Are you sending your kids to school next month?

[VandVsmama]

Sorry, I still don’t understand what difference there is between 2 or 3 or 5 asynchronous days. A process set up to have 2 asynchronous days should make no difference from adding a live stream video feed for 3 more days. It’s not like the process changes day to day that something about it needs changing on a daily basis. You still have students uploading material on both synchronous and asynchronous days.

As a very simplistic comparison, imagine setting up online banking. Once the process is set up, why would there be a difference on which days you use it?

I'm going into this with an attitude of patience and trying to be understanding of the fact that it's a difficult situation for everyone involved. And it's easy for people to be a Monday morning quarterback (hind sight is 20/20, right?).

I have no intention of contacting my kids' school to ask what the difference is between 2, 3, or 5 asynchronous days. I have no intention of asking for or demanding live stream video from 7:30 am to 3:40 pm Monday - Friday, which is when the various grades of our kids' 4-12 school is in session. In addition to teaching & being online during those hours, they're all doing student hours after school until 5:00 pm every week day to assist kids who have extra questions or need extra help. It's a lot.

I know that their teachers are all working their butts off and doing the best they can in a very trying time. I know that many of those same teachers also have their own children at home and they're trying to do their job AND assist their own kids with school technology challenges.

 

[travelmomof3]

No we are not. As much as we want life to get back to normal, we also realize that it isn't normal yet and we are far from normacly. We are learning to live with the virus as safely as possible and for us that means limiting what is necessary vs. what is not. We have a few high risk people in our house so it's not worth the risk to us to send our kids back for face-to-face instruction. Our district has two options, in person hybrid and virtual. Our kids have a wonderful set up with a Virtual Academy through our school district and so far so good.

 

[Mrs. Ciz]

Just got an email from my principal. Someone on the faculty/staff has symptoms of Covid. The person is now quarantined and awaiting testing. The school is being deep cleaned and aired out tomorrow. I hope this is a false alarm. We’ve been open for face to face learning for all of two weeks.

 

[paisleys]

No we are not. As much as we want life to get back to normal, we also realize that it isn't normal yet and we are far from normacly. We are learning to live with the virus as safely as possible and for us that means limiting what is necessary vs. what is not. We have a few high risk people in our house so it's not worth the risk to us to send our kids back for face-to-face instruction. Our district has two options, in person hybrid and virtual. Our kids have a wonderful set up with a Virtual Academy through our school district and so far so good.

I have been super impressed with our school's online learning so far. None of us is high risk, but we have been living like you said--deciding what is necessary vs. what is not (sleepovers--my daughters have been invited to quite a few since March, nope I will be the bad guy--two of those moms actually had Covid!). I couldn't wait to send my kids back to in school to learn though. We knew to expect they could get quarantined, but didn't expect it to happen 2x after the first week of school. All I could think about is the high risk coworker I had worked with in an enclosed space the weekend of the first Covid call. Then the woman I volunteer with in an enclosed space, her husband has cancer. In the ten days until I got tested, they were all I could think about. My desire to have my kids back in school for normalcy doesn't compare to the worry about what could happen. You also can't trust others to do the right thing. In our case, the girl who got everyone home confinement came to school with symptoms. No excuse with our stellar virtual learning.

 

[paisleys]

Most of my family has tested several times, Dd19 4 times (one was pretty bad, she cried for an hour an almost threw up). Hopefully she won’t have to test again until november before coming home.

My kids had the test at the pediatrician and while they said it was hard, they barely flinched. I had mine at the hospital and was ready to climb out of my skin and start screaming it felt so invasive! Awful test. I regret not listening to my friends (ER nurse and a dentist) who said not to get my kids tested, just wait out the two weeks and stop worrying if you don't have symptoms. That is the advice I would follow. I just completely lost my mind after the second call from the school.

 

[siren0119]

I’m guessing to have time to plan lessons and upload content. My daughter is a 6th grade teacher staring the year remotely. You would not believe the amount of time involved in getting a remote classroom up and running effectively in addition to regular lesson planning and having to grade student work as they go forward. Luckily, she is very technologically savvy, but for teachers who are not familiar with these things it must be very overwhelming. There is sooo much more involved than the actual live teaching.

THIS.

I know there are some parents in my town who think "remote learning" for teachers is just them doing what they do in class, but behind a camera. I am a trainer for my company and we had to convert all of our in-person training to virtual starting back in April (once it became clear we weren't going back in person for a long time and there would be new hires and recertifications needed). It is an INCREDIBLE amount of work to convert a live teaching session into virtual format - if it's going to be effective. It isn't just uploading worksheets and recording videos. Delivery of the lesson is different, setting up virtual interactions that keep students engaged takes thought and time, determining how to administer quizzes, tests, reviews and the like that were done formally and informally requires time, thought and often apps that need to be learned outside of the base learning platform. I think schools that embrace this and support teachers will be highly successful virtually, those who resist and don't put in the effort are going to struggle a lot more.

Just for perspective, it took me almost two and a half weeks working daily to convert a four hour class to virtual format, then rehearse it enough to be able to teach the class and manage technological challenges for a live group of learners.

 

[soccerdad72]

Today is my son's first in-person day of high school. Each class had an orientation day last week, but classes started today. For the first three weeks, they're doing a hybrid plan. He'll be in class two days a week, with live online classes two days and a 'reading day' on Wednesdays (not this week, being Labor Day week). After the first three weeks, the school is going to decide if they're continuing with three more weeks hybrid or if they're going to full 5-day in person classes. We'll see how things go this week.

 

[mjkacmom]

Well, Dd17 is at a friend’s, they all took pictures this morning and and doing live schooling from there, ds17 didn’t realize it was the first day of school, or that it was live instruction, so he brought his chromebook to his life guarding job. Should be interesting...

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

It was the first day for multiple districts here.

One of them had issues when the system they use said it logged 50K user log on attempts at once for a system designed for 30K- the issue being multiple devices people were using to try and log in so they told people to only use one device to log on. Apparently they are adding additional servers though for any issues down the road. Two districts had issues with an overwhelmed internet filtering system.

These brought up thoughts in my mind about future technical issues but hopefully the over-reliance on internet doesn't cause too much issues for day to day instruction.

 

[Colleen27]

First day for public schools here... so of course we had random power outages for no obvious reason. Ours only flickered twice but came right back on, so the physical schools in our neighborhood probably weren't too impacted, but parts of the district were without electricity for a couple of hours. Talk about lousy luck!

Meanwhile, we're starting week #3 at my daughter's school and things are so far, so good. We're still only seeing 3-4 cases per day in our county. Hopefully the public schools opening doesn't move the needle on that too much.

 

[3boymthr]

I'm feeling a little frustrated with the whole school thing right now. Gotta whine a little. Youngest DS starts back to school next week. He's in high school. He's been out since March. It's a vocational school so the teaching model is already very different from your standard school even without the covid craziness. One week of academics, one week of vocational training with two grades doing academics and two doing vocational training. In many ways I don't want him to go back because the exposure level is high. The school services kids from 3 different counties, so broad base from which to get covid. For the area it's a smaller school - a thousand students. But contact with a thousand kids is a lot of exposure. But vocational training in person is very important. He has said that even with the risk he wants to go back, because he needs the in person training. Well, except for a couple of surveys about lunches and busing, we hadn't heard much from the school on how they were going to handle going back. We finally found out last week what the plan is to bring the kids back to school. And they made a muck of presenting it. I'm really really hoping that the actual implementation goes better than the explanation. They actually had porn on the screen at the beginning of the Zoom meeting to explain the whole process. I missed it because I was late logging on but my friend said it was on for several minutes and they were apparently oblivious to it until some of the parents started complaining. They, the principal and vice principal, are there on the zoom with no masks on, sitting right next to each other chatting, completely oblivious to what's showing on the screen, and then the meeting starts but no one could hear them for the first 5 minutes because their volume was turned off, it wasn't until several hundred messages had been sent that they figured it out and they had to start again - gives one a lot of confidence in their abilities - not. They did present their plan and it actually sounds like a solid plan -except it's really only an outline of a plan because they haven't said how the actual classes are going to work. They spent more time on how the busing was going to work than on how the classes were going to work. A question was asked about co-op for seniors and they referred everyone to the handbook. Umm, okay, but that doesn't address how it's going to work with covid. So obviously they haven't thought it all through and are still scrambling. What we do know is he is going back hybrid. Fully remote for academics, 2 days per week for vocational, remote vocational the other three days. The kids will spend the entire day in their shop. They will only have one grade of kids in the school at a time - so about 250 kids and most of the shops have 20 or less kids per grade. My son's shop only has 12. And most of the kids will be entering the school directly into their shops. So I'm happy on the exposure front, but the logistics of the actual academics- not so much because, wait, we don't have those yet - and school starts in week. Ugh.

 

[Colleen27]

And they made a muck of presenting it. I'm really really hoping that the actual implementation goes better than the explanation. They actually had porn on the screen at the beginning of the Zoom meeting to explain the whole process.

I heard from some public school friends that this happened in some virtual classes in our district on the first day of school too... I'm not sure what, if anything, the schools can do to lock that down better but man, I'm glad my middle schooler wasn't in one of the classes that got a peepshow.

I hope your son's school year goes well, despite the chaos.

 

[mom2rtk]

They actually had porn on the screen at the beginning of the Zoom meeting to explain the whole process.

How does that even happen? Prank in the middle of a pandemic? Giant oops from the tech team?

 

[soccerdad72]

How does that even happen? Prank in the middle of a pandemic? Giant oops from the tech team?

There have been a number of incidents of 'Zoom Bombing' around the country ever since everyone has gone virtual with classes and meetings. A local school board meeting around here had the same problem happen a few months ago. There are people hacking into Zoom meetings (especially ones without good password protection) and doing things like this.

 

[Colleen27]

How does that even happen? Prank in the middle of a pandemic? Giant oops from the tech team?

Prank/hack. It has been happening all over the place ever since so much moved to virtual spaces. A lot of meeting hosts don't know how to set things up to limit participants' ability to screen-share and otherwise take control of the feed and don't know how to quickly disconnect a user that does so, and most don't seem to be using the approve-every-participant feature (which wouldn't work for public meetings but would allow teachers, for example, to only allow kids on the class roster to join). I've been helping my daughter learn Zoom hosting for her RA/student mentor meetings, and while setting up a basic meeting room is easy, the more advanced features that would help prevent "zoom bombing" aren't very intuitive.

 

[mom2rtk]

There have been a number of incidents of 'Zoom Bombing' around the country ever since everyone has gone virtual with classes and meetings. A local school board meeting around here had the same problem happen a few months ago. There are people hacking into Zoom meetings (especially ones without good password protection) and doing things like this.

Prank/hack. It has been happening all over the place ever since so much moved to virtual spaces. A lot of meeting hosts don't know how to set things up to limit participants' ability to screen-share and otherwise take control of the feed and don't know how to quickly disconnect a user that does so, and most don't seem to be using the approve-every-participant feature (which wouldn't work for public meetings but would allow teachers, for example, to only allow kids on the class roster to join). I've been helping my daughter learn Zoom hosting for her RS/student mentor meetings, and while setting up a basic meeting room is easy, the more advanced features that would help prevent "zoom bombing" aren't very intuitive.

Because the world needs more pandemic pranks. People just suck sometimes.

 

[mjkacmom]

Because the world needs more pandemic pranks. People just suck sometimes.

I’m surprised at this point that schools are unaware of this issue and don’t set up password protected sign ins.

 

[Renarr]

They did present their plan and it actually sounds like a solid plan -except it's really only an outline of a plan because they haven't said how the actual classes are going to work. They spent more time on how the busing was going to work than on how the classes were going to work. A question was asked about co-op for seniors and they referred everyone to the handbook. Umm, okay, but that doesn't address how it's going to work with covid. So obviously they haven't thought it all through and are still scrambling.

This part here really captures a lot of my feelings on the back-to-school plans. The plans in my district have all sounded good on paper, until you realize that the devil is in the details, and so many of the details aren't there.

My favorite case in point: they're talking about doing one-way hallways in the schools. Sounds great! Until you realize that our buildings are shaped like the letter H, and there's not really a way to actually do one-way hallways...

They still haven't responded to my query of how those will actually work.

 

[Funfire240]

My kids started full virtually. DS10 started last Monday and DD12 the Thursday before. We have had a lot of tears and frustration, although yesterday did finally go better. But, DS didn't have one class because the teacher was working from home and her wifi wasn't working. DD also didn't have one class because the teacher had a family emergency and couldn't be on zoom. DS was very frustrated last week because there were so many technical difficulties with one of his classes last week. Then, the schedules change every day so he missed one of his as he thought he was supposed to have science instead of social studies and didn't see an assignment but we were able to correct it and I finished it with him after work. DH and I both work so they are either home alone or my inlaws are available next door if they need something. We have a good system set up where their phones come in handy and alarms are set 5 minutes before the start of each class (and we changed to DS now knows which class is on which day). I'm really hoping it gets easier. Today is the teacher work/student assistant time so they really don't have much to do. They don't even log on until 11. I did hear that the board in our district does have some members that are going to try to get them back in class. Private schools in our district started 5 days a week yesterday. I have a niece 10 minutes away but in a different county and she started full time yesterday as well. We are also on the borderline of yet another county and the school is 15 minutes from us and they have been back full time for 2 weeks now. Sorry to babble but I think I just needed to vent today.
The large metro area we are also about 25 minutes from started yesterday virtually - with a major network crash halfway thru the day due to hackers.

 

[Toad_Passenger]

Our District started yesterday. Options were 5-days in-school, or full virtual (taught by District teachers with District Curriculum).

We took the latter, and these 1st 2 days have been great. The teachers and the tech team did an amazing job of setting things up for the students and their issued devices. Fingers crossed that the good news continues, but all of my kids' teachers are 100% committed to the learning environment and there hasn't even been a single hiccup.

I believe our District is using this virtual academy as a trial run, to set this up permanently for students who may be doing work-study programs, or students who may be unable to attend school for various reasons. They can still attend virtually within the District and get their Diploma from the High School, rather than going into another virtual-type academy.