The Marcums and the Goodoffs, though they live in two dramatically different Texas communities—the Marcums in small-town Stephenville, the Goodoffs in a Houston suburb—have a lot in common. Both couples are in their late 30s and work in the medical industry. Both couples have a kindergarten-age son, and both expected to send that son to a public school this fall for kindergarten. Both families are huge supporters of Texas public schools.

But the effects of COVID-19 on public schools brought each couple pause. Their decision-making processes led them down two dramatically different paths.

The Marcums
“Tedious at best” is how Dr. Benjamin and Katie Marcum describe the spring 2020 remote learning experience. Their first-grade daughter struggled with so much screen time. Their son’s private preschool offered some Zoom lessons, but as Katie says, “You might as well try to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

“The short version is, the spring was terrible,” Benjamin says. “We didn’t do a great job teaching our children. We know that neither of us are really cut out for that. And we looked around in late June, early July and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, our kids haven’t had any social interaction with anyone else since March.’”

Stephenville ISD had assured parents the fall 2020 virtual learning experience would be far more structured and intensive. And the Marcums have been proponents of caution throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As one of the community’s family physicians, Benjamin has worked hard to make sure Erath County citizens know the risks associated with COVID-19, publishing a regular newspaper column featuring hard truths about mask-wearing and social distancing. Plus, the family had experienced the strain on life with a frontline worker in the house as Benjamin’s work brought him into contact with COVID-19 patients.

But when it came time to make decisions about the fall, the Marcums decided the benefits of social interaction—and the downfalls of remote learning, particularly with young children—outweighed the risks. Over a socially distanced summer getaway, they agonized over where to send their children for the 2020-21 school year.

“The whole time we were there, we were asking ourselves, ‘What do we do? Are we going to send them back?’” Katie says. “We were really torn. There was a lot of angst.”

They toured one of Stephenville’s few private school options and found both the school’s technology resources and COVID-19 protocols lacking.

“They don’t use any screen time or iPad or computer lab, and technology is the way the world’s going,” Katie says. “Plus, when we went there, no one was wearing any masks. We were the only two adults touring who were doing any sort of distancing, and it didn’t seem like there would be a strict policy if a kid in the class tested positive. So that was the end of that.”

Looking at the whole picture—their daughter’s need for special education services, the hands-on experience of a kindergarten classroom, their trust in the local school system—the Marcums opted for face-to-face instruction.

“As a physician, you worry about the medical cost of catching the disease, but you also worry about the social implications and the other medical problems that come from social isolation,” Benjamin says. “Everything you do is a risk-benefit analysis. And, when it came down to it, we felt like the benefit of going to public school, where they’re going to follow strict protocols about trying to limit the spread of the disease, outweigh the risks associated.”

While their son’s kindergarten experience is more than a little different than their daughter’s, the Marcums are happy with their decision. Although the district does not require masks in kindergarten to third grade, the Marcums require them for their children.

“On the first day, my son came in and said, ‘Mama, I’m the only one in my class wearing a mask,’” Katie says. “I said, ‘Yes, and if you want to continue to go to school, you will wear one, unless you want Mama to be your teacher.’ ‘No, no, Mama!’ So, in every picture the teacher sends, he wears his mask.” (So are more of his classmates, as masks become more socially acceptable across the state.)

The Marcums lament the changes in the school experience—no PTO carnival that Katie and other parents would help organize, no WATCH D.O.G.S. program for Benjamin and his fellow dads and father-figures—but they have accepted there must be a balance.

“Everyone says, ‘I can’t wait for 2020 to be over,’ but this is going to be here until 2021 or even 2022, even when we get a shot,” Katie says. “You still need to be smart about contamination and wearing a mask. But how long are you going to keep them home? If we did do virtual, would two years of their schooling be robbed from them?”

The Goodoffs
About 300 miles away in Pearland, Erica and Frank Goodoff had enrolled their son in their neighborhood’s Alvin ISD elementary school in May. At that point, COVID-19 numbers in Texas looked promising and the state was beginning to open up.

Because the Goodoffs were both able to work from home, they had kept their son home with them since March, even though his day care had reopened in June. In the spring and summer, Erica says, they had developed a nice routine: The trio would sit down at breakfast, Frank and Erica would check their work emails, and they’d discuss the day’s activities and appointments—down to her son’s afternoon chat with his grandparents. Then, they’d go their separate ways for a couple of hours—Frank and Erica would work, and their son would play independently. The rest of the day, the couple switched off doing what they have come to realize was a casual form of home schooling for their child: teaching him to read or helping him learn how to ride a bike.

The intention was always to send their son to public kindergarten, and even when this summer’s COVID-19 spike led Alvin ISD to plan a virtual start to the school year, that was still the intent. But questions started forming in Erica’s mind as the start of school drew near and she had so little information about what the learning experience would look like.

The final straw was the first virtual meeting with her son’s teacher. Erica wrote the following on Facebook:

“We made a hard decision this week: Anthony will not be starting kindergarten this fall. We had him enrolled and signed up to be in a virtual classroom starting Monday at our local elementary school, but this afternoon we withdrew his enrollment and will be doing home school instead, as we have been since March.

“On a virtual meeting this week with other kindergarteners and their parents, I watched all the mothers’ faces fall simultaneously as they were informed that children would, in fact, spend hours a day on a computer and that they—the mothers (I would say parents, but Frank was the only dad on the call)—would be expected to be present for all of it to ‘help their children stay engaged.’ And lest you think I live in the suburb of Stepford, all of the mothers who asked that question framed it as ‘I work; what are our options?’ But because state funding for schools is based on attendance and enrollment, the long hours and strict attendance requirements for virtual learning are mandated at the state level. Even for 5-year-olds.”

“When the kindergarten teacher got on there, you could tell she was trying very hard,” Erica says. “I know that they are doing the best they can, but this is coming from above. This would not be a kindergarten teacher’s first choice. We recognized it very much, and we told the school that when we called to say this isn’t going to work for us.”

At some point, when they feel comfortable with the COVID-19 situation and the learning situation, the Goodoffs plan to enroll their son in public school. Right now, they have amped up and formalized their home-schooling efforts—and they’re speaking out about the inequities facing parents today.

“I believe Texas has purposely set it up this way to make their public schools fail,” Erica wrote in her Facebook post. “The privileged will withdraw their children, just as we have, for other alternatives—highly unregulated private schools that would allow smaller classes and shorter hours, or home-school, which literally has zero regulations. I don’t blame our local school for any of this. They’ve tried very hard to work with what they were given, and you can tell they’re under pressure. I hope very much we can go back one day soon.

“Our family will be fine. Anthony is learning things as fast as you would expect from a 5-year-old with overachieving parents. We have a well-balanced system that allows us both to work remotely while taking on our teacher roles, and our child is particularly patient and willing to amuse himself independently for long stretches. … But it was very clear to me from watching the faces of my fellow kindergarten mothers that we’re in the minority.”
 

MAKING IT WORK
By Kate Johanns

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Texas public educators have been forced to “build the plane as they’re flying it,” as the saying goes. And the skies have definitely been bumpy—but at the risk of pushing a metaphor to the brink, there have been some rainbows.

Educators, community members, and public education advocates across Texas are coming together to develop innovative strategies to support students and their families during this bizarre and difficult time.

“We can’t overcommunicate right now”
Dallas ISD’s Parent Advocacy and Support Services team always fields a lot of parent inquiries, but the need to communicate has been so heightened during the pandemic that staff quickly realized a different approach would be needed to prepare families for the fall 2020 semester.

Lessons learned from the spring made the district’s “Smart Restart” virtual parent conference, held in August, a good solution.

“We’ve learned a couple of things: Parents are eager for information, and they’re willing to learn however they can,” says Liliana Valadez, DISD Parent Advocacy Support Services executive director. “Before, they didn’t know how to use Zoom. They do now.”

And, after an isolated end to the 2019-20 school year, parents are now more willing to communicate.

“Parents want us to have their emails; they want us to text them,” Valadez says. “They want us to reach out to them. It’s become easier to connect to families.”

With this in mind, Valadez and her team reached out to colleagues across the district to design a one-week series of evening Zoom sessions on topics such as safety protocols, district technology, etc.

“After we booked one week, we realized we actually needed a second week,” Valadez says.

With DISD’s campus community liaisons promoting the event, more than 1,000 parents and guardians registered to participate in the live conference, which included sessions in English and Spanish. The archived sessions continue to serve as a resource.

“Anecdotally, we have heard parents appreciate that we are being transparent and communicating information,” Valadez says. “We can’t overcommunicate right now. Parents want information. They want to know ‘Is my child learning? What are their struggles? How can I help?’”

As she works with parents, Valadez reminds them educators are learning right now, too. “Parents need to realize this is a challenge,” she says. “Educators are finding it a challenge to teach using a device and not be in a classroom with many of their students. They’re learning how to use technology in a better way for instruction and how to connect with families.”

All hands on deck
Parents and educators alike have had a steep learning curve when it comes to implementing learning management systems, whether the district’s system of choice is Seesaw, Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas, or something else entirely. Temple ISD administrators knew of other districts where parents had voiced concerns about long wait times and never-answered requests for IT assistance, so they set out to avoid such issues by training a large tech support team.

“I was brainstorming with Dr. Lisa Adams, our assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, and she came up with the idea: How can we get more people to answer?” says Craig Wilson, TISD director of digital learning.

With the goal of ensuring parents could speak to a “real human” when they called, Wilson trained more than 100 auxiliary staff members to answer calls from the district’s parent tech support line.

“Initially, we thought we could train all of the auxiliary personnel to say, ‘I don’t know the answer, but I can get back with you,’” Wilson says. “But then we took that to the next level—why don’t we give them some of the tools so they can help?”

Looking back at parent inquiries from the spring, Wilson determined some questions were more frequently asked than others and also fairly easy to address. Take login issues: Generally, the parent hadn’t ensured they were logged in to the student’s account. He developed videos for a parent support website and produced step-by-step screenshots, a HyperDoc, and good old-fashioned printouts for the tech support team, which included Spanish speakers.

The result has been a great team effort to the benefit of Temple ISD families.

“What do they say—necessity is the mother of invention?” Wilson says.

Community solutions
This summer, Austinite Tala Matchett and her friends were discussing how to “navigate the new normal” when it came to their children and the fall semester. She was conscious of a huge gap between her options and those of other parents in the community—parents whose jobs couldn’t be done remotely but who didn’t feel comfortable sending their children back to campus.

“I wanted to know, how can we solve the problem together as a community?” Matchett says.

Matchett is a partner at Notley, a philanthropic organization in Austin that takes an entrepreneurial, incubator approach to solving community issues—so she began tackling this problem from that perspective. The result? Community Pods, a Notley program that offers Austin ISD parents an option in between keeping children at home and sending them back to campus.

She began a listening tour, connecting with parents, churches, partners such as Communities in Schools, and the school district, which she describes as an “ally” of Community Pods. When school started, Community Pods had opened two locations at churches in North and Southeast Austin, offering parents a location for virtual instruction that offered reliable internet, nutritious food, and the support of volunteers who could help navigate the intricacies of learning management systems. Students complete their Austin ISD virtual assignments from the Community Pods locations, which use a contactless health screening process to prevent COVID-19 exposure. On the weekend, students are sent home with backpacks filled with food from the Central Texas Food Bank and Costco.

Even with Austin ISD opening its campuses for face-to-face instruction, Matchett says Community Pods participants plan to stay in the program, which will relieve strain on schools that wouldn’t necessarily have the room to follow social distancing protocols if everyone were back on campus.

“The plan is as long as the pandemic continues, we will go to additional churches,” Matchett says. “We see this growing and scaling as the need continues.”

Education community comes together
The ripple effects of the pandemic are going to last for years. Take public school funding. When a student leaves the public schools, the funding associated with that student leaves, too. That’s an overly simple explanation of the intricate Texas public school finance system, but it’s a huge worry—and one that weighs heavily on the minds of the ATPE team and like-minded advocates.

In July, Paulina van Eeden Hill, executive director of the Texas Association for the Gifted & Talented (TAGT), reached out to several public education associations, including ATPE, to form a loose coalition designed to encourage parents to keep their children enrolled in public schools.

“Over the summer, as many did, we became concerned about the prospect of too many students leaving the public school system due to the concerns about and lack of clarity around safely opening schools and remote learning,” van Eeden Hill says. “Now that many families have had the opportunity to experience the new online and on-campus learning environments, many families are still considering alternatives to public school enrollment. It’s imperative, for the health of the entire system, that families, educators, and school administrators continue to work together to find solutions that meet the needs of the broader student population, special populations, and our most valuable resource—classroom teachers. The threat of reduced enrollment and attendance, leading to reduced school funding, is a real one, and we must find creative, constructive ways to continue to support our neighborhood schools.”

A PR campaign already underway from Friends of Texas Public Schools and the Texas School Public Relations Association fit in nicely with the initiative, as did the back-to-school campaign from Raise Your Hand Texas.

ATPE, TAGT, Texas PTA, the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education (TCASE), and the Science Teachers Association of Texas (STAT) saw a way to provide resources for parents and educators alike and are hosting an online parent-teacher toolkit at atpe.org/parent-teacher-toolkit. Available resources include a “decision tree” parents can use to evaluate which type of instruction meets their child’s needs, as well as panel discussions on such topics as what home schooling is really like and ways parents and educators can “give each other grace” during this difficult time.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only way we’re going to get through this.