We give the guidance, we have reminders. We’re working our way right now through the challenge that is presented by the need to have an end-of-year measure of where our kids happen to be. So we’re working with districts. We’re in discussion now about how to finish calculating where we are and where we need to go based on that. So, that is what we do, again, as support and guidance. But the actual implementation has to often occur at the local level.”

Dr. Susan Bunting

By Brooke Schultz

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s “how important it is for the students to have the schools as a resource and a base for their own stability,” said Gary Henry, dean of the University of Delaware’s College of Education and Human Development.

“Overall, I think, society as a whole has become so much more aware of how important teachers are and what an important role educators play,” he said.

That said, as Delaware hits the one-year mark of school buildings closing on March 13 and not reopening fully in-person since, there is the growing push of needing more than hybrid learning.

“I think we’re building up to the time of mounting frustration, though, between opening schools, closing schools — how to really start to assess that risk,” he said.

A year-long change

Most public school students in Delaware went home one Friday when Gov. John Carney initially ordered a two-week school closure in mid-March in 2020. That two weeks grew, until school buildings sat empty of students for the remainder of the year.

“I think it has encouraged us to, out of necessity, rethink some of the things that we do in education,” said Secretary of Education Susan Bunting. “Optimists that we are, we need to step back sometimes, and we were thrust into something that was very different. Our teachers had to pivot, well, over a weekend to a form of learning that they have not had a lot of preparation for and or training in.”

In the year since school buildings first closed their doors, the ball has largely been in the court of school leadership.

“Delaware, as a local control state, does have 19 districts and 23 charter schools that each happen to be doing something slightly different because of the differences in their student populations and their locations and their board of education,” she said.

In the spring, districts distributed technology and food as remote learning got under way. In the summer, working groups consisting of different members of the community came together to draft recommendations for safely resuming school. Gov. Carney gave the OK for schools to operate in a mix of remote and hybrid instruction, abiding by the 34 pages of guidance released by the Delaware Department of Education.

“People knew they had to do this tremendous [effort] — not just mask wearing, but the sanitizing efforts, and the way to arrange recesses, or how to feed the kids in the school and abide by the guidelines,” Dr. Bunting said. “I think it provided guidance, but it also allowed, within these parameters, for a district to make a very personalized vision. Some of them didn’t open until closer to the end of the calendar year. But everybody had to be instructing their students, obviously. That’s our charge. And they figured out how they would do it district by district based on that guidance.”

There have been some bumps in the road.

A surge of homeschools occurred over the past year, with 18,170 Delaware students enrolled in either a single or multi-family homeschool or a private school — an increase of 2,439 students between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.

Public schools saw a reported reduction of 2,407 students between Sept. 30, 2019 and Nov. 13, according to data released by DOE. It’s the first time public schools have seen a decrease in at least 10 years.

High COVID-19-positive case numbers in different districts have closed school buildings for several days. Operational strain — caused by positive cases and active quarantines — resulted in many pausing hybrid instruction for about a month over the winter holidays.

Since Sept. 1, there have been a total of 1,106 positive cases among students in public and private K-12 schools. There have been 859 positive cases among staff in public and private schools.

Even as cases showed increases during the year, the state pressed schools to keep their doors open, citing research that transmission of the virus is low in schools.

Through the course of the year, there has also been pushback. A number of rallies — including one slated for Monday outside of Legislative Hall — have pushed for the state to loosen its restrictions to allow schools to resume full in-person learning.

That light at the end of the tunnel of added in-person learning did get closer as, early into 2021, DOE began coordinating its vaccination effort for educators in a tiered system. So far, 16,000 people have requested to be vaccinated through DOE, Alison May, a spokeswoman for the department said. Each week, the department is scheduling about 1,200 first doses and 1,200 second doses.

With President Joe Biden’s commitment to vaccinating educators by the end of March, DOE is hopeful to get additional vaccine supply, Ms. May said.

“We’ve learned how to plan when you don’t know what the future is going to bring,” Dr. Bunting said.

‘Kids are amazingly resilient’

Dr. Henry said the full scope of the year’s impact may be difficult to know without assessment.

“Part of this is because certain kids who had access to the internet, who had a reliable place to study at home and some quiet time that they could do their work at home, will probably be just fine,” he said. “They’re going to be where they would have been if they had been in school most days, except for maybe the social parts of school that are also so important.”

But then there are the other students who haven’t had that experience. Some were pulled out of public schools to be homeschooled. Other students lacked access to technology or reliable internet.

For that group, DOE worked on connectivity.

“Fortunately we’ve had monies that have come from the federal government that have been able to be invested in such things as increasing [access],” Dr. Bunting said, adding that they used CARES Act funding to advance the installation of towers.

“We always, at our level, think about the whole state because districts are getting monies to think about things for their individual districts,” she said. “So we worked hard to get greater internet accessibility throughout the state, making sure that our kids had not just connectivity, but in many cases we also had to work with the affordability of the internet access so that kids could learn remotely.”

Dr. Henry said, from the variety of different Zoom conferences and calls of which he’s been a part, he gets the sense a number of those issues have been resolved. But for some students, instability means that something that is solved in February can reoccur in March.

“I really feel that the use of the federal funds that have come in has been extremely valuable for helping us to have the resources to get kids on the internet, get them laptops if they need them, give them whatever they need to be successful But for some of these kids, that’s a cyclical thing, not ‘OK, we fixed it, it’s done, we can forget about that now’,” he said.

Then, there are the kids in the middle range, he added.

“So, one of the most important first steps, when we begin opening up and the kids are back, is to do some assessment,” he said.

Several states are doing this, he said, where accountability is removed from the results, but the testing is conducted to see where the students are.

“Kids are amazingly resilient,” he added. “But it all depends on meeting them where they are from day one, and moving them forward. And that’s really a pretty difficult task across all the range of subjects that we need to teach.”

Dr. Bunting said hopefully, schools have been doing their best through the year to gather that data and respond to it, emphasizing again the local nature of that work.

“We give the guidance, we have reminders,” she said. “We’re working our way right now through the challenge that is presented by the need to have an end-of-year measure of where our kids happen to be. So we’re working with districts. We’re in discussion now about how to finish calculating where we are and where we need to go based on that. So, that is what we do, again, as support and guidance. But the actual implementation has to often occur at the local level.”

While skills that require practice could be affected, Dr. Henry said that the year will also have major impacts for soft skills: interpersonal skills, self-regulation in the classroom, learning how to interact with a large number of people around, new rules about distancing, etc.

“It’s going to extend greatly beyond just the reading, writing and arithmetic kinds of ideas and extend into that area that we often now refer to as social-emotional learning or those kinds of skills that it really takes for students to be successful in society,” he said.

Managing the risk

We’re at a time, Dr. Henry said, that it becomes important to carefully strategize over the next six months.

“If we don’t become very intentional in providing learning supports to the kids, then we’ll start out further behind next year than we have to,” he said.

There has been a tension building, especially in the first couple months of the new year, he said. Almost every time he gets on a call where there are parents and school officials, most of the time is devoted to arguing whether kids should be fully online or fully in-person.

“In my view about it, those pitched camps, the ramifications of how the parents feel and present themselves are going to manifest with the kids, because they know these things are going on. They’re very intuitive and quick to pick up on these things,” he said.

“I think what we should all be thinking about is managing risk. It’s a risk to bring kids back. It’s a risk not to. So where do we get to the point where we find that minimizing the risks on both sides, but providing as much for the kids as we possibly can in ways that will get them back to normal? … The risk factor starts to shift dramatically as teachers become vaccinated.”