Middle School Reopens Gradually

Eighth grader Brian McClain was the only student back in his classroom Thursday. And it made a difference: He mastered a lesson in eight minutes after struggling remotely for months with pre-algebra.

Thursday saw sixth through eighth graders return to classrooms for the first time since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Seen from Augusta Lewis Troup School, which McClain attends, the return was gradual: Not everyone showed up at first.

Those who did, like McClain, were happy to be back.

“I liked how easy math work was,” McClain said. ​“I had fun being in-person. I could focus more and listen to the teacher more.”

McClain completed three full math assignments in class Thursday. He was the only student there; other eighth graders in his homeroom were either still learning remotely or will start their in-school classes on Monday and Tuesday.

Pre-kindergarten through fifth graders started this hybrid of in-person and remote school in mid-January. Students who are in third grade and younger can opt into four days of in-person learning. Fourth through eighth graders can opt into two days in person and two days remote. High schoolers are still fully remote.

About 46 percent of middle schoolers are expected to have their first in-person day by Monday. Schools recorded a total of 799 sixth through eighth graders present in-person on Thursday, according to district data chief Michele Sherban. Monday could see up to 1,373 middle schoolers; the other families have confirmed that they want to stay remote. The total number of students officially enrolled in those grades is 4,736, according to the Connecticut State Department of Education’s data website.

Troup saw 20 sixth through eighth graders join the younger grades on Thursday, according to Principal Eugene J. Foreman, Jr. He expects to see another batch of 20 – 30 students on Monday and then to see a larger group next Thursday. He said that some parents missed the survey to sign up for in-person classes. After hearing about the reopening by word of mouth, they contacted their teachers to ask to opt in.

Foreman is seeing the younger grades swell slightly too as weather gets warmer. He speculated that parents just see it as easier to keep their kids remote on cold, wintry days.

Those deciding to keep their children home long-term often have preexisting conditions. Another parent was planning to send her kids and then decided against it, to avoid risking her new pregnancy.

Small Class Sizes

There were small class sizes across the Troup middle school grades on Thursday.

Matt Schaffer’s last class of the day was another one-on-one class. Schaffer (pictured above) is a reading intervention teacher for seventh and eighth graders, so he has small class sizes to begin with. Some of his eight students are sticking with virtual classes. The others are split in the two-day remote, two-day in-person model.

On Thursday afternoon, he moved his one-person class outside. Each found their own patch of grass to do the independent reading portion of class.

Schaffer has lived in New Haven for about five years. Last year, he got tired of commuting to Hartford and decided to switch to teaching at New Haven Public Schools. Thursday was his first day with students in Troup’s stone and brick building.

“I was nervous last night. Waking up and getting here was the hardest part,” Schaffer said.

He is still nervous about managing his remote and in-person students at the same time. Thursday was a transition day, where he gave his remote students independent assignments. On Friday, the remote students join for live classes.

Unlike many teachers, Schaffer is not particularly worried about the safety aspects of in-person teaching. He keeps his class clean. The number of students he interacts with his small. And he had his appointment lined up for Thursday afternoon to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

Some of his students have attended remote classes on and off. Not all of these students have signed up to return to the Troup building. For the disengaged students who have returned though, the eye contact and personal interactions have already made a difference. He can get them to answer questions and focus in a way he couldn’t when their cameras were off.

Schaffer’s enthusiasm was the highlight of the reopening for Principal Eugene Foreman. Seeing his new teacher so excited made Foreman’s day.

Eighth grader Noveair Varella has a homeroom class size of three. He likes school quieter. He and his friend explained — finishing each others’ sentences — that they don’t like human interaction. Waking up is Varella’s favorite part of the day, because he doesn’t have to worry about anyone else and how he is affecting them.

Despite this stated desire to avoid people, Varella came back to school because printed assignments work better for him. He is working on his IQ, inspired by super-smart characters like Near in the anime Death Note.

The empty school was a little eerie for music teacher Joe Silva. Some of the classrooms were completely empty, because the teacher and students were all quarantining after a Covid-19 case. As far as Silva had heard, the quarantine was precautionary; no one besides the family who originally tested positive had come down with coronavirus.

Silva filled his own classes with the sounds of guitar chords and strumming. He teaches a modern band class, where students learn keyboard, bass, vocals, drums and guitars. Students are more excited about class with this curriculum, because they learn to play songs that they already love.

Thursday was one of the early guitar lessons, more about trying out the feel of how a guitar works than playing a song. He joked that the strumming sounded much better than the clicking of a keyboard and was delighted to see one of his students smile despite his mask.

Pre‑K Reopening Was Harder

By 3:30 p.m, New Haven Federation of Teachers President David Cicarella had no calls from teachers about their first day back. That was a good thing. It meant no urgent safety issues had come up among the middle school grades.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that the sixth through eighth grade reopening will be better. We already rolled out pre-K‑5. There are similar issues in 6 – 8 and some of the common things, we’ve already figured out,” Cicarella said.

The teacher’s union has been acting as a go-between whenever teachers have safety concerns. This has been fairly straightforward when the problem can be solved at the school level. Principals call Cicarella proactively to tell him about issues and respond quickly to concerns.

The response time is slower when Cicarella has to call district administrators.

“At central office, sometimes stuff bottlenecks. In fairness, there is so much going on,” Cicarella said.

And the problems aren’t low-stakes curriculum questions that can wait. If a teacher thinks they were exposed to Covid-19, they want to hear back within an hour about whether that was the case.

Cicarella said he sympathizes with the pandemic workloads. By the time he has finished responding to seven texts, he has eight more. Fortunately, the delays from central office have been getting better over the past few weeks.

Vaccines have been a clear win that the state and local union branches lobbied hard for. Teachers, childcare workers and other school staff became eligible to get the Covid-19 vaccine on Monday. Teachers have been happy with the process, Cicarella reported.

Varella’s homeroom teacher, Erica Carrano, felt that the process was exceptionally smooth and easy to navigate. She got her first shot on Thursday afternoon at the Wilbur Cross High School vaccination site.

“It made me more excited to come back,” Carrano said.

Rashana Graham is one of the few teachers who experienced both reopenings firsthand. She has been teaching her fifth grade students in-person since January and added sixth grade in-person classes on Thursday. The split made it easy for her to integrate her sixth graders into the routines she had already established, like hand sanitizing on the way in and out of each class.

Graham was scared in January. On Thursday, she came in half-vaccinated. She received her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at the Whalley Avenue Walgreens on Tuesday.

She has even decided to send her own children back to school, contrary to her earlier decision. She saw the care she and her coworkers were taking not to catch or spread Covid-19 at Troup. She realized that the schools her children attend in Bridgeport would be equally careful.

“We have to stop being scared and live our lives. In this year, we have taught our kids how to keep their distance and keep their masks on. We have to let them out sometime,” Graham said.

Plus, her children were staying with her mother while she taught in-person. Graham’s mother was spoiling her grandkids, like letting them eat cookies for breakfast if they would promise to focus on their studies.

She plans to continue teaching the way she does in remote learning, where students type their questions in the chat and she answers the questions in order. Students sitting at desks in front of her will have the audio and microphone turned off on their Chromebooks, with all audio directed through Graham’s own central speaker. Troup has enough Chromebooks that students attending in-person can leave their laptops at home and use different ones at school.

The biggest change in workflow is that she can now watch students work over their shoulders, rather than asking them to share screens.

Thursday brought Graham a special treat. She snuck by the seventh and eighth grade classrooms to visit her students from last year. Because the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Haven suddenly and lasted longer than initially expected, she was never able to say goodbye to them properly.

“They’re all tall now. I haven’t seen them in so long,” Graham said.

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