Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Pandemic or not, students going back to school in Las Vegas

Classes for new academic year begin Monday in CCSD

Tour of Goolsby Elementary School

Steve Marcus

A social distancing marker is shown in a hallway at Goolsby Elementary School Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021.

When the school bells ring Monday across the Clark County School District, students will return with the coronavirus pandemic again raging.

Students, teachers and staff will be required to wear face masks. Social distancing protocols will be in place, making scheduling activities like lunch a slight challenge for officials.

Logistical challenges aside, the majority of the district’s roughly 315,000 students and 40,000 employees will be back in-person — full-time, five days a week.

“Students want to see their friends again,” said Anthony Nunez, principal of Orr Middle School in central Las Vegas. “Students want to learn and make sure that they’re continuing to grow and develop.”

After a year and a half of distance learning and some hybrid schedules that saw students spending some days on campus and some days logging into classes from home, educators are aware of the challenges of shaking the rust off kids’ social and emotional capabilities and making up for lost time academically.

The first challenge will be keeping children safe from COVID-19, which was the cause of about 1,100 hospitalizations statewide last week, or more than the peak last summer before the vaccine was available and state officials shelved in-person learning out of safety concerns.

The 2020-2021 school year, when most students attended school remotely for all but the last few weeks, was the hardest year ever for educators, CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara said Tuesday at his annual back-to-school address.

“COVID tore us down. Believe me, there were days for all of us that were tough,” Jara said. “But you know what? They never broke us. COVID never broke us.”

The Sun sat down with three principals — Nunez, Sarah Popek from Tate Elementary and Isaac Stein from Desert Pines High School — to reflect on what they are set to tackle in the coming year and lessons learned from educating during the pandemic they hope will be useful moving forward.

What programs or services developed during the pandemic would you like to keep around?

Teachers and staffers became more tech-savvy, and they found ways to keep seeing their students in person. Families needed both. Sometimes simultaneously.

Tate’s three counselors expanded their home outreach, and oftentimes helped troubleshoot online lessons. The hope is that outreach will continue moving forward.

“When we were all in distance learning we did hundreds of home visits, whether it be helping a parent log their child into Canvas,” the school’s online learning platform, “or helping them navigate through the different programs that teachers use,” Popek said.

Orr enlisted some staffers to man a help desk. With some customer service training and dedicated new phone numbers, these employees helped parents with issues like resetting forgotten passwords

“That’s something that we typically haven’t had to provide, but it was a necessity,” Nunez said. He sees this being needed in the future.

The middle school’s in-house social worker was essential in helping the staff better understand needs of the community and mobilized neighborhood outreach.

“Throughout this last year, we realized the importance of not just coming to work but coming to work and getting out to the community, building relationships in the community — not just by way of being at the school — and using that to leverage the professional relationships you would build in your classroom,” Nunez said.

What did you do this summer to get ready for the fall, and how was it different from other years?

Popek drafted a daily schedule knowing it would likely have to be modified. That happened late last month, when the district announced the year’s mask guidance and she had to carve out new meal times to ensure lunchrooms have fewer unmasked, chattering kids at a time.

Although enhanced summer school was offered districtwide, Desert Pines’ version was three weeks longer. The high school also offered on-campus activities that weren’t for credit but were good for social and emotional well-being, Stein said. The school also had a separate summer school for secondary students who attend any school, and an extended school year for special education students.

Desert Pines will also launch an online program this fall separate from the Nevada Learning Academy, CCSD’s online option that combines students from most of the district’s secondary schools. About 200 students are enrolled.

Nunez and his crew studied academic data to devise a strategy for how to accelerate learning this year to make up for lost time, rather than slow down to remedial. He wants to challenge the notion of “learning loss” over the last year and a half.

He credits a book called “Rebound,” the basic tenet of which is, “if we have this narrative out there about ‘learning loss,’ that could compel us to think we have to teach everything that was missed. So you didn’t show up for sixth grade. Now you’re here for seventh grade. (But) let’s teach all the stuff (from) sixth grade.’”

His teachers will reframe learning loss as “unfinished learning” and think about where pupils left off — because if they have seventh-graders, they need to provide a seventh-grade, not delayed sixth-grade, education.

“It does no good to provide them with anything less than that,” he said. “That’s decreasing expectations for them.”

Orr teachers have also been planning traditional middle school experiences, like music education and recitals, an expanded sports program, and new after-school clubs and tutoring to motivate kids and remind them how to enjoy school.

What are your opportunities for improvement this year?

Popek and Nunez admit that consistent virtual “attendance” was a problem.

Tate Elementary had struggled with absenteeism in the past, but “I think that given what we were able to accomplish during the pandemic when no one was at school, I have high hopes that we will be able to do better with absenteeism now that we’re physically seeing the students at school each day,” Popek said.

Nunez keeps in mind that some of his incoming eighth-graders have only been on Orr’s Katie Avenue campus for two semesters. His new sixth graders might not have seen the inside of a classroom since fourth grade.

To break the bad habit of inconsistent participation, Nunez said his teachers would need to establish themselves as trustworthy and helpful. He hopes on-campus activities will help with that.

Stein sees Desert Pines’ big challenge in the social-emotional realm. Teachers will best know how their students are doing mentally once they see them face to face.

“I want to say that we’ve ramped it up, but we’ll see if it’s going to be enough,” he said.

Getting up to speed

Popek wants her teachers to keep the children learning on grade level, with support as needed.

“If we go back and say I’m a third-grade teacher and I’m now gonna be teaching second grade, our students will never catch up,” she said.

She said all students will have social needs, not just the youngest ones who haven’t been fully introduced to typical in-person schooling. But kids are resilient, she said.

Nunez and his assistant principals will have regular “focus groups” with students throughout the year and ask them what’s working.

He said Orr has had counselors and social workers helping children emotionally for years. This year will just be in a different context. At an orientation last week, families and students showed they were ready for a new year.

It’s all about relationships

Popek said anxiety ramped up in the face of uncertainty, and the pandemic surely brought plenty of uncertain times to education, especially when learning moved online some students, especially those with limited means, were unaccounted for.

When the children arrive on Monday, there will surely be more uneasy times — it’s the first day, after all. And one unlike any other.

To combat that, she has been transparent with staffers in letting them know what their expectations are. It helps that many at her northeast Las Vegas school were there when she became principal 10 years ago.

“Over the pandemic, even though we were physically separated for much of it, I keep telling them how lucky I am to have the staff that I do,” Popek said. “Everything that came out, whether it was (at) 9 o’clock at night or 6 o’clock in the morning, I would have a slight bit of panic and communicate things out and everyone said, ‘Okay. New challenge, let’s work with this.’”

Desert Pines, which has one of the largest staffs in the district with 240 teachers and support workers, saw teacher turnover cut in half this year. Stein said the eastside school normally has to fill about 40 to 50 positions every fall. This year, he had to fill 20 spots.

He said this shows how well the team performed, and gelled, in the face of an extraordinary challenge — a challenge that continues Monday into a new school year.

Nunez said information was coming out rapidly in the earliest days of the pandemic, and he saw a responsibility to be as accurate as possible to build up trust and confidence, which spread among the staff and gave the team confidence to adjust their duties as needed.

They also shifted their philosophy. Going online, and doing physical home visits, gave the entire school more insight into the lives of their families.

“One of the things that I really emphasized is when we provide our educational service, I think we have to consider ourselves like we’re guests in other people’s homes,” Nunez said. “We’re used to providing our service at Orr Middle School, but now with this virtual component we’re providing our service in other people’s homes.”

Did you find new allies in the community?

Tate, Orr and Desert Pines primarily teach low-income students, so they already had partnerships with social services organizations and community-minded businesses.

However, Nunez said he was impressed by how much more those groups provided when times got tough. Three Square Food Bank handed out food on the Orr campus, including on the weekends. Tate’s partners also provided food relief. Las Vegas City Councilwoman Olivia Diaz connected with Desert Pines, and the large campus hosted food box giveaways and, through the Southern Nevada Health District, clinics for neighborhood residents to get COVID-19 tests and vaccines.