CLEVELAND, Ohio — John Zitzner thought he found a way last week to connect about 25% of the students in the Breakthrough charter school network to online classes.
He pulled the trigger and spent about $100,000 to order 500 Internet hotspot devices to give to students who don’t have Internet access at home. Zitzner, a co-founder of the Cleveland chain, then started trying to solve several other challenges to enable remote learning for his nine schools while Ohio’s coronavirus schools’ shutdown continues.
But the plan was dashed early this week. The vendor could not deliver, so Zitzner and his staff had to scramble to find another.
“I’m not sure when we’ll be ready to roll out the learning program,” Zitzner said Tuesday. “But we will!”
Schools across Ohio, as well as the country, are rushing, much like Breakthrough, to launch online learning plans for their students while schools are closed. Gov. Mike DeWine had labeled the original three-week school closure an “extended spring break,” but when he extended it from today to May 1, schools now must move from short-term, patchwork lessons to providing real instruction by Monday.
While most districts expected schools to be closed beyond three weeks, possibly for the year, they are at different stages of clearing several hurdles to offering meaningful lessons online.
Students need laptops or other devices. Schools need to find an online program to host lessons. Teachers need to be trained in how to use the program, or the multiple programs a district picks. Then teachers have to take the lessons they were delivering in classrooms and start recording them for online use.
But that’s not all. Parents have to be notified. And students have to sign on and participate.
In some cases, the differences between district plans are minor. Schools may be using different programs with different features. Some are distributing laptops to students this week, while others had already made one-to-one technology — providing an Internet device to every student — part of their academic plan long before the pandemic.
Some teachers are offering “synchronous” lessons online, classes in which both teachers and students are online at the same time and teachers can respond to questions as they lecture. But in most cases, teachers are recording short lessons in advance, letting students view them on websites like Google Classroom or even YouTube at any time. They then hold scheduled office hours on Google Meet or Zoom to talk to students or parents.
Brunswick teacher Lynette Miller can see images of several students and parents as she talks to them on Google Meet for her daily "office hours."
There are variations even between suburban districts that have already launched online classes, said Ryan MacRaild, a teacher in the Brecksville-Broadview Heights district, whose wife teaches in the Nordonia schools and whose children attend Independence schools.
“Between the three districts that we either work in or live in, everybody’s got a little different approach,” he said. “But the message is still the same. We’re still trying to help students learn… With a little patience and a lot of flexibility, I think we’ll get through it just fine.”
Some schools are far behind
But the differences between suburbs and cities is significant and has many school advocates, from teachers unions to legislators to advocacy groups, worry that learning and opportunity gaps between poor and affluent students will grow even wider.
While other districts already have been giving online lessons and told parents of their rollout plan long ago, the Cleveland schools still had not announced any plan for next week as of Friday morning. The district’s only official lessons have been paper packets of exercises, though students and parents have reported that some teachers have done more on their own.
After a few days of paper lessons sent home when schools closed, parents and students must pick up new lessons at the 22 schools giving out free meals. But with fewer than 10% of district students picking up meals each day, it is unclear how many also picked up lessons, let alone completed them.
This week, the district and the Cleveland Teachers Union had teachers trying to collect updated phone numbers, addresses and email addresses for students — a challenge in a district whose students move frequently.
Columbus, Ohio’s largest district, had enough laptops and tablets for every student. But it has not solved the problem of Internet access for its poor students. One solution: upgrading wi-fi at its schools so students can do online lessons outside the locked buildings.
Spokesman Scott Wortman said students did that already, even before the shutdown.
“You’ll see them outside the front of their buildings accessing the Internet,” Wortman said. “You could pull up in the parking lot if you had a car.”
And the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, which has schools in the city and suburbs, said its lessons will “vary according to the age of students and the means by which connections are available.”
“Each school is reaching out locally as technology allows, from paper materials and phone calls, to in-person, real-time video classes and everything in between,” Superintendent Frank O’Linn told families in a letter posted on the Diocese website.
He did not respond to Plain Dealer questions about how many schools would provide lessons by paper and how many online.
A head start
In contrast, Brecksville-Broadview Heights teachers have already been sharing digital lessons this week like this one – a 5-minute video lesson on calculating the area of an object by 7th grade math teacher Ashley Roberts. It shows her talking, along with several slides explaining how to do it.
The Solon school district is also well ahead of Cleveland, having given parents a schedule on March 23, a week before DeWine extended the “break,” for how it would ramp up existing online lessons for all students. Most of its students have laptops already, other than the youngest elementary school students who use them only at school. But on Wednesday and Thursday it passed Chromebooks out to parents of those students with drive-through pickups at schools.
Debbie Roark hands off a laptop to a parent at the Solon's schools district's drive-thru pickup at Parkside Elementary School Thursday. Parents were scheduled to arrive at different intervals to reduce congestion. ( Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)The Plain Dealer
The Shaker Heights schools also mapped out a path to putting classes mostly online, moving from Level 1 to Level 2 and now Level 3 this coming Monday, with some synchronous classes and some just posted to be viewed any time.
“It will be like school…or the closest we can get to that in a virtual environment,” said Superintendent David Glasner.
The district had already given computers at the start of the year to all 5th through 12th-grade students and has been passing out more to younger students. The district also set up a computer repair service, that lets families drop computers off in special lockers in the high school lobby and pick them up later, to avoid contact with anyone.
Casey Ailiff, with the tech support department at Shaker schools, returns a repaired computer to a locker at the high school Thursday. Students drop their broken computers off in lockers and the IT department fixes them and returns them to the lockers for pickup. (Gus Chan, The Plain Dealer)The Plain Dealer
And the district ordered 200 hotspots to provide Internet access for $30 per month to any student that needs it.
Lynette Miller, a first-grade teacher in the Brunswick schools, has already been recording short lessons each day to post on Google Classroom, then going on Google Meet for an hour each morning and afternoon to discuss the lesson with students and parents.
“I’m available to re-teach [a lesson],” Miller said. “I’m available to talk to the student. I’ll be there for parents. If they want the right answer, or how to do something, I can walk them through that.”
Jonathan Hicks, an art teacher at Brunswick High School, has also been recording short lectures for students in his photography class, like this one, while also asking students to send in digital images of their work.
He said the classes are not as good as in-person meetings, particularly since students can’t use the school’s darkroom or computers with Photoshop that stay at school.
“We can’t go fully in-depth,” Hicks said. “As opposed to teaching specifics with the tool, we’re having to teach bigger concepts.”
But he’s having photo competitions between students and doing as much as possible online.
“I feel bad that they’re not able to get the full experience,” he said. “So, I’m trying to do what I can… to make it engaging and something that’s worth their time.”
Challenges remain
How well the online lessons will work is still to be determined. Online charter schools, which have a set curriculum and have practice teaching remotely, have poor results with many students, several studies have shown. Students need to be motivated or have parents taking charge for them to be successful, which might work in the short-term or it might overburden parents who also are doing their jobs from home.
Students may skip their classes, as happened with some online charter schools in recent years. Other cities, like Los Angeles, are already reporting major online absences.
Teachers say making the adjustment to teaching online is hard, but they can do it. They say they miss the in-person interaction and being able to look around the classroom and see, right away, which students understand a lesson, and which don’t.
Miller, now in her 22nd year of teaching, said she even had to ask her daughter for help in learning some of the technology.
“I have ever had to teach from home. Ever,” Miller said. But she said teachers will make the most of a bad situation.
“We got this,” she vowed. “It’s just a different journey.”