Operating a school district and providing remote learning during COVID-19

Abraham Lincoln is credited for stating, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” The Upper Adams School District (UASD) administrative team, like many other school district leadership teams throughout the state of Pennsylvania, have taken a similar approach as Lincoln. When district leaders began to see the spreading pattern of confirmed COVID-19 cases creeping near neighboring counties, we figuratively started our four hours of sharpening our plan to deliver education to our students, while keeping the daily operations in our district up and running. This is only a snapshot of our story and our story is similar to other school districts. The things that differ are the types of resources and support districts have available to provide for their students.

Knowing we needed to address the most basic needs of our students, we initially filed for the waiver to provide food to our students while schools were mandated to be closed. Currently we have nearly 50% of our student population receiving free or reduced lunches when school is in session. Providing food to our students was the first critical component we addressed with the parameters set by the federal and state guidelines. We initially communicated in both English and Spanish a dinner time pick up because we felt that would best suit our school community. The federal and state guidance required us to communicate a change to lunchtime distribution. Later we learned that our original time we proposed made sense to the individuals reviewing the applications, but continuously changing the time and sending multiple communications to our community prompted us to maintain the lunch time distribution. We have been distributing food to our students from Biglerville Elementary School and we encourage all students needing food to come to this site on Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday from 11:30am-1:00pm. If you are a student in a vehicle, we will provide you free meals on these days.

While continually monitoring and responding to ever changing state and federal mandates, we also started with identifying how we could deliver instruction to our students without physically being together in school buildings. Some of our students already had technology and others did not. We knew we could put a device in each student’s hand in grade 4 through grade 8. All students in grades 9-12 had a laptop device assigned to them and they already take them home on a daily basis. We also knew that not all families in the district had access to the Internet in order to bridge the connection between district teachers, instructional resources, and the students at their homes. Geographically throughout the Upper Adams School District some families still have no access to Internet, even if they could afford to purchase it. Therefore, we needed to not only identify all potential devices available in the district for students, but also how we could connect devices. We decided to increase Internet connectivity signals from the middle and high school campus where individuals could drive to the campus and pick up a signal from inside their car at strategic locations to assist with social distancing in cars. Knowing we may still have some families who would have unique situations, we set up a district phone line dedicated to take calls specifically related to technology issues. These calls are monitored and distributed to people within the district administrative team to identify potential solutions for families.

Simultaneously, while some administrators were working on the instructional components, other administrators and staff members were individually preparing to move office operations to their homes. For example, installing specific software on laptops to work remotely and keep the district open for daily operations. All central office functions (payroll, business operations, human resources, board operations, and mail) needed to be evaluated and remote electronic solutions developed to continue these operations. Once solutions were identified, communication was developed and distributed. The technology department worked extensive hours to make sure all technology-related matters were addressed.

When the district learned that we could continue to provide instruction to students, we had already identified existing resources to provide instruction. Most students in the upper elementary, middle, and high schools have had experiences learning with the tool of a laptop. While some teachers were more fluent than others with providing instruction with a device like a laptop, we provided five days for the teachers to work on creating “remote learning” plans to keep students engaged starting on April 1, 2020 with remediation and review experiences. We then learned that federal and state level testing was cancelled for this school year. This news was a huge relief and prompted new questions to which we are still identifying answers. Even though the state assessments were paused for this year, there was still stress connected to moving all face-to-face instruction to a remote learning model. The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) mandated a Continuity of Education Plan for each district. These plans were created by each school district to outline how each district will provide instruction to students and this is dependent upon the resources each district has to work with. In an effort to keep the community updated with all the information in one location we have been utilizing our calling system and the district website. The UASD Continuity of Education plan and other important district information is posted on the district website www.upperadams.org under the Coronavirus Update section. We see this as a fluid document as we may need to edit it as we learn more about our instruction and how this may change over the weeks to come.

While all of the work and preparation was taking place at UASD, we continue to obtain guidance from the Federal and State level governments. Although this fluid flow of information was welcomed, it continues to evolve and prompt more questions, and leaves a lot of room for interpretation and local decision making. We continue to devote time and resources to comprehend the messages and guidance we receive. During regular web meetings and conference calls with tri-county superintendents, state superintendents, and other educational entities, we work together to make sense of the messages we receive and we attempt to find ways to implement the guidance with the district resources available to us. All of this is happening from our homes as our district is “dark” and everyone is trying to follow the state requests to stay at home.

We are navigating a unique situation requiring focus on so many minute details during a continuously changing landscape. Our teachers and staff are working extremely hard to provide opportunities for growth for all our students to help continue to prepare them for college and career. We are most concerned about our seniors and the unexpected challenges they have been handed during the last quarter of the school year. We will continue to find ways to recognize our students and do our best to provide experiences to help maintain some sense of normalcy to their senior year even though these are anything but normal times. As everyone continues to dedicate themselves — our students, parents, teachers, staff, administrators, school directors, Chartwells (food service), and Aramark (custodial, maintenance, and grounds), it is important to know that although our schools, sports fields, and parking lots appear empty, these individuals are four hours into sharpening the axe that will lead us to a successful end of the 2019-2020 school year.

Wesley Doll is the Superintendent of the Upper Adams School District, and is a guest writer for the Gettysburg Democracy for America Education Task Force.