School Reopening Community: Learning Beyond COVID-19

I am an Art teacher at a K-5 public elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida. I teach every student in our school, which amounts to about 700 students a week. I knew I cared deeply abut my students, but I did not realize how much I love them until I was separated from them! Our school closed for Spring Break on March 7th, and we have not been in the classroom since (we went virtual on March 23rd). Most of my students are online, but not all. It is the ones who are not online that I miss the most. I feel that they are missing out, because they do not have access to the online community of our school. Our school and our district (Duval County Public Schools) has done a very good job of creating a virtual school. While I am glad to be able to connect with most of my students online, I can't wait to get back in the Art room with them to make Art together!

I work as a speech-language pathologist for Villa Nova MS in Woonsocket, RI. I miss my students in grades 6 to 8; however, I look forward to reaching them remotely every school day. I get to join them live in Hangout & post communication activities for them in Google Hangouts. May is Better Hearing & Speech Month. #BHSM

Hi. My name is Carol Villarreal. I am a reading specialist in Texas. This has been a hard time for all of us, but I have seen students still be engaged with their learning. I am proud of the growth I have see in some of my students during this time. That growth is what keeps me going.

Hi Jill ! I think first try to gain their confidence by doing some activities which they are interested in.Then, I think they will start responding and if one or two does not then you can ask the parents to make them sit during the class in common area at home. This I tried and it helped me .So, thought of sharing .

I agree - this is a big challenge. Ranjana, those are good ideas. These are some of our biggest challenges: technology and language barriers. We are leaning a lot more on parents / caregivers at home as partners because they help provide a missing link that we can't right now. It takes a lot of work to get them on board with everything but I think this will help us not only while we are remote, but also when we return to being fully in-person because we will have more engagement from our families. Some of our students are home alone during the day, so that is even more challenging because they need to take responsibility for themselves, which is not easy depending on the age.

I would love to see workshops about antiracist work, strategies for remote/hybrid teaching and services with special education students, and educator self-care/wellness :]

I would love to see ideas for educator self-care and how we can make a more supportive work environment for each other and provide trauma-informed instruction for our students who may not yet be showing obvious signs of trauma.

I would love to learn how to teach in this new cultural backlash that is occurring where I live where parents are demanding teachers to stop "indoctrinating" their children by teaching the minority narratives in American Literature. So, I can't teach anti-racism or culturally diverse perspectives. How do I navigate this new world as an educator who believes that literature should be more than it has been? How do teachers teach ELA and Social Studies with multiple perspectives in this new environment?

Wish my district would do this. We didn't do a good job of saying that online is available the ENTIRE school year. Blah.

My district is full in person (Connecticut) with the exception of our high schools due to size. They are operating on a 2 cohort model. Each cohort rotates coming to school in person, one day in, one day distance.