As a senior at Carmel High School, Tyler Armstrong wants to stay engaged in his classes, even if they are delivered at home through Zoom. One obstacle has been his dad, who uses the same room to make phone calls for work.
To make things even harder, Armstrong’s classes are “rife with technological issues, making courses pretty difficult to maintain,” he writes by email, giving credit to his teachers who “are doing their absolute best and putting in wonderful work.”
The result is not surprising. “My day is far less regimented than it was when school was in-person, and that lack of structure has made motivation scarce,” he adds.
And Armstrong is among the luckier of Monterey County’s 78,000 public school students.
“Here in our county, access is an issue,” says Monterey County Superintendent of Schools Deneen Guss. “Some areas have very good access to the internet, but some are very remote.” She points to communities in Big Sur, San Ardo and San Lucas as well as urban districts with high concentrations of low-income residents.
“Between a quarter to half of students are participating.”
The switch to remote learning happened “almost overnight,” Guss says, but she’s proud of how teachers and administrators have worked toward solutions. Where video technologies aren’t an option, teachers are using phone calls, emails and putting together printed packets for students to pick up and drop off.
At many local schools, remote learning means reviewing old material rather than advancing the curriculum. “That’s the guidance that staff has received,” says Steve McDougal, who teaches world history to sophomores at North Salinas High School. Assignments are reviewed but are not being graded, he adds.
That’s because teaching new material wouldn’t be fair to students who cannot participate due to conditions at home or lack of internet access, explains Katie Bassler, president Salinas Valley Federation of Teachers, a teachers union.
“You have to have equity and if you can’t, then you can’t provide new instruction,” she says. “We don’t have consistent internet throughout our city.”
The inherent difficulty of online instruction and the lack of accountability through grading have resulted in abysmally low school participation in some cases.
Bassler and McDougal serve on the union’s executive committee, and they’ve heard from many teachers that a majority of students don’t show up to online classes.
“I polled our executive board last week and it was all over the place. Most said between a quarter to half of students are participating,” Bassler says. “Some students said, ‘I’d rather be working and making money if schoolwork is not going to be graded.’”
Bassler’s numbers are anecdotal. No one knows how many students are engaged on a county-wide level, but on March 31, schools announced they’d remain closed for the remainder of the academic year.
“At this point, most [local schools] are still developing these distance learning plans and finalizing things like tracking,” Guss says. “Our goal and the directive from the state is to offer high-quality distance learning as best as possible. The speed at which we can get there is the challenge.”