When San Diego Unified reopened last week, more students at some schools showed up than expected.
Some schools put students into separate classrooms to essentially do distance learning on a computer while at school. Some called these overflow rooms, but the district calls them learning labs, where students watch their instructors teach via Zoom.
School officials say the students are still getting quality time with their teachers, because students rotate between learning labs and regular classrooms.
“The Learning Labs allow schools to maintain safe distancing protocols while giving every student the opportunity to participate in their classes at schools offering four days of in-person instruction each week,” district spokeswoman Maureen Magee said in an email.
Others have concerns. These arrangements are far from ideal, said Kisha Borden, president of the San Diego Unified teachers union.
“We feel that kind of defeats the purpose of returning to school, because you’re not with your teacher; you’re not with your classmates,” she said.
Borden said she knows of at least half a dozen schools using overflow rooms. District officials did not provide numbers or say how many students are affected.
Borden said at least one middle school had put students who wanted in-person learning on a wait list because that school didn’t have enough room. After the union raised questions, the school scrapped the wait list and moved those students into overflow rooms, Borden said.
The extra rooms are staffed by teachers, special education teachers, special education aides and other staff, Magee said.
They are a solution to ensure that all students who want to learn on campus four days a week — instead of two — would have a chance, she said.
Space is limited in San Diego Unified classrooms, in part because the district is using a stricter standard for physical distancing. It says student chairs can be no fewer than five feet apart in classrooms.
Federal and state guidelines recommend three feet of separation.
To an extent, schools couldn’t predict how many students would show up because thousands of district families didn’t tell them in advance whether their children would be coming back to school.
All families were given the choice to either send their children back to school for part-time in-person learning or keep them home in full-time distance learning.
The district sent out a parent survey in March. About 73 percent of families who answered the survey said their children would return to school, and 27 percent said they wouldn’t.
Schools planned for reopening based on those results.
Each school decided whether they would offer students two days a week or four days a week of in-person instruction, based on survey results and how much classroom space they have.
Most schools chose four days a week, which pleased some parents but squeezed schools on space.
Add to that, more than a third of San Diego Unified families did not respond to the survey. School leaders said they were expecting some students to show up without advance notice, but they didn’t know how many.
That’s why some schools cobbled together overflow rooms.
San Diego Unified is not the first to come up with this overflow arrangement; it’s a technique some area private schools used early in the school year to serve more students in person.
Borden suggested the solution is for schools to switch to a two-days-a-week, in-person learning schedule. That would halve the number of students on campus at one time and eliminate the need for overflow rooms, she said. All the schools that have overflow rooms are sticking to a four-days-a-week schedule.
But schools across the county, not just in San Diego Unified, are feeling pressure from parents who say that part-time in-person learning is insufficient.
Addison Basquez, a seventh-grader at De Portola Middle School, attended a protest of about a dozen people Tuesday calling for full-time in-person school.
She said she can only go to school on Mondays and Tuesdays, and for the four hours of those days she is in class, she is on Zoom. Instead of doing science experiments, she watches videos of them.
Because teachers have to simultaneously teach students learning at home and students learning in-person, some teachers are having even their in-person students learn on Zoom while in the classroom. Educators say it’s for the sake of consistency and fairness to the at-home students. But some students, like Addison, don’t like Zoom in school.
“That is not real school,” Addison said.
The district expects the learning labs to last the rest of this school year, depending on the needs of individual schools, Magee said.
"fit" - Google News
April 18, 2021 at 07:00PM
https://ift.tt/3tuLm6w
Some San Diego schools use "overflow" rooms to fit in students learning in-person - The San Diego Union-Tribune
"fit" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2SpPnsd
https://ift.tt/3aP4lys
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Some San Diego schools use "overflow" rooms to fit in students learning in-person - The San Diego Union-Tribune"
Post a Comment