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In the spring, when schools closed up and went to remote learning, it wasn’t an unqualified success. Educators, parents and policymakers were aware that learning via internet wasn’t going to suffice for all, or even most students, and that some would fall through the cracks entirely.
So the pressure was on this fall to return to in-person learning, and most schools did bring students back, first to outdoor classrooms, then indoors, at least part-time. Though there have been several instances where schools had to go fully remote for several days or a week, most schools have kept the novel coronavirus at bay and have remained open.
As a result, remote learning has become a bit of a backwater, with some districts retreating from extensive programs they adopted in the spring. A report on changing the “grammar of schooling” in Vermont calls for a renewed commitment to personalized learning that would improve remote learning opportunities.
“Moving forward, more training needs to be provided to classroom educators with regard to remote and hybrid learning,” the September report issued by the Vermont Agency of Education reads.
Students and parents have felt the strain of remote learning this fall.
“I think it’s more difficult when we’re not really actually there. You feel more isolated,” said Emma Schulze, 16, of Newbury, Vt. She is a junior at Oxbow High School in Bradford, Vt. She attends school Thursdays and Fridays and studies at home the other three days of the week.
While she enjoys the greater sense of independence studying at home has given her, she acknowledged that sometimes her work ethic flags amid the distractions of home.
Normally an A student, she received her first ever C this fall.
“I feel like I have personal standards, based on my abilities,” she said, and while her math grade doesn’t meet those standards, she feels OK, given the circumstances.
Her mother, Renee Schulze, a therapist and social worker with an office in Wells River, said she and her husband, who is a Vermont state trooper, worry that Emma is missing some of the one-on-one classroom instruction that she needs to make sufficient progress.
“We feel terrible, because we have to work and can’t be there for her,” Schulze said. But they also feel their daughter is “pretty resilient” and has gotten used to remote learning.
The Vermont “grammar of schooling” report identifies this sense of independence with support from schools as a model for the future, but the remote learning experience so far has pointed out how far the state’s schools have to go to make this transformation concrete.
“Two central themes emerged from this spring,” the report says. “The importance of equity and access. Gross inequities were apparent and continue, while access, especially to technology, was quite unequal.”
Remote learning remains a key part of schooling this fall.
In New Hampshire, 28 of the 353 schools that responded to a state Department of Health and Human Services survey were fully remote, and another 189 are using a hybrid model, where at least some days each week are remote.
Frustration with remote learning was part of a movement toward homeschooling during the pandemic. The number of home study enrollments in Vermont more than doubled from 2,024 on Aug. 27, 2019, to 4,455 on Aug. 27, 2020, according to the Agency of Education,
Pomfret resident Cathy Peters, whose daughters would ordinarily be at Woodstock Union Middle School and High School, opted to homeschool them this year.
She has health issues that make sending her children to school a danger to her, and the remote learning options seemed inadequate and insufficiently integrated with the in-person programs at the schools, she said.
“How are our kids going to reintegrate once this is all over?” said Peters, who wrote a letter to the weekly Vermont Standard in September, signed by other parents, that took the district to task for its remote learning options.
Where some school districts or supervisory unions have set up virtual learning academies staffed by teachers who chose not to return to the classroom this fall, others have relied on virtual programs from outside their districts. Woodstock has offered programs from the Maynard, Mass.-based Virtual High School Collaborative.
Peters argued that the online courses aren’t meant to be a replacement for school, but should be seen as a supplement to it. So, despite her trepidation, she turned to homeschooling.
“So far, it’s working really well for us,” she said.
Her older daughter, Endine, 16, is taking a math class through the high school, but otherwise is working her way through a home study curriculum. And her younger daughter, Amelia, 13, is following a curriculum that stresses mastery of subject material. Peters said she thinks Endine might finish high school at home, and that Amelia would have learned what she needs to resume in-person schooling when it seems safe.
Her criticism of remote learning echoes the Vermont report. “Options for remote learning are geared toward independent learners,” she said. Students who might need extra one-on-one assistance are on their own. The report notes that students have to “take ownership of their learning.”
In the Windsor Central Supervisory Union, which supervises schools in Woodstock, Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Pomfret, Plymouth and Reading, only 84 students are fully remote in grades K-12, about 8% of the total, Interim Superintendent Sherry Sousa wrote in an email.
“The challenge is offering two very different programs simultaneously,” Sousa wrote. While the supervisory union created an elementary-level remote-learning program, middle and high school students can choose curriculum from Virtual High School, she said.
While every school had to make remote learning work in the spring, the emphasis this fall was on reopening schools. Parents who relied on remote learning could tell when schools took their eyes off the ball.
Shawn Gayner’s daughter, Alice, was in kindergarten at Dothan Brook School in Wilder when remote learning began in the spring. “It really worked well for us,” she said. “She had a lot of engagement with her teachers.”
Her husband joined the military and was in basic training over the summer. They opted to keep Alice in remote school, mainly because once Gayner’s husband was sent to his first posting, they would have to quarantine for 14 days before they could join him if Alice was in school.
But the engagement of spring was gone, said Gayner, a Dartmouth College graduate who is now in graduate school in international relations. The teacher engagement was replaced by an online program through Calvert Academy. “It reads like an online textbook,” she said.
The teacher was wonderful, but Alice was with her for only half an hour a day, Gayner said. “We just got to the point where we stopped using the software,” and used age-appropriate reading materials, she said.
Gayner has since moved to New Mexico, where she and Alice are living with her mother while her husband awaits his first assignment. Alice now has instruction with a school there, though still remote, from 8:30 a.m. to noon each day, which is working much better and gives Gayner some time to focus on her graduate studies.
“I much prefer it this way,” she said.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
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