Northwest Arkansas’ public school students are beginning to return to the classroom from online school, district officials said.
Many families who chose online or a combination of online and in-person learning models in the fall decided in-person learning better fit their family, said Don Hoover, the Bentonville School District’s executive director for student services.
District administrators believe in-person learning is the best way for students to learn, he said. Some students struggle keeping up with work and navigating online platforms independently, Hoover said.
“Sometimes, it’s not the student’s cup of tea,” he said.
Bentonville had 13,240 students, or 74% of total enrollment, attending school in-person as of Oct. 1. That number had increased to 14,297 students, or 79% of total enrollment, as of Jan. 4, according to district data.
Changing family circumstances — such as parents returning to the workplace after working from home because of the pandemic — also may account for some of the in-person attendance increases, said Alan Wilbourn, Fayetteville School District’s public information officer.
“We’re just trying to help each household decide what’s best for them,” he said. “We know everybody’s home situation is different.”
Fayetteville, which has about 10,104 students, experienced the greatest jump in traditional attendance within its elementary schools from 49% in early August to 66% this month, he said. The middle schools saw in-person attendance increase from about 50% in August to 57% this month, Wilbourn said.
Springdale experienced more modest increases for full-time, in-person attendance for its approximately 22,500 students. In-person enrollment grew about 1% for high schools, 2% for junior highs, 3% for middle schools and 4% for elementary schools from Dec. 18 to Jan. 5, according to Marcia Smith, associate superintendent for curriculum, instruction and innovation.
The district’s combined and online learning models experienced decreases of about 0.07% to 4% across all grade levels, she said.
“Some school students have not been successful in the virtual setting, and, therefore, their parents feel like they would be better served back at school,” Smith said.
Rogers School District’s online attendance dropped from 1,927 students to 987 for elementary schools and from 1,903 to 968 for secondary schools from the first week of August to the first week of January, according to Sharla Osbourn, Rogers’ assistant superintendent for general administration. The district has about 15,400 students.
The increase of students returning to in-person learning may be attributed to the academic and social-emotional challenges that sometimes accompany online learning as well, she said.
“There’s a degree of isolation that comes with virtual learning,” Osbourn said. “Even though health and safety protocols are affecting how students interact on-site, they are still interacting with their peers and other adults.”
ONLINE HURDLES
Ivy Joyce, 12, of Fayetteville found beginning school online as a seventh-grader at Woodland Junior High to be particularly challenging last fall, she said.
Ivy finished her sixth-grade year at McNair Middle School online when schools switched to online learning at the end of last school year. Online learning at McNair wasn’t much of a challenge for her, and she thought she’d have a similar experience this year at Woodland, she said.
“I was just thinking that it would be easier doing virtual, but it actually wasn’t,” she said. “It was pretty hard.”
The inability to interact one-on-one with her teachers proved difficult, Ivy said. She was unsure how teachers at her new school might feel about receiving questions or emails about what she might not understand in her classes.
“You’re going into a situation in which you don’t know your teachers, you only know a few of the students,” said Shannon Joyce, Ivy’s mother. “There was just a level of insecurity and fear on her part of being comfortable to where she felt OK to reach out to ask questions.”
Teachers introduced themselves through prerecorded videos, and classes were conducted independently by Ivy through Google Classroom, Joyce said. The unfamiliarity with her teachers and navigating the many different platforms teachers used to teach different subjects became problematic for Ivy and her grades declined, she said.
School administrators and teachers supported Ivy as her challenges with online learning became known, Joyce said. They worked with the family to help transition Ivy into a four-day, in-person and one-day online learning model at the end of October.
Ivy’s grades have improved and she’s enjoying school more as a result of the change to a primarily in-person attendance model, she said.
“It is so much easier, and the teachers are so much nicer than I would have thought,” Ivy said. “It definitely helped.”
PANDEMIC PRECAUTIONS
Administrators said they can still operate within covid-19 safety protocols despite the increases in in-person attendance.
“We had a whole semester to really work those processes, so that this semester we’re even more fine-tuned to do even better,” Hoover said.
Wilbourn said pandemic conditions are being monitored by the hour within Fayetteville schools.
“It’s going to be more important to wear that mask, stay socially distant and wash your hands many times a day so we can also have an uninterrupted spring semester,” he said.
Combination learning models, in which students split their time doing school in-person and online, also will continue to keep the number of students in classrooms lower than during traditional school years, Smith said.
Covid-19 safety protocols in the schools built confidence in in-person learning, said Melissa Fink, Springdale’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and innovation for pre-K through seventh grade.
“Parents have been reassured that we are doing everything that we can in our school setting to provide a safe educational environment for students,” Fink said.
Adhering to pandemic safety precautions is the best way to ensure educating Northwest Arkansas students can once again be conducted traditionally, Wilbourn said.
“Nobody wants to get back to ‘normal’ more than educators,” he said. “If we all wear the masks and we all do what we’re supposed to, it shortens the time to get back to the time when we can all take our masks off.”
Ready for Learning plans
School district Ready for Learning school opening plans can be accessed at the following links:
• Bentonville: https://www.bentonvillek12.org/domain/5126
• Fayetteville: https://district.fayar.net/o/fps/page/covid-19-updates—67
• Rogers: https://www.rogersschools.net/domain/1524
• Springdale: https://sites.google.com/sdale.org/springdaleschoolsreopening/home
Source NWA Democrat-Gazette
Mary Jordan can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWAMaryJ.