As many Baltimore-area school systems began an unprecedented fall semester Tuesday amid the COVID-19 pandemic, families and educators described both technological hiccups and triumphs while logging on to exclusively online classes.
School districts and state education officials say they have no reliable data on how many of Maryland’s 900,000 public school students have access to a dependable broadband internet connection. And some districts are starting the year with computing devices needed for students still on back order.
Administrators have said they’ll be watching closely this week to count how many children tune in for the classes. And school schedules look different this fall, depending on the district. Some districts have opted for lessons four days a week, with a fifth day set aside for one-on-one instruction or small group work.
But on the first day of classes, students, teachers and school districts said they managed to avoid major disruptions.
It was “a busy, good day” for Baltimore County Public Schools and their families, said Christina Byers, the school system’s Central Zone community superintendent.
Byers visited schools throughout the day to oversee the distribution of devices and learning materials to families, and she said there were many moments where students happily reconnected with school staff despite the pandemic.
“In a weird way it doesn’t matter that it’s different and it’s virtual because there’s still excitement,” Byers said.
Baltimore County administrators and teachers were busy helping families that struggled to log into virtual platforms, but Byers said the school system troubleshot those issues. She encouraged parents to “be patient” with their students and themselves as teachers and staff work with families this year.
The school system is taking attendance as students log into their virtual classes, but Byers said those numbers weren’t readily available Tuesday afternoon.
Outside Pine Grove Middle School Tuesday morning, Bethany Frey crouched with a laptop balanced on her knees. The parent had taken the device home for her 6th grader before realizing it required logging in once on campus in order to function remotely, she said.
“I’m hopeful we’ll get the hang of it,” said Frey, adding that the family lives about five minutes away. “It’s just a weird new thing for everybody and it’s going to take a little grace and patience.”
Meanwhile, other parents lined up outside the middle school in Carney to collect laptops and hotspot devices for their children. The line moved quickly while Beatrice Oliver waited to pick up her daughter’s laptop. The 6th grader has another device at home, but Oliver didn’t want to take the chance that it could fail and decided to reserve a laptop offered by Baltimore County School System.
Oliver said her daughter was anxious. She missed her friends and had a hiccup logging in when she couldn’t remember her username and password, Oliver said.
“I’m anxious as well,” she said. “You just want your child to be successful … It’s hard to concentrate when you’re in your room with toys around.”
In Baltimore City, Hazelwood Middle School teacher Kenneth Childs said he was delighted to notice solid attendance — and engagement from some of his historically quieter students, he said.
His lesson on Afrofuturism and Black representation in media, using the movie “Black Panther” as a jumping-off point, was an easy ice-breaker for his seventh graders, and prompted a lively discussion with the 8th graders. Childs wondered whether the chat function on Zoom calls allowed those shy students to air their comments without needing to speak over their peers.
“I have witnessed students who wouldn’t normally say anything engaging a lot more,” he said. “When they heard me say ‘I like what you said there,’ then you see their green hand pop up.”
While Childs’ first day went well, he said it did require some juggling of tasks. For example, it was disorienting to lead a class while also attempting to answer texts and emails from parents who had trouble logging their child into the course.
“This is a whole new experience and the teachers have worked really hard to make it seem like fun and to make the kids feel comfortable,” said Jenell Kronick, a Harford County schools parent and former paraeducator for system. “There’s glitches along the way, but the teachers are, you can tell, really trying hard.”
In Harford County, Superintendent Sean Bulson has said the goal is to eventually get all students and staff back in the buildings and ramp up in-person instruction, so long as schools can safely do so and meet physical distancing requirements.
Gov. Larry Hogan has called on school districts to bring at least some students back to classrooms as soon as possible.
Taby La Martina, a stay-at-home mom in Joppatowne, said things went swimmingly for her daughter, a seventh-grader at Magnolia Middle School, but not so much for her son, a second-grader at Riverside Elementary.
“We’ve had to switch devices three times, the ones we had at home, because he kept getting kicked out of Google Meet, so that’s been a mess,” she said.
Harford County Public Schools ordered 25,000 Chromebooks to distribute to elementary students, but because of manufacturer shortages and delays, it didn’t have enough devices for every student for the start of the year. The new devices are now expected to be received and distributed sometime in October.
Harford schools did welcome some students back to Learning Support Centers set up in school buildings, and will continue to bring more students to the learning centers over the next month. But for now, a majority of Harford’s 38,000 students are learning in home offices or at their family’s dining room tables, with parents guiding them along the way.
Anne Arundel County schools superintendent George Arlotto welcomed students and staff back via a video.
Standing in front of a background photo of Richard Henry Lee Elementary School in Glen Burnie, Arlotto offered school communities a message of hope, stating that he knows what the first day back is like with students feeling eager and a sense of anticipation.
In the video, Arlotto went over how the school system has prepared its staff and educators for an online semester. This summer, teachers and staff accumulated over 130,000 professional development hours dedicated to online learning.
The start of Anne Arundel County Public Schools’ first day began with no widespread outages but a couple of incidents, like such as log-in issues, said school spokesperson Bob Mosier Tuesday morning.
Allie Cullison of Carroll County said she set up a learning station in her bedroom for her senior year at Winters Mill High School. Her first two classes, criminal justice and advanced placement computer science, went off without a hitch, she said. Then Cullison said she had difficulty connecting to the Google Classroom software for her next class.
“I got in, I was just a couple of minutes late,” Cullison said. “I had to keep reloading and restart my computer and stuff.”
Cullison said she was worried about trying to handle some of her more difficult classes outside of the traditional in-school setting with a teacher.
Columbia resident Jennifer Schwartz was one of many parents in Howard County and across the country who were trying to balance their own jobs and parental responsibilities with their children’s virtual learning.
Schwartz was nervous about the first day of school for her daughter Cady. The 7-year-old is enrolled at Atholton Elementary School, but Schwartz dropped her off at Clemens Crossing Elementary School, one of the Columbia Association’s locations for its child care program.
The Columbia Association’s child care program, which offers daily, weekly and full-time enrollment for children in kindergarten through sixth grade, has 10 sites in Howard County. The county’s RecZone program, open to students in kindergarten through fifth grade, has 16 sites across the county.
“This is all very different,” Schwartz said. “We just have to take it one day at a time. We’ll all have to get used to it. We’re going to give each other a lot of grace.”
Baltimore Sun Media Group reporters S. Wayne Carter Jr., Ana Faguy, Naomi Harris, Jacob Calvin Meyer, Randy McRoberts, Pat Stoetzer and Megan Woodward contributed to this article.
