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Because of its vulnerability to hurricanes and other
emergencies, the Miami-Dade school district already had distance
learning plans before the coronavirus hit and is refining them now.
Credit: Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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The Hechinger Report
Coronavirus is the practice run for schools. But soon comes climate change
By finding ways to continue learning through the pandemic, the
education system will be better equipped for a future marked by severe
weather emergencies
By Caroline Preston
May 23, 2020
On the eve of each hurricane season, Jamar McKneely worries that this
one will bring the next Katrina. McKneely was a teacher at Edna Karr
High School in New Orleans when the 2005 hurricane devastated the city
and closed his school for months.
But instead of a deadly hurricane, this year brought another crisis
that shut the city’s school system: the coronavirus pandemic. McKneely,
who now leads InspireNOLA Charter Schools, is trying to use this latest
emergency to prepare for future natural disasters and disease outbreaks
that are worsening due to climate change. His schools have been
scrambling to set up online learning, connect students with virtual
counseling and get laptops into the hands of families — steps McKneely
says will be invaluable if another hurricane disrupts education.
“We are building all of that now to make sure we’re better prepared,”
he said. “For us it might be the coronavirus or the next epidemic, but
it could easily be the next hurricane as well.”
Like McKneely, some educators, government officials and policy experts
around the country say the coronavirus carries lessons for another
global crisis of our time, climate change. So far, the pandemic has
revealed the challenges of conducting education remotely as well as
uneven access to Wi-Fi and devices such as laptops. Overcoming those
difficulties could equip schools for a future in which severe floods
and fires increasingly batter communities and pause in-person
education. The coronavirus could serve as a reminder to educators to
reinforce the value of science education and the need for quality
mental health services for kids.
School leaders “should be keenly aware that this is not just a one-time
thing,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the nonprofit Learning
Policy Institute and of California’s State Board of Education. “If
you’re thoughtful about it,” she said, “and you really start to think
about closing the digital divide, making sure every kid has
connectivity and devices, creating the curriculum strategies that are
continuous, and helping teachers and other school staff understand what
we have to do if schools are closed, then we can be better prepared for
these eventualities that are going to become more and more
frequent.”
Why Some Florida Districts Were at the Ready
Perhaps no school system had a distance learning plan in place that
anticipated a shutdown on the scale of the coronavirus closures. But
some places were more prepared than others. When Darling-Hammond looked
around recently for school districts with online education plans that
California might learn from, hurricane- and flood-prone districts in
southern Florida stood out, she said.
The Miami-Dade school district, for example, adopted a plan back in
2012 to close the digital divide. It was initially designed to
“obliterate digital deserts,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, but
the plan has also helped position the district to keep learning going
amid disruptions like the flooding that routinely submerges parts of
Miami.
“Because we are a coastal community prone to hurricanes, a coastal
community prone to the arrival of literally dozens of thousands of
children, immigrants,” Carvalho said, “we have naturally adapted to
dealing with crises whether they are human crises, environmental crises
or health crises.”
Back in January of this year, Carvalho told staff to keep an eye on the
emerging coronavirus outbreak. In the weeks that followed, the district
surveyed parents about their technology needs, took an inventory of
devices such as Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots, and assembled digital
learning content under one portal that teachers and students could
access easily. Those efforts allowed the district of 520 schools and
educational centers to transition relatively smoothly from traditional
learning to distance learning when the school system shut on March 16,
Carvalho
said.
By mid-April, about 111,000 devices and 11,000 hotspots had been
distributed, he said. Approximately 92 percent of students are marked
as present for remote classes (meaning they logged in to the online
portal), which is only a percentage point or two behind school
attendance the previous year at this time, Carvalho said. But even with
online learning plans, school districts around the country could face
an “unprecedented historic academic regression” unless they do more, he
said. To stave off this learning loss, Miami-Dade is adding summer
sessions and working to identify vulnerable kids and pair them with
virtual tutors and mentors, among other steps.
In neighboring Broward County, Superintendent Robert Runcie said he had
been receiving calls from school administrators in Chicago, Los Angeles
and elsewhere, asking for advice on distance learning. Like Miami-Dade,
the Broward system was able to quickly ramp up remote learning in part
because of provisions it had put in place in the event of hurricanes.
The coronavirus offers an opportunity to rethink how education is
delivered in ways that could make school systems nimbler and more
effective in serving students going forward, according to Runcie. “They
say never waste a crisis,” he said.
How Forest Fires Are Prompting California to Rethink Strategies
Across the country in California, worsening fires, floods and droughts
have forced some educators to contemplate a school calendar marked by
natural disasters. Half of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state
history have occurred since 2015. In the 2018 school year, roughly one
in every five California school children missed at least one day
because of a natural disaster, school maintenance issue, shooting or
other emergency, according to an analysis by CalMatters.
That doesn’t mean that school districts were up to speed on distance
learning, however. When schools closed for the coronavirus, an
estimated 1.2 million kids statewide lacked access to Wi-Fi and
computers. As of mid-April, schools had distributed supplies to meet
about half of that need, said Darling-Hammond.
In Occidental, California, Matthew Morgan, superintendent of the
Harmony Union School District, said the pandemic has exposed a big
digital divide and online learning was slow to roll out. “We don’t have
a distance learning plan that is operating on all cylinders,” he said
in April.
But filling those gaps, he said, could help if poor air quality from
wildfires keeps kids from going to school. That’s been a reality the
last few years. Sonoma County, where Harmony is located, has been
pummeled by fires in recent years. The 2017 Tubbs Fire caused
evacuations and killed more than 20 people in the county. Smoke from
the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise 200 miles
north, compromised air quality in Sonoma. And last fall, the Kincade
Fire forced the largest evacuation in Sonoma County history.
In other ways, the district is drawing on its experiences living
through emergencies. The close relationships Harmony forged with local
government agencies because of wildfires helped it keep families and
staff informed as the coronavirus spread, he said.
At Hall Middle School, in nearby Marin County, science teacher Rebecca
Newburn said the disruptions to learning have forced her to streamline
lessons and prioritize the content and skills that are most important.
“Some things are going to get less attention this year,” she said, but
“climate change is still super significant.” Her students are learning
to cite evidence in making arguments, a skill that seems even more
relevant now as the two global crises of coronavirus and climate change
underscore the dangers of ignoring science and facts. She’s also trying
to ensure that her kids are mentally resilient by taking breaks from
learning to check in on their well-being and to process feelings.
“This is going to be an ongoing challenge,” Newburn said of the health
and environmental issues that disrupt education. “Our curriculum and
our schools are going to get disrupted multiple times, and the more we
can be thoughtful and proactive about how we approach those disruptions
and providing more stability and support for students, I think the
better off we are all going to be.”
But in the South…
In the hurricane-prone Gulf, lessons from past disasters have helped
schools think differently about which of their students’ needs to
prioritize. But more work needs to be done to shrink the digital divide.
After living through Hurricane Katrina, McKneely, the charter school
network CEO, knew to make student and staff mental health his first
priority. The first thing he did upon learning that schools would close
because of the coronavirus was to establish phone contact with families
and set up phone lines with social workers so that parents and kids
felt informed and supported. “What we learned from Katrina is that our
students experienced a bunch of separation, of loss,” he said. “It was
the trauma of the new norm, of not being able to go to school, to see
their classmates, their teachers. We wanted to deal with that
first.”
Loss came quickly: On April 2, a beloved football coach at McDonogh 35,
which is part of the charter school network, died of the coronavirus.
The school held calls with staff members and students, arranged
counseling hotlines and extended spring break to give families time to
cope.
On the academic front, InspireNOLA schools were less prepared, McKneely
said. They had a short-term plan in place: Hand out homework packets to
students of the sort that the schools provide over holidays. But there
was no long-term plan, McKneely said. “We’re still learning how to fly
as we’re flying,” he said.
His schools are high-need, with more than 95 percent of students
receiving free or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.
McKneely quickly discovered that the share of families who lacked
Wi-Fi, laptops and other tools necessary to participate in remote
learning was even greater than anticipated – some 40 percent. The
school district, NOLA Public Schools, provided some Chromebooks and
hotspots that the school operator distributed to families. But because
of funding, logistical and other challenges, only about 28 percent of
those in need have received the equipment so far. InspireNOLA also
began trying to get teachers at all levels acquainted with the learning
platform Google Classroom, which it had previously used for high school.
Now, McKneely said, his schools are trying to figure out a long-term
plan for learning through emergencies. They are determining how they
might transition all aspects of the school’s education – grading,
social and emotional support, staff calls, lessons – online. When
schools reopen, they might do so with a different schedule: four days a
week of in-person education and one virtual day, for example. McKneely
said he wants all his students to be accustomed to learning outside a
school’s walls in the event of a second wave of the coronavirus or
another Katrina.
Going forward, McKneely worries about not just another deadly
hurricane, but another coronavirus outbreak before a vaccine is
developed. But he has reasons for hope, recalling “how we came together
to rebuild our city” after Katrina. He added: “I hope the same
camaraderie, passion and commitment can be made to our students’
families to make sure their sense of normalcy as well as their
advancement continues.”
What Experts Say We Need for Distance Learning
It’s hard to know exactly what distance learning might look like a few
years from now, said Sujata Bhatt, a senior fellow with
Transcend, a nonprofit that works with school systems to improve how
they deliver education. Schools are still scrambling simply to cope
with the immediate coronavirus crisis and meet students’ basic needs,
she said, but the next school year could present opportunities to
rethink how remote learning happens.
One big step forward would be universal broadband access, said Lillian
Pace, vice president of policy and advocacy with the nonprofit
KnowledgeWorks. Another is making sure teachers receive training on
distance learning, through programs that prepare them for the
profession as well as through ongoing professional development. “It’s
going to have to be built in as a new baseline of entry into the
profession,” said Pace.
Education systems will also have to adjust how they assess students and
schools. Measures like seat time and attendance just won’t work the
same way in a world facing so much disruption. Instead, we could see a
shift toward evaluating students based on whether they’ve mastered
certain skills, said Katherine Prince, senior vice president of
strategic foresight with KnowledgeWorks. And schools will need to find
ways to prioritize kids’ emotional and social well-being, she said, and
provide them with the sense of working collaboratively with peers even
when they’re stuck at home.
David Cook, who leads the Division of Innovation within the Kentucky
Department of Education, has been working since 2011 to find ways to
keep kids learning through snowstorms and floods. (Notably, climate
change could reduce snowfall in the state but worsen flooding.)
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, 83 of the state’s school districts
had in place a “nontraditional education” plan by which teachers
prepared lessons that kids could access remotely if needed. Since
March, the program has expanded to all of the state’s 172 districts.
Now Cook is studying how to revise the program given that school
closures of the future are likely to last weeks and months, not days.
Whatever happens with this current crisis, Cook said, distance learning
seems poised to be a bigger part of education going forward.
“The notion of everything happening in a building between 8 and 3,” he
said, “is probably not something we’re going to go completely back to.”
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