blizzard bags” for students. The teachers had about 24
hours to assemble the first batch for Friday, March 13. In
subsequent weeks, the district has prepared the packets.
Smith is particularly pleased with the “great
teamwork,” she has seen exhibited by the teachers and
parents who are “doing their best to keep some normalcy,”
during these difficult times.
Nevertheless, Smith says, “we still have our
struggles.” Chief among those struggles is the fact that not
all TPS students and their families have the ability to
access the internet, which the learning packets, up to this
week, have been exclusively based on.
“As much as we’re trying this home-schooling,
it’s not equitable,” says Smith of the dilemma facing TPS.
“We have to find a way, as a district, to make this
situation a lot more equitable.”
TPS, of course, is a city district, with a
huge proportion of students living in poverty, in
single-parent homes or in in foster homes, for example.
Teachers and staff will be faced with the consequences of
such inequities when school resumes and students return with
weeks of completed, or uncompleted, assignments.
“We haven’t collected any work yet,” says
Smith. “We have asked families to hold on, until the
students return on May 1.” Of course, when the students
return is anybody’s guess at this point.
On the district level, Gault is also
impressed by the work that teachers are putting in during
the shutdown. The district’s call center, he notes, is
receiving few calls because “the teachers are logging those
calls.”
However, the challenges facing the district
when school resumes loom large in the administration’s
conversations these days, he says. Administrators “are
looking at the grading system and the challenges facing
students.” When students return, Gault adds, the
anticipation is that they will not be harmed by the amount
of schoolwork they turn in but completed assignments can add
to their grades.
“It can only help,” says Gault.
|
