Mountain Empire Unified School District Superintendent Kathy Granger said the district has changed its approach to serving the community while schools remain closed for social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an example, Granger said they have consolidated food pickup to just one day per week.
“Kids can now pick up five days’ worth of breakfasts and lunches at their school on one day. That limits the number of times they need to leave the house and, as some families in our area have to drive more than 10 miles to get to school, it cuts down on gas use as well if parents only make the trip once a week,” Granger said.
She says staff took the two weeks prior to spring break as well as the scheduled break to plan out how lessons would look when students returned to school in a virtual setting on April 14.
“We came back from spring break (last) week and on Tuesday launched distance learning as well as food distribution. Over 90 percent of students from most of our schools came to pick things up. So far it’s worked very well,” Granger said.
Already, Granger said, the district maintains several curriculum resources online so students who are able to access the internet can access that material like always.
“Our math curriculum already has a very strong online component as does our middle school language arts curriculum. There are also some teachers who have moved forward with Google classrooms and Dojo so we have a good online communication vehicle established with parent support,” Granger said.
“What was challenging for us is while we do have one-to-one Chromebooks at school, many families don’t have online access at home. We had to make sure that whatever we did online, we also had to make available in a paper packet.”
She explained that some of the more rural areas in the back country area simply don’t have any cellular service but the district is working to obtain hotspots, devices used to supply a mobile wifi connection.
“Google is giving a lot of resources to schools and we’re working to make hot spots available but they’re probably four weeks out. We’re going kind of low tech for most things because the availability just isn’t there,” Granger said.
“Out here, we do have to have snow days and we have also had San Diego
Gas and Electric power outage days so we had already lost five days of instruction this year. We have the capacity to switch to a home-based situation at a moment’s notice because we’ve already established those practices by dealing with the other closures. It is kind of a silver lining that we learned from those experiences,” Granger said.
The reality, she says, is that even before the COVID outbreak led to social distancing and required students to learn from home, not every student was at the same point in learning when schools were able to meet in person. Although she says there will be gaps when school returns, she believes students will be able to make up for lost time.
“The message to parents is that we’re all doing the best we can right now so if you need support, give us a call. We’ll pick up where we left off when we come back and move forward from there.”
