El Paso schools survived some of COVID-19’s worst. What can Fort Worth learn from them?
For the past few months, Cynthia Valdespino has organized her life around a series of alarms on her cellphone.
As she teaches her seventh grade students online, an alarm lets her know when her own kids, a pair of twins who are in kindergarten, need to be in a small online group with their teacher. When it goes off, she tells her seventh-graders to take a break, then runs into the next room to help her kids set up their meeting, then runs back to start teaching again.
She makes lunch for her kids during her planning period. Then, another alarm goes off letting her know it’s time to start class again.
Valdespino, a middle school science teacher in the El Paso school district, has been teaching from home for months in an area among the hardest hit in Texas by COVID-19. School districts in the El Paso area have brought only a small number of students back to school in person. After months of teaching remotely, Valdespino has found ways to make it work.
As the situation begins to improve in the El Paso area, COVID-19 case counts are surging in North Texas. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram interviewed teachers and school officials in the El Paso area to mine ideas that might be applicable here if things worsen by the time Fort Worth teachers and students return from winter break.
The most important thing for teachers during the worst days of the pandemic is to have compassion for their students, Valdespino said. Teachers don’t always know what their students are dealing with at home, especially when they don’t see them in person regularly, she said.
Teachers in the El Paso area say finding creative ways to engage students remotely is crucial. And school officials say strong collaboration among superintendents across the El Paso area has made the response to the crisis more effective.
Collaboration is key for school districts
El Paso has faced dramatic challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, a hospital official told the Dallas Morning News that El Paso hospitals were forced to ration care, a situation in which health care workers must decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. El Paso County has set up mobile morgue trailers to help ease the strain on the county’s permanent morgues, which have been overwhelmed with bodies due to the pandemic.
While Tarrant County hasn’t experienced a situation as dire as the one in El Paso, COVID-19 cases here are climbing at an alarming rate. On Dec. 9, county health officials reported 15 COVID-related deaths, the most the county had seen since Aug. 22. Health officials have warned that county hospitals are running short on available intensive care unit beds, and the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office has brought in two refrigerator trucks to help store bodies.
Fort Worth schools brought some students back to campus in phases beginning in August. About half the students in the district have returned to school in person, with the other half learning remotely from home. District officials have said they’re ready to shut schools down again and return all students to remote learning if the situation calls for it. But the district hasn’t closed any of its campuses since students returned in August, and officials say they have no immediate plans to do so.
In the El Paso school district, schools have never reopened at full capacity. The district has opened learning pods on its campuses, allowing certain students, including those with excessive absences and failing grades in two or more classes, to return to school in person.
Of the district’s more than 50,000 students, only about 2,000 accepted spots in in-person learning pods, said Melissa Martinez, a spokeswoman for the district. Even among those 2,000 students, the district has never had full attendance, she said. The district saw a steep decline in in-person attendance just before Thanksgiving, as COVID-19 cases increased sharply, she said.
Collaboration was a key factor that helped the district make it through the worst days of the outbreak, Martinez said — not only collaboration within the district, but among districts in the area. Early in the pandemic, the superintendents of every school district in El Paso County had regular conversations about a unified response plan for COVID-19, she said. In early November, as COVID-19 cases in the area surged, leaders in each district in the El Paso area implemented a system of so-called school safety zones based on the area’s hospitalization rate.
Under that plan, when the hospitalization rate in the area exceeded 20%, districts were allowed to restrict on-campus learning for students in all grade levels. They were still required to offer in-person learning for students in high-priority groups. Once the hospitalization rate falls below that threshold, districts will allow all elementary students to opt for in-person classes, but they still may restrict students in higher grades. As the hospitalization rate falls further, districts will lift other restrictions.
That unified plan allowed school officials across the area to communicate more clearly and effectively with their communities, Martinez said. Officials from all districts used a single color-coded system to explain their plans, she said. That meant parents only had to understand a single, straightforward message rather than trying to figure out which districts were considering what criteria, she said.
Teachers get creative
That collaboration also made it easier for districts to coordinate with local public health officials, said Marivel Macias, assistant superintendent for administrative services for the Socorro school district, which covers eastern El Paso and its suburbs. In the early stages of the pandemic, school officials began to realize the amount of power and influence school districts have in families’ lives, she said. Leaders in each of the districts in the county aligned their messages with county health officials so families received a consistent set of information and advice, Macias said.
That consistent message is especially important because families regularly move from one school district to another, Macias said. Extended families with members in several parts of the city might have children in two or three different school districts. The fact that every school district in the area works from the same plan and speaks with the same voice makes it easier for parents to understand what’s going on, she said.
Like the El Paso school district, Socorro has never reopened at full capacity, Macias said. Certain high-need students are in in-person learning pods, she said, but most of the district’s teachers and students work remotely. The district uses a year-round school year with intersessions built in, Macias said. That gives the district the flexibility to shut school down entirely if the situation calls for it and make up the lost days during one of the intersessions, she said.
Cristina Barajas, a high school and middle school band director in the San Elizario school district, said it’s critical for teachers working remotely to understand what their administrators expect of them and how students will receive instruction under the district’s remote learning plan.
San Elizario, which sits along the Rio Grande just southeast of El Paso, is on a system that brings groups of students to school in person on alternating days. Barajas has had to find creative ways to work with her band students when they can’t all be in the same room. She uses Google Meet breakout rooms to break students into their sections and have them rehearse together. Delays make it nearly impossible for musicians to play together virtually, so in each section, all students but one mute themselves, and every other student in the section follows the one person they can hear.
Contacting students and parents has been a challenge, Barajas said. Between middle school and high school, she has more than 300 students. If she had to contact even a fraction of those students’ families each week, it would be a major time investment, she said. For teachers in similar positions, she suggests using online services that send mass emails or recorded phone messages to large numbers of parents at once. Those services allow teachers to get parents the information they need without taking too much time away from teachers’ other responsibilities, she said.
Valdespino, the El Paso science teacher, said she’s noticed the toll the school year has taken on her students. At the beginning of the year, they seemed excited about starting school, even as they were getting the hang of online classes, she said. Now, they seem tired and ready for a break. She isn’t sure if that’s because they’re burned out on online learning or because Christmas break is approaching, or some combination of the two.
As important as it is to be compassionate with her students, Valdespino has learned she also needs to extend that compassion to herself. Because she teaches remotely, she doesn’t have access to the same materials and space she has in her classroom, so she does the best she can with what she has at home. That’s an important lesson for any teacher during the pandemic, but particularly for those working from home, she said — the normal ways of doing things don’t work this year, so don’t expect them to.
Teachers should just do the best they can and try not to get discouraged when thing don’t go perfectly, Valdespino said.
“Make the most of what you have and don’t be hard on yourself,” she said.
