Teaching from home amid coronavirus ‘overwhelming’ parents, teachers in Fort Worth area
In the midst of all the unknown, Kristy Hill is trying to find some structure.
Hill is a single parent who, as a Keller school librarian, has been trying to find a routine for her kids while working ten- to 12-hour days to help other parents and teachers get the resources they need to teach their own children.
With her three teenage sons’ schools closed in the Keller school district, she’s working to balance that job while trying to ensure that her sons, one of whom has autism, get the education they need.
“One minute I feel like I’m doing great, I got this,” Hill said. “The next minute I’m worried I’m not doing enough. I’m worried that I don’t have all the answers.”
Hill isn’t alone as parents, teachers and principals learn to navigate a coronavirus pandemic that has closed their schools.
Teaching at home
Fort Worth area school districts have said they will be closed “until further notice,” and with their shutdowns has come a shift to learning at home.
School districts have sent lessons and curriculum plans, but many parents are anxious they aren’t doing enough or they aren’t qualified to ensure their kids’ education isn’t disrupted by the coronavirus.
Arabia Whitfield searched online to try and create a curriculum for her 12-year-old son, Christopher Grimes, who is in seventh grade at Uplift Elevate Preparatory, a public charter school in Fort Worth.
“I’m not a teacher, I don’t know how much work to give him and not put so much pressure on him, because this is a different world for him too,” Whitfield said. “He can get frustrated getting the schoolwork done that’s not mandatory.”
And parents have had to balance their own jobs, too, with many navigating how to work from home.
“I have still 40 hours of work to do, so how am I going to fit this into this new normal?” said Emily Youree, a Fort Worth mom. “I’ve explained to my kids this isn’t a snow day. It isn’t spring break. It’s a serious deal, but mom and dad still have to work.”
At first, Lonnetta Wilson was struggling to balance both working from home and the education of her three kids — kindergartener Malachi, second-grader Kaydi and sixth-grader Jeremiah — who attend schools in Fort Worth ISD. Normally, her two sons also attend Hope Farm after school, a Fort Worth nonprofit that provides leadership development for boys without a father figure in their life.
Hope Farm has been able to help relieve the pressure by providing meals, an extra desktop computer, supplies (“all of our crayons are broken at this point,” Wilson said) and mentorship through calls and videos to her boys.
At the suggestion of Hope Farm, Wilson also put in a schedule that brings a structure to their days that school normally fills, like an hour for physical fun, an hour and-a-half for classwork, two hours of screen-free time and more.
“That really has just changed things in the matter of a week. So it’s having a set routine, where we’re doing the same thing every day,” Wilson said.
For Hill, a routine has also been key, especially for Tristan, who is 13 and on the autism spectrum. But feelings of anxiety still creep in, and Hill tries to devote time to simply sit and take deep breaths with her children, as a reminder that the chaos brought on by the coronavirus’ spread is temporary.
“And I do try really hard just to validate all three of them, their feelings,” she said. “They say they’re worried or scared and I tell them that’s totally normal and to be expected.”
But there’s still some worries that parents have to deal with on their own.
“As a single mom, it is overwhelming,” Whitlfield said. “My fear is, if I get sick, he gets sick. And who takes care of him?”
Meeting students’ needs
While some districts already have their online classes up and running, others have taken an incremental approach to help teachers, parents and students adjust to a new normal.
The Arlington and Fort Worth school districts have been assessing students’ technology needs through a form sent to parents to fill out. On Friday, Arlington distributed laptops and tablets to the roughly 12,000 families that had initially requested one, Superintendent Marcelo Cavazos said.
The district plans to roll out its online learning in phases, to both train teachers how to best reach students online and to make sure students have access to meals and devices first.
Blanton Elementary School teacher Demaris Gloria estimates that about 40% of her 25 fourth-grade students don’t have the technology or internet access they need to learn from home.
“A lot of our parents are working. And then our kids are at home by themselves, and they don’t have technology access. So then that also makes it really difficult,” Gloria said. “If I don’t get the support from the parent, then that child is going to be falling behind.”
At Blanton Elementary, a little over half of the students are English language learners. And as a bilingual teacher whose students primarily speak Spanish, Gloria wanted to make it is easy as possible for parents to access new online resources. So she created video tutorials in Spanish to show step-by-step how to access the virtual learning hub — even demonstrating how to translate the district’s entire site with the click of a button.
“But some parents don’t know that,” said Karen Diaz, a second grade bilingual teacher at Blanton Elementary. “So it’s tough to explain those things so that we can all be on the same page.”
Diaz and Gloria said they’ve tried to get a hold of all their students’ parents to check in, and some of Gloria’s students have already sent her photos of the math problems they were proud they solved. Teachers have tried to stay connected in other ways too, like Malachi’s kindergarten teacher, who reads to the children everyday in a video post.
But both parents and educators worry that despite their best efforts, students may fall behind, causing the achievement gap to grow larger.
“I believe that’s going to widen over this closure,” Reny Lizardo, the principal of Arlington Bowie High School said. “When a teacher has a student in a classroom, they could see them falling asleep or not doing their homework. They can interact and intervene right there to help. But online, that’s going to be harder.”
Whitfield and her son are learning to adjust to the new normal, and each day it’s gotten a bit better. She balances the classwork of her own online master’s program, while her son works on assignments from the Chromebook his school provided. But it makes her anxious about the future.
“What happens in May? What happens in August? Will he repeat the seventh grade? Will he work over the summer?” Whitfield said.
While it is a worry on Wilson’s mind, she said she’s felt supported by the Fort Worth school district and thinks they’ll cross that bridge when they reach it.
“We’re all learning,” Wilson said. “And that we’re just going to have to all be patient with each other — me as a parent, the district as the educator, and then again, Hope Farm as that gap in between.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
