As Anchorage schools prepare for a virtual first quarter, a host of challenges awaits

Since spring, the Anchorage School District has known this school year would bring an onslaught of challenges.

The district has for months grappled with a question schools are struggling to answer across the nation: How will it provide public education while keeping students, staff and teachers safe from the coronavirus?

School in Anchorage begins Thursday and, for now, is online-only for the first quarter. As the district gets ready, administrators say that its new online programs are a big improvement from the distance-learning programs it rolled out in just a week when the state shut down schools in March. It has built on the lessons and mistakes from that experience, Superintendent Deena Bishop has said.

“We’ll get there,” deputy superintendent Mark Stock said. “We have confidence. We have a lot of talented people. But it won’t be without hiccups. We just have to realize that it will not be without a few glitches.”

[Anchorage parents weigh difficult choices as an unpredictable school year edges closer ]

Many in the district are apprehensive about the continued challenges it will face while rolling out its new programs.

“We’re kind of trying to fly the plane, in essence, while we’re building it in the air,” said teacher Katrina Kim, who will teach first grade at Nunaka Valley Elementary.

Stock said one of the district’s biggest hurdles right now is enrollment: It’s about a week from the first day of school and thousands of parents still have not registered their kids. That’s not an unexpected challenge in the face of so many unknowns — families are struggling to choose between options, he said.

[Ahead of an unusual school year, registration in Anchorage schools points to dropping enrollment]

They can pick the district’s in-school program, which is starting online-only; its new virtual school, which is much like a homeschooling program; or an already-established home school. Even in a normal year, many families register late, he said.

Still, it is causing a “domino effect” of issues as schools scramble to design new schedules of all the classes they will offer, Stock said. It also means that some teachers, who had their first day back to work Thursday, still don’t know what they will be teaching.

That is “very unsettling for staff,” Stock said.

“This is literally doing months’ worth of work in mere weeks,” Stock said of the district’s switch to virtual school.

Stock said principals are now running a “communications campaign,” making phone calls to explain the options to families so they can make a decision and register, because that drives almost every decision the district makes next, he said.

“That is the No. 1 issue, above all other issues,” he said. “... In my 40 years, we’ve never had a school start where staffing was this uncertain.”

Moving classes online a ‘monumental task’

Teachers had already been working to compress the class curriculum from a semester system into a quarter system that allows students to take just three classes at a time instead of six, said Jennifer Knutson, senior director of teaching and learning. About 500 teachers have been working to create the building blocks for each online class — nearly 300 classes suddenly turned virtual, she said.

“I am extremely proud of the work that was done by all the staff this summer because it was a monumental task,” Knutson said.

Teachers will have to adapt to a whole new way of teaching. Some, especially those who used different online tools in spring, may not be familiar with the districtwide online platform in use this year, said Lem Wheeles, a social studies teacher at Dimond High School. He is part of the team helping to transform the district’s curriculum.

[As schools reopen, much remains unknown about risk to kids and peril they pose to others]

“You can’t have students sit together around a table and have a discussion,” Wheeles said. “You’ve got to figure out, how do you translate that to Zoom and how do you translate the assignments that you normally do to digital versions, how do you engage with students and answer student questions and ensure that students are connecting with what you’re doing?”

Turning in-school programs online means making a normal classroom essentially virtual, Knutson said.

Students will still be on a class “bell” schedule each day and will log in for live, 30-minute lessons over Zoom at the beginning of each class. They may then break into smaller groups or work on assignments for the remainder of the 90-minute period. That’s up to the teacher, who is available to students by Zoom or email during the class period.

Though it’s a similar structure to normal school, teachers will be making a big adjustment, said Sean Prince, principal of Bartlett High School.

“They just have to make that switch and it’s difficult because being on stage with your audience right in front of you, and being able to read your entire audience, and see them shift in their chair or cock their eyebrow, or raise their hand, looks completely different than it does in a 30-person Zoom,” he said.

Questions loom about education inequities and teaching from home

Kim, the first grade teacher at Nunaka Valley Elementary, said she’s especially worried for younger students adjusting to school online. Along with the traditional educational curriculum, much of what kindergarten classes teach children are the foundations of how to be in school.

But because kids didn’t return to school after spring break, Kim expects a big challenge ahead.

“It’s having to reteach them all over again how to do school,” she said. “I believe there’s going to be a lot of behavior that we have to tackle first before we can even really go into the content that’s academic.”

Kim works in a Title I school, which generally means most families who attend live at or below the federal poverty line.

Kim is worried what the lack of face-to-face interaction will mean for the children that often depend on school for hot meals and a safe place to be.

“Kids aren’t going to pay attention if they’re hungry,” Kim said. “Or if they’re not sleeping well or if their family life is not doing well.”

She’s also worried about being able to pinpoint the children who need special education, a process that happens in the early years of school. That will be tough without being able to develop relationships with students in a classroom, she said.

Prince, whose school is also Title I, said that many of the teenagers in his high school have families with younger siblings and parents who can’t work from home.

“Quite honestly, I’m just scratching my head trying to figure out how they’re going to — how 90% of my families are going to make that work,” Prince said.

He thinks that older siblings, like the teenagers in his high school, may be in charge of their younger brothers and sisters throughout the day and will be unable to focus on their own schooling, he said.

Then there are the challenges at home for the educators themselves. Prince and his wife, who is a teacher, have three children who are 8, 7 and 3 1/2 years old, he said. It was hard enough for the couple to help their children during the district’s virtual school in spring while they both worked from home, he said.

Many teachers with children will now be in that same situation. Wheeles, who also has kids at home, said that for now, a motor home in his driveway will serve as his teaching space.

Online learning means all students need laptops — but they’re hard to come by

One of the most glaring inequities the district is working to solve is access to the internet and devices, said Stock, the deputy superintendent. It’s launching a program this year that will eventually issue a Chromebook to each student in third through 12th grades.

But there is currently a backlog in the supply chain.

“Everyone in the nation is trying to order Chromebooks; every school district in the country is doing this,” Stock said.

The district does have enough Chromebooks for everyone who is in immediate need of a device, he said.

It has distributed about 10,500 Chromebooks since spring and is working to distribute 3,600 more in the next week to families who have recently requested one, said district spokesman Alan Brown.

According to chief information officer Mike Fleckenstein, who spoke at a school board meeting earlier this month, the district has also worked out a deal with internet provider GCI to set up families who lack internet with cable modems and internet service.

Stock cautioned that some requests for that will be denied because it is only available to families who are the most in need, and that it’s something parents must apply for.

The district will also lend Wi-Fi hot spots to families in areas that GCI does not cover, Fleckenstein said.

‘The reality we’re facing’

Prince said preparing for the school year is like being tasked with putting together a puzzle of moving pieces that don’t fit together, and with no sense of what the final picture should look like, he said.

“What does it look like when you’re in an online model? Or, how do you bring 1,500 to 1,800 high school students into a building, get them socially distanced and fed and moving around the building?” he said.

Communicating with parents has been one of the biggest challenges, he said.

Some are questioning why the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District is starting school in a different way, or whether the Anchorage School District is making a political statement by requiring masks.

“And you’re trying to balance all of that for, again, the safety and well-being of your community, staff and students,” Prince said. “And how do you deliver education in a meaningful way?”

Frank Hauser, principal of Service High School, said that many of the families he speaks with feel better when they realize that teachers will be teaching classes live online.

“I’ve actually had parents who have burst out in tears of relief,” he said.

Teachers and students are also expressing excitement about getting back to school, he said.

The coming challenges of the school year are just “the reality we’re facing,” Hauser said.