Mississippi schools were some of the first in the country to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic. Now, teachers and administrators across Northern Mississippi are reflecting on everything they’ve had to adapt to in the past year.
Teresa Jackson, the Winona-Montgomery Consolidated School District superintendent, knew on March 16, 2020 that the kids in her district would not be returning to school. It was also the day that the Mississippi High School Activities Association officially suspended all sporting events and practices for grade school students.
“State law says we go to school for 180 days,” Jackson said. “So for anything to not follow that — it’s just outside our ability to comprehend.”
When the two schools that serve nearly 1,200 students in her district closed last March, they did their best to keep in touch with students through daily updates posted on Facebook and emailed out to parents. Still, it wasn’t easy to continue teaching children remotely because an estimated 35% of students in the district did not have internet access at home.
The entire district had to resort to assigning take-home packets to its students that parents would pick up and drop off in filing cabinets outside their child’s school. At the time, it was difficult to ask teachers to grade the packets because no one knew how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted yet.
“The students that were putting the work in probably got something out of it; many students did not,” Jackson said.
She said seeing the students struggle so much with remote work was one of the things that pushed them to reopen schools for in-person learning.
Jackson added that one of the challenges the school district was facing in the fall was making younger students keep their masks on at all times. However, she found that the kids were so grateful to be back in school, most would wear them without complaint.
Terri Rhodes, a fifth-grade teacher at Mantachie Elementary School, said they took a similar approach to Winona schools when they first closed last March. They created videos for students to watch at home and distributed packets at the schools while also giving out lunches, Nearly 65% of students there are on a free or reduced lunch program.
“In Tupelo and bigger cities, the large number of people have internet access,” Rhodes said. “In Mantachie, so many parents don’t have internet access, and if they do, it’s on their phone.”
Because they weren’t allowed to take the assignments they were sending home for a grade, she said most students were reluctant to do their work.
“I would say maybe a quarter of kids were doing those activities,” Rhodes said. “I would say the large majority of kids just cut off that spring break.”
When school returned to in-person class in the fall, Mantachie Elementary School went back in a hybrid format that it still uses. In-person students come to school Monday through Thursday each week, and students who have chosen to learn remotely come in on Fridays to take tests.
“On Fridays, we have to give a packet for our students,” Rhodes said. “Because we have so many that don’t have internet access.”
Marcie Harper, a science teacher at Tupelo Middle School, has had a somewhat different experience teaching through the pandemic. At Tupelo Middle School, every child is given a Chromebook laptop to complete their work, and when the pandemic shut down school last march, they set up WiFi hotspots in their parking lot.
TMS switched to a block schedule to keep students from crossing paths too much and avoid spreading the virus at school. They also allowed students who wanted to learn virtually to do so at home.
Harper records videos for her virtual student learners and sometimes arranges for them to attend live lessons on Google Meet, a video-communication software provided by Google.
“One of the biggest tells of how distance learning is going, in general, is that I started out with 65 distance learning students at the beginning of the year, and I’m now down to 30,” Harper said.
Because Harper’s students have struggled during this school year, she decided to make a policy change in her classroom and no longer gives 0% grades on any of her assignments. Instead, she rarely gives a student a grade lower than 50%, so that if one child decides not to do their homework for one week, it won’t tank their grade for the entire rest of the school year.
“The thing is, I have around the same amount of failures as my colleagues doing this,” Harper said. “I just now have more recoveries than they do.”
Harper said most of her virtual students who have struggled during the pandemic have done so out of an unwillingness to do work rather than stress of the pandemic.
She recognized that the pandemic is a stressful event for everyone, especially children, but she said most of her students who struggle tell her that they fell behind simply because they were unable to motivate themselves to get the work done at home, which is why she believes it’s important to give them a second chance.
“I think they should be allowed to try, you know,” Harper said. “They should be allowed to have a change of heart and that to matter because that’s what we’re trying to teach them.”
