Pandemic paradox: Remote learning brought some Modesto educators closer to struggling kids
As students and their families face pandemic-related challenges from online learning to economic hardship, Modesto school administrators are offering aid as the circumstances have raised their awareness.
Over the past 18 months, Sue McHann, principal at Shackelford Elementary School, said she and her colleagues have been able to connect with families in need of assistance in a much more proactive way than before.
She said that when schools turned to remote instruction during the height of the pandemic, she and her team increased their home visits to ensure every student had the support they needed to be able to participate.
“Last year alone, we probably did over 200 home visits, trying to make sure that the kids have their Chromebooks, if they’re having internet issues, or those sorts of things,” she said. “We wanted to make sure that our families had what they needed.”
Shackelford Elementary, located in south Modesto, serves primarily Latino families from the area. Many students are learning English as a second language, and many families are from lower-income backgrounds.
Through the regular home visits, issues the school might normally be unaware of — such as displacement, lack of internet access, or, for one family, a leaky roof — were brought to the attention of administrators.
“In a normal year, we wouldn’t have found out those things, because it’s none of our business,” McHann said. “But because we were trying to figure out how we can support the families (through the pandemic), we were able to kind of enter their world, as opposed to them entering our world.”
Staff members could address the needs of families head on, whether that was providing a second internet hotspot to make sure all the kids in a house could access their assignments, or connecting parents with district or community resources to help them out financially.
Helping a family find its footing
One family of seven is thankful for staff at Shackelford, who became aware of its displacement and decided to help. A legal dispute over eviction and the loss of a job left Gregorio Callejas and his family with nothing but bags of clothes, unable to retrieve any other of their belongings from their rental home.
Following their displacement, a shortage of affordable housing pushed the family to seek shelter at a motel. But within two weeks, Callejas said, they ran out of money.
“I could barely keep up,” he said in Spanish. “I honestly didn’t know what to do.”
With a lack of rental assistance programs willing to help undocumented families like Callejas’, he said it left them with no choice but to live in their car for a few days. Shackelford staff later provided food, diapers and money for a few days of rent toward a new place. That allowed the family enough wiggle room to seek a loan to afford the new rental home in west Modesto.
Callejas said his family still is living paycheck to paycheck. As the couple sleep on the floor of their unfurnished home with their kids, including a 1-year-old, a toddler, a 9-year-old, two tweens and a teen, they wonder when their economic struggle will end.
A districtwide challenge
Of the roughly 29,000 students across the district, about 384 met the criteria for homelessness during the 2020-21 school year. This marks a 47% increase from the 2018-19 school year, according to MCS data.
Danielle Hinkle, the district’s senior director for student support services, said that while the pandemic certainly factored into the increase, it’s often individual family situations — financial troubles, unforeseen evictions, divorce — that result in students becoming temporarily or more permanently affected by displacement or homelessness.
Pandemic-related unemployment, as well as increasing rent prices across the Valley, have increased the burdens faced by families across the district. Hinkle said MCS is able to provide students and their families a variety of services and resources, from school supplies to connections with organizations that can help them secure housing.
For McHann, knowing she and her staff were experiencing the effects of the pandemic right alongside the students and their families meant they were able to connect on a different level. That relationship-building, she said, was one of the most important things to develop in the past 18 months.
She was able to lean on her school community as well. After McHann and her colleagues discovered a family’s trailer roof was leaking, she and her Bible study group helped raise funds for the repair.
With schools’ return to in-person instruction this school year, McHann and the staff at Shackelford are prepared to deal not only with challenges students faced at home, but through online learning as well. The district has provided schools with instructional coaches to bridge learning gaps that occurred when instruction was moved online.
“(Students) are going to come back with a lack of exposure,” she said. “I don’t like to call it learning loss because if they’re not there, they’re not going to lose it. It’s a lack of exposure if they didn’t show up and they weren’t exposed to the curriculum.”
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
