Jack Boyle, 12, is enjoying hands-on learning with adult guidance for five hours a week despite Durango School District 9-R moving to all remote learning.
Jack, a sixth grader at Escalante Middle School, is among the first students to take advantage of remote support rooms 9-R opened the first week of December in all of its schools that offer 2- to 2½-hour sessions with paraprofessional instructors. Sessions provide tutoring to students struggling with lessons offered remotely, often through online classes and assignments.
Jack’s father, Ralph Boyle, said, “He’s definitely more of a hands-on learner. I think he definitely benefits from the sessions. It is limited, he goes twice a week so it’s five hours, but in this situation, I believe anything helps. There’s no substitution for human interaction. Remote learning is still kind of strange. This is not anything like a normal year.”
Especially tough for Jack, his father said, is the loss of socialization that in-person school affords.
Jack recently enrolled in 9-R schools after coming from Pagosa Springs.
“He was just starting to make friends around here and everything, when all this hit in March, and they went to remote,” Boyle said. “And you know, he was really sorry schools were closing.”
Dylan Connell, 9-R’s executive director of curriculum instruction and assessment, said adding the remote support rooms has come as part of an assessment of how remote learning went during the previous school year, when the district suddenly pivoted with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late March to remote learning from traditional in-person classes.
“One of the things we learned this spring is no matter how good our instruction was, there was a group of students that we consistently noticed didn’t have the same access or who struggled with remote learning,” he said. “That hit the hearts and minds of our educators. And we were determined if we were forced to go remote again, we needed to have a plan for how to connect those who are having a hard time with remote learning.”
From the experience in spring, the remote support rooms were born.
The rooms are especially important for special education students who frequently receive therapeutic treatment at schools and students in rural areas who have limited access to the internet, but they are open to all students. Connell said parents who see their child struggling in a subject area or a unit in class should contact their school so they can be accommodated in a remote support room.
Four to five remote support rooms are operated Monday to Friday at each of 9-R’s schools.
While most rooms are led by paraprofessionals, Connell said some rooms have been led by teachers who have agreed to do double duty by leading remote-support sessions while still teaching their classes remotely. School counselors have also led the rooms and even school principals have led sessions.
“It’s just all hands on deck to make sure we’re meeting the needs of the students who need us the most,” Connell said.
Remote support rooms feature a 1-to-5 instructor to pupil ratio. Most instructors are not 9-R teachers, but come from 9-R’s ranks of paraprofessionals who are assigned to help teachers. The paraprofessionals are also in contact with the teachers of the students in their remote support rooms.
In outlying schools, a good number of students using remote support rooms are dealing with internet connectivity issues, but the schools in town are seeing students who are struggling with remote learning.
Connell said: “It is definitely a mixture of students using the room. It’s really different at each school, but definitely in our outlying elementary schools internet access is a problem.
“In-town schools, it’s just other extenuating circumstances that are making it hard for the students to access that instruction,” he said. “It might be homes where maybe there’s three or four students, and they’re all trying to access at once. Or a student may simply need some guidance to help them through a lesson, so we’re trying to hit multiple barriers with the rooms.”
Mia Clifton, a paraprofessional instructor who is leading a remote support room at Escalante Middle School, said the first week offering the rooms was valuable in helping kids keep track of the various Zoom classes they were scheduled to attend and helping students prioritize their assignments given different deadlines in different remote classes.
“Once they get some guidance, they realize they can actually do this themselves. They can use Google Classroom, it’s not that hard,” Clifton said. “Just kind of helping them see where everything is and helping them figure out what they’re supposed to do when and where, that was the big thing the first week.”
She was also able to help a few students struggling with ratios in math class.
“I think some kids are just overwhelmed online. They see a lot of assignments and they got off track,” Clifton said. “Sometimes, they just need some clear direction on when their due dates are and how to prioritize assignments and scheduling.”
For Connell, the remote support rooms help students cope in multiple ways in a world turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Primarily, the rooms help students connect to in-person learning. A secondary benefit is the establishment of a routine,” he said. “For students to have a routine where they know there’s an adult they can check with each day and get instant feedback on their work, that’s a big thing.”
parmijo@durangoherald.com
