GOSHEN COUNTY – Trail Elementary students may not have been able to participate in Torrington High School’s pep rally last Friday, but Gwen Walsh’s fifth grade classroom is not without spirit.
Students dressed in their “sports day” best on Sept. 22, a little more than one month into the school year.
Some news outlets and education experts are calling this “the lost year” after educators struggled to teach students remotely at the end of the spring semester due to rushed transitions to online learning. Goshen County School District No. 1 students have been lucky. They’ve been welcomed back into the classroom this fall, but there are still difficulties for them and their classmates who have opted to learn virtually, remotely or by homeschool.
Remote learners in a synchronous program, meaning they attend a live class with students and a teacher via Zoom, a video conferencing platform. It’s one thing to be the student, either in the room or at home, in this situation, but it’s another thing to be the teacher.
“Nobody really was jumping at doing this job,” Walsh said. “One of us needed to at each grade level, and nobody was like ‘oh I can’t wait to do that!’ There’s just a lot more planning.”
Walsh, sporting a “Game day is the best day” t-shirt, is stepping up to the figurative plate. She’s not going to let this be “the lost year,” at least not for her 11 in-person and eight remote learners. The kids aren’t going down without a fight, either.
The month has been challenging, she said, but they are all better adapted to their new technology and COVID-19 mitigating measures. Walsh said she is more comfortable in the situation than she was on Aug. 18.
“The teaching part is coming,” Walsh said. “I do worry that I’m still just a little bit behind where we should be. But I think we’ll get there.”
As of Sept. 28, Trail Elementary students and staff have avoided contracting COVID-19.
There are now dividers between desks so students can take a break from wearing their face coverings and still keep their germs to themselves. Some students make use of the clear plastic, hanging their multicolored face masks from the handles or sticking a post-it note with helpful information to one of their walls.
Some classrooms are equipped with 360 degree cameras on the ceiling so remote and in-person learners have the same view of the classroom and their teacher, but Walsh still stands in front of her laptop’s webcam to face her students tuning in at home. Her Zoom rectangle displays the wall when she walks around the room fielding tech questions from frustrated fifth graders during the morning’s reading lesson.
She has two laptops now to manage her virtual class and materials simultaneously and students are proving to be whizzes on their laptops, but the days are not without difficulty.
Technology is stubborn at times, like when a student is sharing their screen and editing a word document with their classmates on Zoom and the boxes of students vanish suddenly.
“It’s getting easier, and we’re getting better at it,” Walsh said. “But we’re trying to expand and then that makes it tough again.”
But the remote learners log back on and the lessons continue. Little hands shoot up, rear ends leave their seats and feet leave the ground in enthusiasm when Walsh poses questions. Her students are very eager; more eager than she’s previously seen.
“I think that’s new. They’re always excited about being around each other,” she said. “Fifth grade’s pretty competitive. They’ve pleasantly surprised me with all the work they do.”
Challenges like adjusting to new technologies and mitigating the spread of the coronavirus through disinfecting and social distancing have been time consuming, Walsh said. Not only is the school day 20 minutes shorter, but tasks like attendance take more time. Students’ computer questions cut into instructional time as well.
Walsh doesn’t tend to assign homework to her students, but she has a lot herself. After the final bell rings, she said she usually stays behind until 5:30 or 6:30, goes home to eat and exercise, then works for a little while after that. Nearly all of Sunday is spent lesson planning or grading.
“It’s a little more,” she laughed. “It’s a lot more.”
Superintendent Ryan Kramer said he knows this school year is challenging for educators as they adapt themselves and their lessons to fit the temporary “new normal” presented by COVID-19.
“For many of our experienced teachers, it’s like being a first year teacher again,” Kramer said. “We know that workload and we’re trying to figure out how we can accommodate and help them the best way possible.”
GCSD has been able to purchase an abundance of new technologies thanks to grant funding. The district received $439,704 in COVID-19 stimulus funds for tech, some of which was used to purchase 25 large screens for use in classrooms participating in synchronous learning, like Walsh.
“As I talk to different students, they’ve said it’s kind of nice to walk into your classroom and see those remote students,” Kramer said. “You have the ability to interact a little bit better when you see somebody’s face.”
Walsh in particular, balancing 11 excitable, in-person learners with eight eager fifth graders learning from their homes for the first time, has been “phenomenal” in Kramer’s words.
“She has taken it on like no other,” he said.
Haley Bustamonte’s son, Zeke, is one of Walsh’s eight remote learners. All four of her children are enrolled in remote learning this school year, two at Trail Elementary, one a Torrington Middle Schooler and a senior at Torrington High School.
Bustamonte, whose family has been cautious when out in public in the age of COVID-19, wearing masks and sanitizing as much as possible, consulted her children but ultimately decided they would learn from home.
“I didn’t think it was fair to have them make that decision,” she said. “And I didn’t feel like I wanted my children’s teachers to be responsible for their well-being as well as their education.”
Bustamonte works during school hours, so her kids are responsible for joining Zoom and completing their assignments throughout the day and can expect to answer Mom’s questions about their school day afterward. Aside from a few instances of technical difficulties, internet outages rectified with a new hotspot and the occasional absence because they lost track of time, the family has done well with remote learning.
Bustamonte told her kids they would start remote learning on a “six week trial basis,” meaning they will likely revisit their options come October. She is unsure whether or not her children will opt to stay home or go back to school. They miss the social aspects of in-person learning, but remote learning is going well for them. Much better than it went in the spring, she said.
Zeke is diligent in completing his assignments. Plus, Walsh ensures he doesn’t miss out on the social aspect of the classroom.
“She’s really trying hard to make him feel like actually part of the classroom, and I really appreciate that,” Bustamonte said. “He has his own little desk and he sits there with his laptop and Mrs. Walsh will sometimes turn (her laptop) and be like, ‘let’s say hi to your friends.’”
Walsh makes it a point when forming small groups to mix in-person learners with remote learners via breakout rooms on Zoom. When they take time to stretch out in between lessons, Rosa, student and apparent stretch leader for the day, stands in front of Walsh’s laptop to include those at home.
Remote learners do not miss out on participating in the Warrior III yoga pose, or Warriors I and II for that matter. Thanks to Walsh, they don’t appear to miss out on much of anything, even when they might want to. There’s no getting out of singing the Torrington Blazer fight song no matter where they’re at.
“Are you singing at home?” she asked between breaths.
When one student remarks from his Zoom square that he’d like to come to class, Walsh didn’t hesitate.
“You can come and join our class anytime. It’s your class, too,” she said.
