Sam Gurwitt Photo
Ridge Hill teachers: School feels safe, but we’re ready for remote.
Hamden schools have figured out how to operate safely in a pandemic — but it looks like fast-rising Covid-19 cases will force them to move to all-remote learning anyway starting Nov. 23.
The district will likely move to all remote learning starting that date and continuing until Jan. 19.
The Hamden Board of Education discussed that plan Tuesday evening from Superintendent Jody Goeler to move school online. A vote of approval is expected next week.
As Goeler and his staff told the board, cases are spiking in the region, and in Hamden. There have already been problems with schools having to shut down because staff tested positive, and enough other staff had to quarantine that it was impossible to keep the buildings open.
Rather than having to shut everything down on a moment’s notice, Goeler and his team said, the district should plan ahead, so parents and the district and can be fully prepared.
As many board members acknowledged after looking at the numbers, it appears inevitable that the Hamden schools will have to go remote within the next few weeks one way or another.
The board did not vote Tuesday evening. At the end of a five-hour meeting, just before midnight, board members decided to wait until next week to make a final vote so they could get more information. But the tone was clear: In all likelihood, they will vote next Tuesday to make school remote starting on the 23rd.
“Please start making preparations and arrangements so you are not caught off guard,” said board Chair Arturo Perez-Cabello, addressing the 250 people in the Zoom attendees who had stayed until the end of the meeting. At one point, the meeting reached 500 attendees.
As Goeler told the board, staffing challenges may necessitate the transition to remote school. Schools have proven to be safe, and have not shown to be dangerous places for the spread of the virus. All teachers who have spoken with the Independent in the last few weeks have agreed that their schools are safe, and have said everyone wears masks at all times and there is limited contact between people in the building.
But when one staff member tests positive, they have to quarantine, as do all the other staff members who came in contact with them. It doesn’t take long before enough staff are in isolation that it’s impossible to properly staff a school.
That happened at the Ridge Hill School in October. On Oct. 27, the school changed to entirely remote learning because of staffing issues after a staff member tested positive. On Monday, teachers and students returned to school after a two-week quarantine period.
“The amount of coverage that teachers are providing for one another, and the amount of work required of people in the system,” said Goeler, “…that rubber band is stretching and stretching and stretching.”
He showed the latest Covid-19 data from the region. New Haven county is now in the state’s “red” category, meaning it has a high case rate. According to the New York Times, the county has 33.5 positive cases per 100,000 residents — numbers not seen since the spring’s outbreak. Those cases are increasing exponentially.
The proposed timeframe would give the district and parents time to prepare, but would move to remote learning right as cases are anticipated to force it. Goeler said the district also expects a high caseload after the holidays because of travel and gatherings, hence the delayed return to in-person school in January.
Goeler (pictured above) said he met with health and other officials on Friday and learned how bad the numbers are. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse in the district.
As he sat on Zoom Tuesday evening, he told the board, his screen was lighting up with messages about additional staff members testing positive or being suspected of having the virus.
Personnel Director Gary Highsmith said that at the beginning of the meeting, 79 staff members had had to quarantine since the beginning of the school year. At 8:37, he and Goeler got an email about another staff member, bringing that total to 80.
What is particularly alarming, he said, is how fast that number has increased in the last few days.
When he started preparing for Tuesday’s meeting on Friday, a total of 62 staff members had been in quarantine since the beginning of the school year. By Saturday afternoon, it was 68. Three days later: 80.
In addition to those in quarantine, there are also staff working from home taking care of their own kids. The district is required to allow remote work for employees whose kids are home from school. About 25 are working from home, he said. As districts nearby go remote, that number will increase.
When teachers and other staff members are out, there are not enough substitutes to cover for them. And the more staff members have to be reassigned, the more they have to come in contact with cohorts of students they normally would not be near.
“We have an opportunity to be proactive, or reactive.” Goeler told the board. “If we are reactive, we will have more closings, for a longer period of time, and they will be done late the night before, or early the morning of.”
By taking the proactive approach, the district and parents would have two weeks to plan, he said. That is, of course, unless schools end up having to close before then, which he said is likely, based on the current trends.
As the questions board members lobbed his way indicate, he and his staff have a lot to plan for. At one point, board member Roxana Walker-Canton summed up the concerns she and others had about going remote: parents need childcare, and it’s tough to give the same quality of education online, especially for those students with little support and limited resources at home.
The district will have two weeks to work out those equity and childcare concerns, assuming the board opts to go remote starting Nov. 23.
Luckily, Ridge Hill recently showed that the transition to fully remote school is possible, even at the elementary level. The transition, said teachers at the school, was very smooth. They will miss seeing their students, though, in the hybrid model that many said has worked well so far.
For Teachers: Tech Tricks, Patience In Hybrid Model
The week before teachers at Ridge Hill had to move their classrooms to their dining room tables and makeshift home offices, the in-person hybrid model of teaching seemed, for the most part, to be running smoothly.
The teachers who met with the Independent the week before going remote said they were encouraged by how the year had gone so far. At Ridge Hill, at least, the town’s hybrid model seemed mostly successful. It has also prepared teachers and students with the skills they will need if the district goes completely remote.
Sixth-grade teacher Stephanie Mannle (pictured above) said that over the summer, she was nervous about how she would teach students on Zoom and in the classroom at the same time. The virus was also nerve-racking.
“We were waiting so long to be back, that burden got heavier and heavier each week,” she said of the stress of anticipating a drastically different school year than any she had ever known. But as soon as she got back to school and actually began the teaching she had spent so long preparing for, she said she felt much better. “I was put at ease just being back with the kids,” she said.
Over the summer, Hamden developed a hybrid model in which only some students come to class every day. At the elementary school level, each grade spends one day a week learning remotely to reduce the number of students in the building at a time. Some parents have opted to keep their kids at home entirely. The remote students and the in-person students are still in the same class, and teachers have to teach to both a classroom and a computer screen full of students at the same time.
At the middle school and high school, only half of in-person students come on any given day.
In some elementary schools, in-person students spend half the day in their classroom with their teacher, and half in another location in the school learning remotely. That model helps keep students in small cohorts to limit spread of the virus. At Ridge Hill, that model is not necessary because classrooms are big enough to accommodate all in-person students at once.
It takes work, patience, and a large sleeve of tech and teaching tricks to teach both in-person and remote students at the same time, said teachers. But they said they and their students have risen to the challenge.
“It’s like a workout. I’m telling you, it’s like a workout,” said fourth-grade teacher Amanda Gratton (pictured above) of teaching over Zoom and in-person.
The new digital platform comes with its frustrations.
“It’s either too loud, or you can’t hear anything,” said third-grade teacher Holly Stanley. She said she has to constantly remind her students on Zoom to speak up.
It’s tough for adults to sit still all day and stare at a Zoom screen. For elementary schoolers, it can be even tougher. Teachers have had to devise new ways of keeping their students engaged.
Gratton said she when she noticed her students getting restless recently, she had a dance party on Zoom. After that, her students were more engaged. Sometimes, she’ll throw in something fun for her students to look at in the corner of the screen when she’s presenting a slide to keep them tuned in. She will occasionally include a gif of herself dancing so her students will notice and think: “What is Mrs. Gratton doing on the corner of the screen?”
Sometimes just checking in with students and asking them about themselves helps keep them present. “Just talking to them about their lives helps,” Gratton said. She’ll ask about their weekends, and oftentimes it makes them excited to share what’s going on in their lives, and excited to participate in online class.
Zoom also allows teachers to use a number tools like breakout rooms and shared screens where students can draw. Teachers can post polls on Zoom so students can answer questions in real time, all at once.
The online format also allows some students to feel more comfortable sharing their work, said third-grade teacher Larry Stein. “As a shy kid, you can show stuff without everyone staring at you,” he said.
Teachers said the in-person aspects of teaching at Ridge Hill have been smooth. Mask wearing has been no issue at all.
“I am amazed. I feel like our school is safer than being out on the street,” said Stein (pictured). Other than reminding students to pull their masks up over their noses when they fall down occasionally, he said students always follow the mask rules. It was a pleasant surprise.
Students barely leave their classrooms. They step outside twice a day and stand at least six feet apart for mask breaks.
“You say, ‘Six feet,’” said Stein. “They go…” he shot his arms out, imitating the way his students make sure they’re far enough away from their peers.
Stein and the other Ridge Hill teachers who spoke with the Independent said they all feel safe in the building. Everyone is wearing a mask. At Ridge Hill, they’re lucky because they have big classrooms with high ceilings.
“It’s a ghost town in the hallways,” said the school’s literacy specialist, Kara Breen.
The hybrid model, and remote teaching, does require changes to how much students can learn. Overall, teachers are not able to get through as much material because the school days are shorter, and they have to spend more time getting their students on board on the electronic platforms. Teachers said it has forced them to assess which parts of the curriculum are truly necessary and focus on those.
Preferable? No. Smooth? Yes.
Kara Breen.
For the most part, students prefer to be in school, teachers said.
“Oh my god, this is so much better,” Mannle recalled a student saying recently when they came to school for the first time after spending the first part of the year remote.
Teachers, too, said they much prefer to see their students in-person.
“So great,” replied Gratton when asked how it felt to return to school Monday after spending two weeks teaching from home.
Gratton and her colleagues at Ridge Hill may only get two more weeks to relish in-person class, though, before they have to return to remote teaching, this time for a much longer period of time.
At Ridge Hill, teachers have practice.
“Spring was like emergency teaching,” said Breen. Teachers had to suddenly upend the way they taught their students, and had to start teaching remotely with no notice, no preparation, and no technological experience. Some students had internet-connected devices at home. Many did not.
The October transition to remote learning happened as fast as the transition in March. Teachers found out on a Monday that they would go remote the next day. This time, they were prepared.
“This is now really well-curated planned teaching, just from a different location,” Breen said.
All classwork is managed through Google Classroom. Every student has a device they can take home that connects to the internet, and the district has provided wifi hotspots to families that don’t have internet. Students know how to use Zoom.
“We were definitely prepared to go remote,” said Gratton. “It went very smoothly. As smooth as we could have hoped for.”
It helped that students had already had seven weeks with their teachers to learn the new technology platforms and to establish relationships with each other and with their teachers.
“Being in person first helped with that engagement piece,” said Mannle. She said students were actively participating in their Zoom-only class because they already felt comfortable with each other and their teachers.
Student engagement could be hard to maintain at times. Mannle said that at one point, she had to tell students that she noticed they hadn’t written as much for one assignment than they did when they were in person. She said she had to stress to them that they need to be able to hold themselves accountable.
While many students in the district have separate rooms they can use when in class, many do not. Some don’t have stable housing, or they have multiple siblings all using the internet at the same time and little space to accommodate multiple distance learners at a time.
Gratton said it was essential to communicate with parents from the beginning to make sure they could help their kids set up a good place to use for class. For some kids, she said, that took time.
“Where Will I Bring My Child?”
The all-remote system seems to work. And the district has ensured that teachers have the tools they need.
But for students and families, it can be difficult.
A flood of parents submitted letters for Tuesday’s board meeting urging the board to keep at least some in-person school.
“As a working parent of two students who attend Bear Path School the idea of moving to remote learning for almost two months is extremely upsetting and frustrating,” wrote one parent. “Our school has done a fabulous job keeping our students safe.”
Most of the 35 pages of comments echoed those sentiments. The hybrid model works, parents said. Especially for younger students, being out of school is extremely detrimental. Parents can’t take care of their children if they are home because they have to work.
“If the schools go to full remote learning as an essential worker where will I bring my child?” wrote another parent. “I have no vacation or sick time left due to the remote learning last school year. Will the town be reimbursing parents for the cost of childcare?”
Some parents of special education students wrote that it would be especially difficult for their kids to attend school remotely. Many said being in school has been good for their children’s mental health.
“My son is a different and happier person since returning back to school. He skips home every day!!!” wrote one parent of an elementary schooler.
Community members had a number of suggestions: Keep elementary schools open, but not the middle and high school. Use Hamden High School graduates who are home from college to help out.
On Tuesday, Goeler said schools would still be running some programs, and would not be completely shut down like they were in the spring. Administrators would still be in the building. There would be programming for some students. He didn’t specify what that would be. He said the district is also looking into alternative child care for those parents who need it, but the details have not been worked out.
In deciding to wait until next week to vote, the board gave the administration time to come up with some of those plans before the board makes its final decision.
But if you are a parent in Hamden, the read on the Zoom “room” was clear: Get ready for remote learning starting on Nov. 23.
