0920_September Comstock's Magazine September 2020 | Page 15

LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
The COVID-19 Pandemic
Has Made the Education
Process More Challenging
PHOTO BY TERENCE DUFFY
It’s September, when children typically are zooming off to
start a new school year. But with COVID-related restrictions
in place, classrooms in the Capital Region’s counties on Gov.
Gavin Newsom’s health watchlist are empty, at least for now.
There is no morning rush to the school bus. The dining room
table is the new classroom.
Given the new and widespread surge of COVID-19 infections
this summer, there is no question that distance learning is
critical to protect public health, but it also poses unprecedented
challenges that are not limited to students and teachers.
With children going to school in the next room, parents
become a substitute for the presence of a teacher instead of
playing a supporting role. That upends household routines
like a tumble dryer with people who are juggling working from
home or needing to leave home to work.
Students and teachers are missing out on what some educators
call the magic moment of learning, when a light bulb goes
off in a student’s head and a lesson is learned.
With distance learning, many children also are falling
behind. The “summer slide,” the loss of knowledge between the
end of one school year and the beginning of the next, is getting
faster and steeper. Many school districts in the Capital Region
have reported that, without adult supervision, as many as half
of their students have not kept pace with classes after several
months of distance learning.
Mackenzie Wieser, a mother of three and an Elk Grove Planning
Commission member, is a parent facing this challenge. She
says her high school senior and college freshman can navigate
distance learning on their own, but she still has to juggle a
school schedule for a second-grader with her job as a CEO of an
environmental nonprofit. When school was disrupted in March,
she said she had the luxury of playing teacher in the morning
and working late into the night. And she thought it was temporary.
“Still, it was so overwhelming,” she says.
Picking up the nine textbooks and workbooks, each about
200 pages, for her second-grader for the new school year pushed
her over the edge. “You could just shoot me,” she says. She is
turning to a growing trend and a modern version of the oneroom
schoolhouse, pandemic learning “pods.”
Wieser assembled a group of four students with two of her
neighbors, with whom she splits the cost of hiring a teacher.
The group is small enough for appropriate social distancing
while giving the children more personal attention to help
them with their distance-learning curriculum from the Elk
Grove Unified School District and during their several hours
each day participating via Zoom. “It’s the open-mindedness of
my neighbors that gives me hope we can all get through this,”
says Wieser.
The teacher she hired is credentialed but an unemployed
substitute. Some older and more experienced teachers are retiring
early and striking out on their own to avoid the potential
health threat of facing a classroom full of students. The trend
has picked up steam so fast that statistics to measure it are still
guesswork. But a Facebook page for this kind of microschool
learning in the Sacramento area gained nearly 1,000 followers
in less than a month.
Diana Hilton, who owns A Brighter Child, one of the only
homeschool-supply stores in the Capital Region, says that since
regular classrooms were disrupted in March, she has seen more
bewildered parents showing up in her store for the first time,
forced into a world for which they are unprepared.
Other businesses are doing their part to help parents
and students get through this. Comcast is providing free or
low-cost internet service for qualifying families through its
Internet Essentials program, creating a vital digital lifeline
for the approximately 165,000 families in the Capital Region
already signed up.
And PowerSchool, an education technology software company
based in Folsom, has grown its Schoology virtual learning
program to become one of the most popular in the country,
used by 75 percent of students nationwide. Developed specifically
for K-12 education, it enables schools to create, manage
and share academic content on one platform. Teachers and
students can share lessons and administrators can evaluate student
progress. It gives parents regular updates as often as they
want and sends notifications when assignments are late. Since
the shutdown from the pandemic in March, PowerSchool has
seen Schoology’s peak usage increase 400 percent.
That’s a valuable contribution from the technology
segment of the region’s economy at a time when all of us —
parents, teachers, students, neighbors and businesses alike
— are zooming together through a challenging school year.
Winnie Comstock-Carlson
President and Publisher
September 2020 | comstocksmag.com 15