What Oakdale district has learned in the month it’s had kids back on TK-6 campuses
It was about a month ago, the week of Oct. 19, that Oakdale Joint Unified School District returned its 2,550 transitional-kindergarten through sixth-grade students to its four elementary schools.
Back in August, the public school district was the first in Stanislaus to submit a waiver application to county and state health officials to reopen in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its waiver was approved Sept. 24.
The past five weeks have reinforced what most educators and families already agree upon: Distance learning doesn’t come close to in-person instruction, and there’s no 100% safe way to have children and adults on campuses.
“At the end of the first quarter, we compared everybody, 7-12 as well as TK-6,” to grades students earned a year earlier, Superintendent Marc Malone said as he and Cabinet members sat down with The Bee for interviews Thursday morning. Tallying failing grades at the time of this year’s first progress report, “we saw an over 50% increase at every site, and most of them were even greater than that. We had one particular site that I think had a 300% increase in ‘F’ grades.”
At a meeting earlier this month of the Modesto City Schools board, student member Carson Carranza, a Modesto High senior, noted similar numbers. At his school, the number of failing grades doubled from first quarter 2019 to first quarter 2020, he said.
Stanislaus schools Superintendent Scott Kuykendall said in an email Thursday that the increase in failing grades is a reality countywide. “I don’t have the percentages, but districts are struggling with student engagement,” he said.
For a relatively small population, distance learning is working, Malone said, but for the large population, it’s not.
Working to close the digital divide
Getting children back in classrooms goes a long way toward improving the situation, Oakdale Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Kristi Rapinchuk said.
About 20% of OJUSD’s TK-6 students (464 of them) are on independent study, learning from home full time. The rest are divided into two groups, all getting a half day of distance learning on Mondays, then receiving full days of in-class instruction from their teachers on either Tuesdays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Fridays.
Rapinchuk said she’s heard from teachers directly that they have been “shocked” at how much content they’re able to cover during the two days they have kids in the classroom, and at how well the students do at completing the work asynchronously on their home-learning days.
“There is no perfect solution,” Oakdale Teachers Association President Lisa Greenhow, a third-grade teacher at Sierra View Elementary told The Bee via email. “Some students really excelled in distance learning and teachers have found a rhythm that was working. Some students are flourishing with the hybrid model. There are benefits and disadvantages to both models.”
Though some students — primarily academic high-achievers — continued to learn well in a 100% distance-learning model, Rapinchuk said, “we were also very aware that we were beginning to experience an increasingly large digital divide.”
So while there were many reasons for school districts to want children back in classrooms — among them, social and emotional support, peer interaction and trained eyes to spots signs of possible trouble at home — one of the biggest was the need to close that learning gap, Rapinchuk said.
When student cohorts are in classrooms, she said, they have the full attention of their teachers. That’s unlike districts in which teachers are instructing both the children in front of them and those in front of a live-stream at home. “We really wanted to honor the integrity of the classroom,” Malone said.
The students who’ve returned to classrooms are hungry to learn, Rapinchuk said. “If there can be a silver lining, I guess that’s one right now. The elementary teachers have given testimony that the kids are really more engaged than they ever have been before.”
Lots of learning loss to recover
Giving children undivided attention in the classroom better ensures that teachers will identify students’ learning loss, Malone said. “We’re going to spend the vast majority of next year trying to recoup that learning loss,” Malone said. “And pleasantly what we’ve found is because our cohorts are relatively small, teachers ... are able to identify some of that learning loss and remedy it now.”
Assuming that the pandemic is over by next school year and children are back in school full time, hearing there will be a focus on recovering learning loss is good news to most families. But it’s likely of little to no comfort to students struggling through their senior or even junior years of high school.
That’s why it’s so important that students work to stay engaged and attend classes every day, even if they don’t like digital learning, the superintendent said. And it’s why site-level and district staff have a sense of urgency to be as creative as they can in engaging students and in getting them back on campuses, he said.
Teachers of college-bound kids who want to take AP tests are being “strategic” in preparing them for success, just as they would in a normal school year, Malone said.
Teachers and students in career-tech, ESL and special-needs classes all have their own issues in distance learning, he added. Having 14 kids trying to run table saws while a teacher watches from behind a camera? Untenable, Malone said. Same with having virtually taught auto shop students beneath cars, or ag students using cutting torches and welders without in-person supervision.
So in this current environment, those technical-education students are learning lessons with construction paper, cardboard and other materials “to try to spur them along.” No one would argue it’s a good substitute for the hands-on instruction they need, Malone said, which is why from the start, and even when applying for a waiver that applied to only TK-6 in-person instruction, OJUSD has been proactive in planning for the return of all students.
Health and safety measures are working
Bringing back those TK-6 students hasn’t gone perfectly, and no one thought it would. As of Thursday, none of Oakdale’s four elementary schools has had to be entirely closed because of COVID-19 cases, Malone said. One school had four classrooms quarantine, and another school had two. he said.
Anticipation of outbreaks is why schools have so many precautions in place, like social distancing, mandated face coverings, facility cleaning and disinfecting, cohorting of students, screening and testing, and routes for entering, exiting and moving about campuses.
In all these cases, there’s no indication that spread occurred at school, the superintendent said. “It’s been at other events.” For example, one student had a household member who tested positive, so the child’s class quarantined. In another, a student or staff member was exposed to someone who was awaiting test results. OJUSD consulted with the county and decided to quarantine the class, which “ended up being the appropriate step to take.”
The district even has a School Site COVID Dashboard, updated weekly, that shows the number of students and staff at each facility and the number of active COVID-19 cases.
Stanislaus County Superintendent of Schools Scott Kuykendall said last week that safety measures in districts across the county are working well. He had a conversation with Dr. Julie Vaishampayan, the county’s public health officer, last Monday, “and she was extremely proud of the work being done at our schools to limit spread and ensure student and staff safety,” he said. The county Health Services Agency “has been a regular on our superintendents calls and is a great resource for our districts.”
The Oakdale district and its teachers association “have spent a lot of time together this year trying to create the safest environment for students and staff,” OTA President Greenhow said.
From discussions and surveys, she said, her impression is that the majority of the elementary teachers believe that the procedures outlined in a memorandum of understanding have created a safe environment.
“We are still working on the guidelines for the secondary (grades) to return,” she added. “There are concerns unique to secondary levels that are difficult to find solutions to.”
Among those concerns is the sheer number of students. Oakdale high has 1,600 of them, so 800 could be on campus any given day. Also, junior high and high school students don’t stick with one teacher all day, but move from class to class.
“We are nervous about all the unknowns,” Greenhow said. “It seems like every concern brings up two more concerns and every question that gets answered leaves us with two new ones.”
The district has its reopening plans for the junior high and high school posted at www.oakdale.k12.ca.us and has set a tentative start date of Jan. 4, dependent upon the virus tier placement of Stanislaus County. With the county back in the purple tier, Malone noted Thursday that the date is “not looking promising.”
This story was originally published November 22, 2020 at 1:34 PM.
