From Spotty WiFi to Working Parents, Remote Learning Challenges Schools to Eliminate Barriers
By Katherine Huggins
Grand Oaks Elementary School’s physical location has been unoccupied by students as they study from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Photo from San Juan School District’s website.
After schools shut down in March because of the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers faced a series of challenges preparing their students for remote learning. At Grand Oaks Elementary in Citrus Heights, California, this meant making some house calls.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento County immediately sent a Chromebook to every Grand Oaks student for remote learning.
“At one point, we didn't think we were going to have enough Chromebooks for everybody, and I was called to pull out every computer, every iPad, every piece of technology that we had in case we needed to go into emergency mode,” Suzanne Landuyt, the principal of Grand Oaks said.
Ultimately, every student in the district received a Chromebook in March through socially-distanced pickups, drive-thru sites at schools, or via a porch drop-off for families unable to make the pickup date. Approximately 5% of Grand Oak’s families were also sent to the district office to pick up WiFi hotspots.
Landuyt said she expected students in lower grades to receive touch Chromebooks when school resumed in the fall, but they’re still on backorder due to the pandemic.
“When we think about having to use hand-eye coordination and navigating a computer with a mouse or a built-in mouse, it's just a little bit more difficult for kids to navigate,” she said.
Teaching students and families how to use the Chromebooks was the initial challenge, particularly since there are multiple login steps before reaching the class Zoom links.
First, students have to log in to the Chromebook, then they have to log in to the San Juan Unified portal, then they have to log in to the learning platform their teacher is using — either Google Classroom or Seesaw. Another login for Zoom was added when school resumed in the fall, due to an abundance of Zoom bombing in the spring.
“We had to re-explain to families that just were getting going and finally feeling comfortable navigating that all of a sudden, we had to do the authentication too,” Landuyt said. “We had parents whose kids missed a lot of Zoom meetings because they didn't know how to do that.”
Thomas Prieto, a bilingual English Language Development (ELD) instructor at Grand Oaks and San Juan Unified’s Mariposa Elementary, said that while parents largely had experience navigating a cellphone, those skills didn’t automatically translate to navigating the Chromebooks.
“We entered this pandemic with students and families that were not digital savvy, but digital savvy in the sense that you can be digital-savvy on the platform of a cellular device that does not mimic a Chromebook,” Prieto said.
Prieto works with 130 non-native English speakers, the majority of whom speak Spanish. He said communicating the school’s plans for remote learning with those families was not too difficult, as the district provides translators and makes information available in different languages.
Both Landuyt and Prieto set to work improving the students’ families’ ability to access the technology.
Grand Oaks’ office remained open, and parents came in when they needed help with technology. In some cases, teachers and administrators actually visited the doorsteps of student’s homes to show parents step-by-step how to use the Chromebook while social distancing.
“We were like mini tech people that were helping to try to solve problems,” Landuyt said, adding that she instructed one of the school’s bilingual intervention specialists to set up a Google line where she helps parents and staff troubleshoot technology issues. “We had to build in some systems of support to help parents and students with the navigation of the technology that we're asking them to use.”
Prieto also went a step above what was expected.
“I've actually given out my cell number to many of the parents, so they'll text me if they have any problems,” he said.
In addition to technology-related problems, learning through Zoom proved challenging in, and of, itself for many students.
Anel Isaacs, whose oldest son Caleb is a first-grader at Grand Oaks, said her son’s biggest difficulty was learning how to sit still and focus. At one point, as Caleb was walking around with his computer, he accidentally left it in their cereal cabinet.
Isaacs says his attention has improved over time, however.
But for some, remote learning proved unmanageable.
Tami Smock’s third-grade daughter, Taylor, attempted distance learning in the spring at Grand Oaks, but became increasingly unhappy.
“She would often say it was like no one even saw her,” Smock said. “Her anxiety from March until the end of the year got pretty bad, and it all stemmed from the Zoom classes. At the end of the school year, we decided if we would have to continue distance learning that we would pull Taylor and put her in the homeschool program.”
Her middle child, Madyson, began kindergarten in the fall at Grand Oaks but Smock decided to homeschool her as well about a month in.
“At first she enjoyed distance learning, but day after day, she felt more and more like no one saw her,” she said. That feeling of not being seen, added to spotty internet, caused Madyson to become frustrated. “Kindergartners aren't meant to learn on a screen. They need to use their hands and all their senses.”
Smock plans to return to Grand Oaks once there are no more Zooms involved.
While Grand Oaks had little control over the Zoom format, the administration worked to ensure that students were equipped with the resources needed to be successful in an unideal environment.
At the beginning of the school year, students received a drawstring bag containing pencils, markers, scissors, glue, paper, notebooks, and “anything that they would need for supplies that we would normally supply in the classroom,” Landuyt said.
The school continues to provide supplies on a monthly basis, depending on what families say they need. However, providing those materials to families has been an additional expense for the school.
“We had to double what we normally order,” Landuyt said. “We have to have a set of things for school for when, and if, we come back. Then we had to order double that to send it home.”
While the pick-ups have proved useful to many families, some fail to show up.
“We have families who have never come,” Landuyt said. “I've had to pay people to deliver to people's front doors.”
She said she was unsure why some parents are unable to make it to the school for resource pick-ups because she has tried to be flexible, even providing her personal cell phone number to parents.
“I have said ‘if you can't make this date, here's my cell phone number, we can arrange a different time.’ But they don't take me up on it,” Landuyt said.
She continued: “Then they complain that the time that we have available is not the time when they're available. I've tried to be open and I think the biggest thing is trying to work through all the barriers that families have, so that there are no barriers. But some of it is just the dysfunction within the family and that the parents have to work a lot of hours.”
The divide between those who have been successful in remote learning and those who have struggled largely comes down to the level of support they’re receiving at home, which is often challenging for working parents to provide.
“We do have families that still rarely get on to Zoom, and the reason being is parents are working,” Landuyt said. “Either the students are at daycare and the daycare doesn't do the technology, or students are home by themselves and they don't keep themselves focused enough to get on.”
Prieto encountered this problem when one of the fifth graders wasn’t showing up to Zoom sessions.
“I went physically to his house,” he said. “Part of it is because I know that he's just an amazing kid, and he has so many skills. He's extremely capable. That's where I'm like, what's going on?”
Prieto’s home visit revealed that both of the student’s parents work and that they assumed he would be responsible enough to navigate Zoom alone.
“That's just a lot to ask of a 10-year-old. Their brains are still developing. That executive functioning is not happening,” he said.
Isaacs said she has taught Caleb, her first-grader, to take some responsibility for logging in, though she has been able to help him out as a stay-at-home mom.
“He’s starting to remember the codes to get into the computer, and then to log on to Zoom,” she said. “Every time he has a Zoom, our Alexa will go ‘Caleb you have a Zoom in two minutes,’ and then he'll bring his computer to me.”
She logs him into the computer and portal, and he logs himself into the Zoom.
“I just wanted him to take some responsibility because there's at least an hour between every Zoom,” she said, noting the same challenge as Prieto’s fifth-grader. “Otherwise, he'll just hang out and be like whatever.”
Prieto said most issues about attendance have been resolved after communicating with parents, as many were unaware that their child was missing class.
If a student isn’t attending or participating, Prieto communicates to the primary teacher, who then relays that information to the parents during parent-teacher conferences. He also will call a parent directly if their child has missed more than three of his classes.
“What I've noticed with Grand Oaks and especially with the kindergarten team is that they're good at communicating,” he said. “Especially after conferences, all of a sudden there was a huge shift, and attendance increased immensely.”
He said that since transitioning to remote learning, his class attendance has climbed exponentially.
At Mariposa Elementary, Prieto’s classes now have about 80% attendance on any given day. At Grand Oaks, almost 100% of the kindergarteners participate.
While reaching out to parents and offering support has improved Prieto’s attendance numbers, Landuyt says the challenge lies in parents who can’t be contacted.
“We have families who don't have email addresses or phone numbers change, and really, those are the only modes we have of talking because it’s not face-to-face,” she said.
A child is marked present for the whole day if they participate in any way, shape, or form on a school day, whether it be turning into a Zoom for only five minutes without their video camera turned on, or submitting a singular asynchronous assignment.
“It's really hard because teachers want to penalize kids for being there for five minutes, and then getting off,” Landuyt said. “We have to tell the teachers, ‘remember, it's like a child coming to school and putting their head down all day.’ Yeah, they get marked present, but the academic work isn't being done.”
If a teacher reports that a student was absent for the day, then the attendance clerk confirms with the parents that the student didn’t attend any Zooms or work asynchronously. If she can’t reach the family, then Landuyt calls. If neither can contact the parents, then Landuyt and a Safe Schools officer will go and do a home visit.
“At that time, if I see any barriers, then we try to fill them with hotspots, additional instruction, or whatever we need to do,” she said.
While following these steps usually yields results, in rare cases, families are completely unreachable.
“There's a student that I had to drop from school on Thursday, which just breaks my heart,” Landuyt said in late November. “This particular child has missed 30 days of school, and the last 17 days, he hasn't been there. We've done home visits, and we've actually had the police try to do a welfare check and they weren't home.”
Despite its challenges, remote learning has had some unexpected benefits for families who are actively engaging with their students.
Caleb is “ahead of the curve and learning at a different pace with the one-on-one attention,” Isaacs said.
And Prieto similarly found pros in the virtual environment that he plans to incorporate when they return to the classroom.
“The amount of growth that I've seen from some students is crazy,” he said. “Because I've recorded these lessons, the kids can watch it over and over and over. Whereas you cannot repeat a lesson in a classroom, you've got this window, this narrow window, and then it's gone. You can re-teach but it's just a little different.”
At a meeting of the English Learner Advisory Committee, Prieto received positive feedback from parents about the way he structures and videotapes his lesson plans.
“I asked the parents, ‘How many of you are actually joining, or you're off to the side participating in the lessons I'm delivering?’” Prieto said. “All of them raised their hand. So not only are the kids benefiting, the parents are benefiting. If a parent didn't have the opportunity to attend a school to learn the language, now they have that opportunity.”
Prieto says he plans to incorporate Chromebooks and recorded videos into his curriculum for when in-person learning resumes.
“Who knows what the future holds,” he said. “But if another pandemic were to happen again, the kids are actually ready to go. The parents are ready to go. You know they have the tools that they need.”
Landuyt strongly correlates students’ success to their support network at home, and while she isn’t worried about children being behind the curve when instruction resumes in-person, she does believe the gaps between students who have, or don’t have, supportive families will be wider.
“The students who are struggling will continue to struggle and there will be larger gaps,” she said. “The students who have a supportive family that have the ability to spend the time that they need with the kids to get the academic work done, they're still not going to have a problem.”
Landuyt’s hypothesis is backed by several studies, including a recent one by the University of Michigan, which showed that home life can deeply affect a student’s academic performance. Separate research from the Russell Sage Foundation found that the “poverty” achievement gap — meaning the difference in academic achievement between “poor and non-poor children” — has grown faster than the racial achievement divide.
The Covid-19 pandemic has underscored class divisions, often by way of separating who is privileged enough to be able to pause their career, or work at home, from essential workers. The economic toll of the virus has thrust millions into unemployment and forced others to take on additional hours to support their family — which in turn can cause students learning from home to struggle.
“There will be a big discrepancy, especially with our minority families, just because of the gap in who has to work all the time to survive, and who can have a parent stay home to help them with their academic work, and keep them focused,” Landuyt said.