|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
|
The 74
Texas Teachers Go Door to Door as Kids Disappear From Remote Classes
At one San Antonio middle school, teachers don’t wait for students to
go missing — they search for them at the first sign of trouble
By Bekah McNeel
March 3, 2021
This piece is part of “COVID Warriors: How Educators Are Saving the
Pandemic Generation,” a two-week series produced in collaboration with
the Solutions Journalism Network that explores what educators, schools,
and districts are doing to prevent an entire generation of students
from lost learning and its lifetime of consequences. Read all the
pieces in this series as they are published here. Catch up on all of
our solutions-based coverage here.
Middle school teacher Brandee Brandt pounded on the door of a ground
level apartment in San Antonio, Texas for the third time one January
afternoon in search of one of her students.
“It’s Ms. Brandt! Davey, are you there?” she called, her face close to the apartment door.
She could hear voices inside, and finally Davey’s older brother cracked open the door.
“You really aren’t going away are you?” he said, trying to sound annoyed as a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“You know we’re not giving up!” said Brandt, who asked the teen to go
get Davey, 13, who had suddenly stopped doing his online schoolwork.
Brandt and fellow 8th grade teacher Emily Countryman from Rawlinson
Middle School would spend the day knocking on doors, from public
housing apartment buildings to a middle class suburban neighborhood
where nearly every house had a doorbell with a built in security camera.
Since the beginning of the school year, a squad of Rawlinson teachers
have visited around 100 homes. Once every few weeks, school staff
develop a list of kids in urgent need of a visit. Two teachers
volunteer, they set a date, and the school hires substitute teachers.
With half the school’s 1,350 students learning remotely, and thus at a
higher risk of chronic absence, teachers from Rawlinson have come
knocking at the first sign of trouble this school year.
“I felt a sense of urgency,” Rawlinson Principal Sherry Mireles said,
“If they’re not getting their schooling it’s our responsibility. I’m
not going to allow a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old to drop out. Not on my
watch.”
Many of the visits pay off: Kids log on again, or turn in work for the first time in weeks.
It’s often not a one time visit. The teachers keep dropping by until
the student is found, logged on, and participating. They know even the
most disengaged kid can be found.
The teachers’ relentless pursuit of these kids is why Rawlinson
averaged 99% attendance in the weeks after Christmas break, said
Mireles — about 8 percentage points higher than the district middle
school average.
Click here to see the full COVID Warriors seriesAttendance is critical
to learning in any situation, most experts agree: Kids can’t learn if
they’re not in school, and already data from the COVID-19 era is grim.
Chronic absenteeism among Black students in some Ohio districts is 47%.
In Detroit the school year kicked off with only 78% of students in
attendance after a week. In several surveyed California districts, the
chronic absentee rate for Black, Latino, and American Indian/Alaskan
Native students was between 19% and 29%.
The Texas Education Agency does not yet have statewide absentee data
for the 2020-21 school year. However, the pandemic’s toll on attendance
showed itself immediately when school buildings shut down in March
2020. In the five school years before the pandemic (fall 2014-spring
2019), statewide attendance rates hovered just under 93%. In just three
months, the pandemic pulled the statewide average for the entire
2019-20 school year down to 89%.
The consequences are daunting. In the Ohio districts, reading scores
have fallen by 7% after years of hard-won gains. In Texas, additional
learning loss due to absenteeism will compound the six months already
lost during the spring shutdowns and summer, according to an optional
statewide assessment administered by the Texas Education Agency.
Most of the students on Brandt and Countryman’s list that January
afternoon had either stopped logging on for classes or turning in work.
Some were just starting to show signs of giving up—regularly dropping
single classes. Others hadn’t been seen or heard from in months.
Davey (the student’s real name is not being used to protect his
privacy) was just beginning to show real signs of fading, Countryman
said. He’d stopped participating in class online. Without his camera
on, she couldn’t even tell if he was at his computer. He hadn’t turned
in the most recent test in her class.
Around the state, districts are reporting dire numbers for remote
learning attendance. Dallas ISD reported that thousands of students,
one in five high schoolers, are considered chronically absent so far
this school year. Smaller districts have done away with remote learning
entirely to try to re-engage kids.
Georgetown University’s Future-Ed think tank and the nonprofit
Attendance Works produced a report detailing how schools could fight
chronic absenteeism during COVID-19. It included relationship-building
home visits as one “promising” intervention. The Rawlinson visits
combine visits with a tool the study labeled “strong”: reminders to
parents about the importance of attendance, consequences of
absenteeism, and how many days the student has missed. The study calls
this “nudging.”
Brandt and Countryman do a lot of nudging on their visits.
Wearing matching masks and backing up six feet when the door opened,
they made their pleas to students and parents to stay engaged.
They brought sport bottles emblazoned with the school mascot, tech help, groceries, and school supplies.
When Davey finally came to the door, he was bare-footed and
sleepy-eyed, explaining his sleep pattern had slowly changed over the
past few months, so that he was staying up all night, and sleeping
during the day. The teachers gave him a nudge.
He didn’t need to log on for Zoom sessions if he was too sleepy, they
allowed. But he needed to turn in the work. He needed to retake the
test he’d blown off. He needed to pass his classes.
“Don’t you want to go to 9th grade?” Countryman asked Davey.
“Yeah…” he said with a shy and sheepish smile.
At another stop, Rochelle Mata told Brandt and Countryman school Zoom
calls overlapped with her job, which kept her tied to her computer from
long before sunrise to mid-afternoon. Her middle school boys had
started taking advantage, not logging on.
Even if they miss the calls, the teachers reminded Mata, her sons could
still turn in their work, and as long as it’s before 11 p.m.
That policy is helpful, Mata said, but when they had questions about
their assignments, she often didn’t know how to help. So they just
wouldn’t turn in anything.
“I feel like they feel lost,” Mata said.
Brandt had an answer for that too. Their district, Northside ISD, has a
tutoring hotline manned by teachers from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. every night.
Every need they can meet, every burden they can ease will make it more
likely kids will have the support at home to engage at school. At
Mata’s house, they left a bag of groceries. At other houses, they’ve
given tech help.
Brandt and Countryman have heard similar stories about kids taking
advantage of parents’ work schedules at suburban homes with deep front
porches and exuberant landscaping.
“Some of the kids get engaged just to get us off their back,” Countryman laughed.
Others are more defensive or evasive. At one house, the student who
came to the door said his parents could not join them, though an adult
was easily visible. While he talked to the teachers, a tiny hand
reached out from behind the door and tugged at his socks. It was his
little sister, maybe 3 or 4 years old, demanding attention.
Several homes on the route were dark and quiet. Brandt and Countryman
waited a long time, and knocked repeatedly. They peered in windows to
see if lights were on, pressed their ears to the door to listen for
voices. On a previous route they once enlisted the help of a
maintenance man who was on his way into the apartment, asking him to
send a family member out to talk to them.
At one apartment, a grandmother answered the door. Her granddaughter
had been living with her, but she recently went back to live with her
mother. The grandmother hadn’t known the girl stopped logging on, and
promised to pass along the teachers’ message.
Another address, which the school used for its attempted communication
with a student who’d disappeared in October, turned out to be the
maintenance workshop at an apartment building. Brandt and Countryman
went to the complex’s office to do some sleuthing.
By the end of the day, the teachers were tired, but upbeat. In a time
when so much seems beyond their control, these visits help stave off a
feeling of helplessness.
“(The students) are capable of so much more,” Brandt said. “The pandemic shouldn’t be the reason they don’t succeed.”
Two weeks later, Countryman said, the visits had paid off.
The grandmother had made good on her promise, and her granddaughter is turning in her work, passing with flying colors.
The school found the student whose address turned out to be a maintenance workshop. She is logging into class again.
And Davey logged into class that very afternoon, completed his work, and took a make-up test. He scored 100.
Read this and other stories at The 74
|
|
|
|
