The changes were coming so quickly to The Dalles High School that before the Spanish translations of public announcements were done, new superseding rules were coming from the state.
That’s what many recent, hectic weeks have been like, with the flurry of changes to how education is delivered in Oregon due to coronavirus.
The Dalles High School Principal Kurt Evans lauded his staff for doing in a few weeks what usually takes up to a year: setting up an online school.
The high school, like all public schools across North Wasco County School District 21 and the state, implemented distance learning for all students on Monday, April 13, since schools were ordered closed for the remainder of the school year.
“The task itself is a huge lift,” Evans said, “but especially in the short timeframe that we were given.”
Adding more challenges are the rapidly changing state directives.
Another massive undertaking is also planned, D21 Superintendent Candy Armstrong told the school board on Friday, April 10.
The district will be offering three meals at a time to students, and on Fridays each child will be provided enough meals for the weekend.
The district served 5,600 meals the past week, Armstrong said, and is gearing up to deliver much more.
While schoolwork starting April 13 will be graded –the online learning previously offered since the end of Spring Break was voluntary – Evans said it will be done mainly for credit, not a grade.
“The intent is to do no harm,” he said. “We’re not going to fail students for not participating in this distance learning.”
Evans said many teachers in the core subjects like English and science had already developed some aspects of online teaching, but other teachers were on a steep learning curve of getting their material entirely online.
Even for teachers who were already doing some online aspects, “It’s still a ton of work but they’re able to further develop it,” he said.
Some teachers are creating instructional videos for students, and some have already done live sessions with students on platforms like Zoom and Google Hangouts. “I haven’t put a lot of parameters around it,” Evans said. “I’ve put limits on the expectations.” Per state guidelines, he doesn’t want instruction to last more than 30 minutes per day per class.
“You can’t apply the same principles that you would apply in a traditional classroom,” he said in terms of seat time and homework time. “There’s things that would happen in a classroom that add richness to the course that you simply can’t replicate in an online setting,” Evans said. “The content you can deliver, you can teach the kids how to do the quadratic formula, but that interactive time, that collaboration time, you try to replicate it but you really can’t.”
He said, “If there’s a class where you’re debating a topic, those human interactions are what will be absent. Those are hard to measure but that’s really a huge part of a school.”
The platform the school is using is called Google Classroom.
The valedictorian and salutatorian for the Class of 2020 are already selected, Evans said. Those decisions are always made at the end of the second trimester, he said.
He said he has “every intention” of having a live graduation ceremony, but it may not occur on June 6. “It will just have to be whenever it is allowed,” he said.
The Dalles High School is lucky to have a trimester system, Evans said, because the end of the second trimester lined up exactly with the time that school stopped being in session.
He said seniors have clean transcripts with GPAs and grades through the second trimester, “so sending those off to colleges, kids are in good shape.”
Under state guidance, schools are directed to exercise considerable flexibility with regards to rewarding credit, Evans said, especially for seniors who were on track to graduate at the end of the second trimester.
The final term grades will be either pass or incomplete, and passing grade is a D or higher, Evans said.
He said the workload for teachers in providing online education is the same as if they were doing in-person teaching.
Normal graduation requirements like community service hours and senior binder have also been removed for this class.
State guidance for grades 6-11 was expected over the weekend, Armstrong told the school board.
A big push for all the schools has been reaching out to students and their families to see if they need school-supplied laptop computers, Chromebooks donated by Google, in order to take online classes.
Armstrong said about 90 percent of students have been reached. She said snail mail was actually the least effective means of reaching parents, since it was difficult to send it out and difficult to manage once it gets sent back.
Armstrong said teachers are going through their call lists for their students to connect as much as possible. The district is working to find out how to best reach out to students.
“We’re trying to figure out what the barriers are for people not responding,” she said.
One population that’s hard to reach is migrant students, she said. The district is working with the Migrant Program at Columbia Gorge Education Service District on it.
All of the schools have a phone line that rings to the secretaries of each school, so they can receive school calls at home.
Some of the secretaries can speak Spanish, but if they can’t, another person is available to transfer the calls to, Armstrong said.
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