Many Kansas City area kids punt online class. Schools worry how they’ll do next year
When the coronavirus forced Kansas City area classrooms online in March, Raytown school officials noticed almost all students logging in for their daily schoolwork.
But as time wore on, that number dwindled. At times, up to 40% of students in grades three to 12 were not clicking in.
“It is a universal struggle we are all seeing,” said Brian Huff, Raytown’s associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
Urban and suburban districts on both sides of the state line say the reasons vary, from no internet access to no interest, and from students’ behavioral issues to plain parent fatigue.
And then some students just don’t work well without a daily in-person connection.
“It’s hard to pull them in when they are at home,” said Heather Mayfield, an English teacher at Shawnee Mission’s Trailridge Middle School. “Home is great. There’s snacks and the outdoors and FaceTime with friends. It’s really challenging to motivate in this environment.”
As a result, many students are falling behind. And as educators look ahead to the next school year, they worry how some students will ever catch up.
Teachers call parents and try to be supportive, but “that’s part of the challenge,” said Mark Tallman, associate executive director of Kansas Association of School Boards. “We’ve moved from a model of trying to teach lessons to just trying to stay in contact.”
In Kansas City Public Schools, only half the students are regularly doing classwork online. A few have disappeared from class. “Less than 6% of our students have been completely disengaged,” said Kelly Wachel, district spokeswoman.
The numbers of fully engaged students peaked in Raytown in the first two weeks, when about 5,900 of the 6,000 students were online, Huff said. “It was the novelty of it.”
Now, at best, the district is seeing 75% to 80% engagement. “But if you are talking about complete engagement where they are completing all assignments, then we are talking about more like 60%. And I’m still pretty pleased with that.”
Pleased because educators made the pivot from in-person classrooms to online teaching within days. Three months ago, Huff said, most teachers had never even used the online conferencing tool Zoom.
But the curriculum they’ve used in the classroom doesn’t work the same in the virtual world. Some students are thriving, he said, but others tune out or never tune in.
Not logging in
Districts have scrambled to close the digital divide, providing laptops, iPads and hot spots to students who don’t have the resources to log in. The most recent numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 14% of school-aged children don’t have internet access at home.
But regardless of the equipment they have, sometimes parents are not equipped to help, said Maria Fleming, assistant superintendent for education services in the Fort Osage district. They may be working from home themselves and not have the time, or they feel unprepared to help.
“Some students have trouble with behavior, and one of the triggers is when you put academic stress on them,” Fleming said. “Some parents are just not willing to take that on. And I get it.”
Some students are homeless, and others are having to work to help support their families. Or no one at home speaks English.
In school buildings, districts have resources to deal with such scenarios. There are health care workers, counselors and therapists. “But when we made the shift, a lot of those resources are removed,” Huff said.
“Take a family that is a single parent who suddenly loses their job. Now they are worried about how to pay for rent, for food. That family is going to be more concerned with safety and security than education.”
The children in those families are the ones Mayfield of Trailridge Middle School worries most about: “Those kids who are not connecting and they are not OK because they are bearing some emotional toll worrying about the safety of their family.”
But Mayfield said she also realizes a fair number of students are not logging in because they are not motivated to do so. “I have to be realistic. There are those kids who really do not like school and for some of those kids this is a gift. But it is not a gift that is going to benefit them,” she said.
In Missouri and Kansas, state educators have told teachers that the grade a student left school with when buildings were closed cannot be lowered. That’s another reason some students might not be logging in.
Shawnee Mission officials said they don’t have the data yet on how many students are logging in for classwork, and like other districts in the Kansas City area, they are not penalizing students who don’t.
“We want kids to participate and we want to make sure our kids are OK,” said David Smith, district spokesman. “But our efforts have been around preparing, and that includes making sure we have ways to deliver equitable education to all our kids.”
Meanwhile some students and their parents have just grown tired of the virtual schooling process.
When Katrina Pickens’ husband was called to active duty at the end of March, she was left alone to help her three children with the steady flow of online work from their Shawnee Mission teachers.
“At the very beginning I knew a lot of parents who were, like, this is going to be great,” Pickens said. “But after going through this for a month, I feel like most people just are not as engaged as they were at first. I was very laid-back at first. I was not going to try and do perfect. But it still became overwhelming.”
Pickens, who has two children in elementary school and one in middle, said she would log on to her computer and “I would have an email from one child’s seven middle school teachers, an email from each of my other kids’ teachers, an email from the principal, an email from their special teachers. There are emails saying sign up for this virtual thing and sign up for that virtual thing. And ever since this all started, the internet has been really slow. I mean it’s good that teachers are really trying, but it’s frustrating. For the kids too. “
Pickens, who has been outspoken in the school district about the amount of time students spend with screens, said she just stopped pushing her children to engage.
“When I found out that there wasn’t going to be grading and no attendance I was like, thank God, because this is not going to be a priority. We are most interested in enjoying time together playing outside.”
Goody bags and free takeout
Although states are not holding districts accountable for low attendance during the pandemic, schools are making “extraordinary efforts” to connect with students who have been chronically absent from the virtual classroom, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, an organization of the nation’s largest urban school systems, including Kansas City and Kansas City, Kansas.
“We are not sitting back and being passive about this and saying, oh well,” Casserly said. “Everyone is cognizant of which kids are not logging in. And a lot of our school districts are deploying staff that is not otherwise engaged and having them call families or drop by their places of residence. And some of those outreach efforts have helped.”
Luis Hinojosa, principal at East High School in Kansas City, said at his school, emotional trauma specialists reach out by phone and video conference to students they know have struggled and are not connecting and work to bring them into the virtual classrooms.
Of the 1,200 students who attend East, Luis said, “there are only 53 who have not connected.”
Teachers at East have been really creative, said Ben Richardson, vice principal. In addition to knocking on doors, “some teachers will drive through neighborhoods and hold up signs outside to get a student’s attention.”
At Northeast Middle School, where 75% of students are engaged on a regular basis, Principal Brett Schriewer said teachers call families weekly.
One teacher holds a weekly contest for students who complete assignments. The winners get a takeout meal delivered to their home. You have to be present in class to win.
Other teachers drop off goody bags on front steps with notes thanking students for good work. Another group of teachers organized a Zoom movie night with students.
Schrierwer said one teacher realized some of her students didn’t have computers because their parents didn’t have transportation to the school to pick up the free laptops and hot spots. She picked up each of those parents one at a time and drove them to the school to get the computers and then drove them home. “She did that one day for seven hours,” Schrierwer said.
“When we are finally able to connect with those students they know how much we love them, and then we see this turnaround in engagement,” Schrierwer said.
Nevertheless, Huff said, districts still know, “we obviously will have students who will not engage at all the rest of this year.” That is significant, he said, because “20% of instruction this year was virtual.”
They expect districts across the country to notice coronavirus had “an academic toll. But it is hard to gauge the degree,” Casserly said.
However severe, it won’t show up in the current end-of-year grades since most districts have eased grading, “because we can’t be sure that every kid has adequate access and adequate support,” Fleming of Fort Osage said.
Next school year
Teachers expect a notable number of students, even some who have been present online regularly, will return in the fall having missed a chunk of the previous year’s lessons.
“So we are looking at how do we go back and recoup that,” Fleming said, adding that in some instances, what students didn’t learn could prevent them from moving forward. “For example fourth-quarter geometry is a building block to be successful in algebra,” she said.
The Kansas City, Kansas, school district says student participation online is 80%. And teachers plan to “do some rehabilitation in the fall, maybe for the first 60 days,” said Superintendent Charles Foust. “But we will also be pushing forward. It may be a mixed bag.”
Summer school will be an option for some students, but in most cases those classes too will be online.
So when school starts back, whether it’s in person or online, “we will see highly differentiated classrooms,” Huff predicts. Teachers may be meeting with students in small groups to help them fill in the gaps.
“We are going to be intentional about looking back and addressing some of the key standards we didn’t get to teach face-to-face,” Richardson said.
“I don’t think we are ever going to really completely fill all the gaps,” Mayfield said. “I have so much anxiety about next school year, because we really don’t know yet what it is going to look like. But one thing is for certain, I don’t think any of us are going to be able to say to our students, hey, why didn’t you learn that last year?”
As for next year, school administrators say they will be ready whether teachers and students are back in their classrooms or not. In districts throughout the Kansas City area, teachers have continued with training for improving online education and connecting with students remotely. And KCK schools plan to offer training to parents too, “because they are the biggest champs,” Foust said.
“We are learning a new set of skills to be used from this point forward,” Hinojosa at East High said. “There is a good chance when August comes around we are not going to be going back into school. We’d better be ready this time.”
