Will Distance Learning Make The Grade In San Diego Schools?

Speaker 1: 00:00 Kids and teachers cannot go to school due to covert 19 so school is coming to them this week marks the launch of distance learning in the San Diego unified school district, California second largest with 121,000 students. What started as a one room school house in 1854 now becomes many thousands of one room school houses with kids taught via computer screens. Joining me to discuss how it works is San Diego school superintendent Cindy Martin and Zachary Patterson, sophomore at university city high and an elected member of the district school board. Welcome to you both. Thank you for having me. Cindy, tell us what distance learning in San Diego unified will look like for the rest of the school year? Speaker 2: 00:43 San Diego unified started our soft launch of distance learning that ended this past Friday and this week we're into our formal distance learning and I'm happy to report actually today as a day to a formal distance learning. 95.6% of our students at the traditional calendar schools have logged in and have started their learning, which means they're connecting with their teachers was so important to us is that the academic year counts. Learning matters, school matters for our kids for a whole host of reasons. And we needed to very quickly figure out how to keep school going even though we couldn't unlock our Gates and open our doors to learning, we can open our doors virtually to learning through this model. Speaker 1: 01:26 And so as you mentioned, you had a soft launch, you worked out some kinks, I imagine, um, you prepared teachers and students for this new way of learning. Speaker 2: 01:36 Yeah. If you think about what, what it took to get us ready, we, during the soft launch, we distributed over 50,000 Chromebook computers that we had at eight distribution sites where families could go to pick up a Chromebook computer. And these are computers our students are familiar with because they use them every day in their classrooms. But we needed to take them out of the classrooms, clean them up, get them ready, and log them out. To a student who would need them and we needed to make sure our students had not only the Chromebook device, but they also had the internet capability to connect, whether it was through a wifi hotspot or through the Cox connect to compete program. We wanted to make sure our kids had that connectivity. Now more than ever, Speaker 1: 02:19 well Zack, what do you think of this plan? How does it compare with learning in the classroom? From your perspective? Speaker 3: 02:24 We know it's not going to be exactly the same as classroom learning and that's important to recognize, but with that, I really do think that our district is really leading the way in terms of districts across the state of California in ensuring that all students have the resources necessary to succeed. I know from my own personal experiences in the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of success in it. My math teacher, for example, provides individual tutoring for every student that needs it. So she's telling me she's spending multiple hours per day working with students, making sure they're prepared. And that's just one of many examples of teachers that are to go out of the way to ensure that this learning continues and students are keeping up with their grade level Speaker 1: 03:04 and send it. You said 95% of students are connected. What do you think is keeping the other 5% from logging on to distance learning? Speaker 2: 03:11 Well, those will be individual cases, student by students. So the teachers give us feedback if their principal and our team the feedback on, on a daily basis. Okay, what did the student need? Sometimes it was just the ones that didn't log on. They may have actually had a family commitment that they just on any given day you might have a student, right, who calls in sick to school if they were even coming to school because I had a doctor's appointment or they had a family commitment. So I think that it's okay. Definitely something that we're going to look at student by student w. Um, and, and if there's something, a roadblock or something that's in the way of them connecting that we can remove, we will remove it. Speaker 1: 03:50 I wanted to, I wanted to ask a nuts and bolts question here. Um, I understand teachers set their own daily schedules and how does that work? A master schedule for any school can be difficult and normal times Speaker 2: 04:00 master schedule is a technical term around how you make sure students are enrolled in the courses that they need in order to graduate with the skills and abilities that are part of our graduation. UCA through G requirements. So the students are already scheduled into the master schedule that makes sure they have the courses on their transcript this year that they need to complete the graduation requirements that we've set forth. So that's the technical part of a master schedule. The daily schedule and the weekly schedule, the monthly schedule of learning teachers plan out a year long curriculum. There's a scope and sequence. There's core critical standards that need to be covered in every course and every year by the end of the year. And that's what teachers have to look at in terms of designing the learning now between now and the end of this school year to ensure that the critical standards have been taught and the students have had access to those and that they've been learning those standards. So as teachers develop what the schedule looks like, if there's some compacting that has to happen to ensure that the critical standards have been met and reached and learned. That's what teachers are designing right now and ensuring that kids have access to that they're doing ongoing formative assessments to understand students' knowledge of what the content was that they're supposed to learn during the course of a given school year or course that they're enrolled in. Speaker 1: 05:18 All right and sack. I wanted to ask, do you think the fact you can't get a worse grade than you had when the schools close? Could this be an invitation for some students to Slack off? Speaker 3: 05:28 So we have, as I said, such a diversity of socioeconomic status and ability to actually participate in distance learning. And we recognize that we need to support every single student because no student can be left behind. And with that mentality in good faith, there's no way that we can ensure that every single student will. So we're going to set that baseline and make sure that we're not going to make students indiscriminately for not being able to connect because they don't have the resources or access. Cause that's not something that we're about to San Diego unified, but to the students that can, I don't think that's going to be a large issue. And I've actually already seen that it's not being a large issue. The whole goal of distance learning is making sure students continue to persevere and learn. And as Cindy said, we're not going to be able to cover every single concept in the amount of detail that we would in an individual normal classroom. But we're going to do our best to cover everything that we can. And I know from a student perspective as you were asking specifically that I'm continuing to participate and I do believe that the things students really find interesting, they will continue to, to participate in and we will continue to make sure they're learning and persevering through their education. Speaker 1: 06:50 And Zach, do you see a positive side to distance learning something you might not be able to learn or do in a classroom? Speaker 3: 06:57 Yeah, totally. Actually I can pursue my passions. I mean I personally love history and I know we were going to uh, talking about AP classes. Uh, AP world history is one of my favorite courses and I've been able to really go in depth, understand the curriculum, learn more about it, I'm more knowledgeable and even not just including that, I mean to all subjects, to all things. I know of three students in my school, they founded their own organizations working to combat things in Kobe from serving food to seeing from delivering groceries to seniors to making cards for first responders. We're seeing San Diego unified students, my friends being innovative, smart, being on the front lines of change, finding new activities to participate in, whether that's history, whether that's coding or whether that's some new course that's being offered for free because of the covert crisis. We have so many resources now and we have so many opportunities to educate ourselves, pursue our passions and find more about what we love to do. Speaker 1: 08:01 And Cindy, last question. How is the district preparing for the new school year, more distance learning or return to campuses? Speaker 2: 08:09 You know, that's the question everybody in the country wants to know. Frankly, there's 188 countries that have closed their school systems Countrywide and the guidance around that needs to come from the health professionals. It's the same kinds of questions that everybody's happening having around opening and what is opening look like opening up cities. So we have our district pediatrician, Dr. Howard, Tara's works with us and the local health authority at the state and national level so that we have some clear guidelines and guidance around how to open safely. And the big question is when will that happen? I continue to focus on what we can control and what we do know, which is getting this distance learning right right now and then while we have to begin to think about what will this look like and if we open in the fall, what would that look like? Speaker 2: 08:55 What would the changes be? And I don't think it's just a San Diego unified decision, people saying that unless you have appropriate tracing and testing, which is a national conversation right now, we have to think about what would the implications of that be in terms of getting our employees back to work on our students in a learning environment that's allowing the community health goals to be met but also continuing to move on with their education. So we're watching that very carefully and we know those are the questions that people are waiting to make sure we have a final answer on soon. Speaker 1: 09:26 I'd been speaking with San Diego school superintendent Cindy Martin and Zachary Patterson, a student at university city high and a member of the school board. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. How are you and your kids adapting to doing school from home? What does online learning look like? Leave us a voicemail at (619) 452-0228.