After the Commissioner’s recommendation and a meeting held by the Cumberland County Superintendents, we have decided to extend our distance learning programming through to the end of the 2019-20 School Year.
This was not an easy decision and I recognize the difficulties this places upon parents and upon our students/staff and community. The fact of the matter is that we are still experiencing a climb in our COVID-19 numbers here in Maine and the reality is that even if we may want to come back (and trust me we do), we will not have a well thought out and safe mechanism within which to do so before the end of this school year.
Therefore, this decision was made now in order to allow all of us the time necessary to plan for how we will be ending our school year virtually for our students, our staff, and our families in as safe and positive a manner as possible given our current and near future realities.
As we move through the remainder of the school year, the Gorham schools will continue to focus on the wellbeing of our students, our staff, and ourselves. The message continues to be and will remain that the primary focus of the Gorham schools is on the social and emotional health of our students, our families, and then, only after those things are met, on academic maintenance and growth.
The District Leadership Team has already been preliminarily planning for the possibility that this extension would occur. We know this means that we will need to find a way to do many of the things we did before to end a school year (scheduling, staffing assignments, classroom assignments, transition activities, celebrations, etc.), virtually.
We know this means that parents will continue to have to struggle with day care, and with juggling all the various plates that you currently have in the air for a longer period of time. We know that this means folks will continue to be uncertain and anxious. And we know we will definitely continue to miss our students.
As we move through the course of the rest of this month and early next month more detailed information will be coming out. We will continue to adjust and “tweak” our systems to find better balance and we will make sure we find a way to celebrate the accomplishments of all of our students, our staff, and our parents before we close this school year and work to begin a new one.
Please know that the intent of taking “attendance” in our new format is simply to assist us in tracking which students and families may be having the most difficulty engaging in our programming so that we can use this data to better inform programmatic decisions now and in the future.
We realize that not every student or family will be able to engage at the same levels for lots of different and very valid reasons. Each family must find their own balance during these difficult times and the school will find a way to provide support and adjust programming to match that balance over time.
We are focused on how to appropriately end the 3rd quarter in such a way that does not “punish” students for the extremely unusual way that we ended that quarter. Once this has been solidified, we are also talking about how grading and reporting will be done for the remainder of the school year. The overall objective will be to ensure that however we might temporarily “tweak” our grading and reporting systems that these systems allow teachers to continue to provide timely and specific feedback to students on their work, that any grades assist teachers and students in better understanding what skills/standards they have met, and what skills/standards they still need work on and that this system does not unduly disadvantage students who may be experiencing our distance learning programming in very different ways depending upon circumstances that are beyond their control.
There has been some concern raised recently regarding Zoom meetings, or any meeting for that matter, that involves video with students and teachers in larger groups. Video conference meetings are helpful to be able to see one another, to smile and laugh together and to just “be” with one another. On the other hand, however, lots of issues can arise. We have “Zoom bombings” occurring where folks are hacking into Zoom meetings all over the country with profanity, sexual content, or rude/racist remarks which none of us find useful at all.
We have provided additional training to staff on Zoom meeting safety and will likely be encouraging the staff that can to move more towards use of Google Meets, which requires that individual’s login with their Gorham Schools issued email addresses. Of course, this will only help those grade levels that have school issued email addresses as not all do.
We ask that families try not to take photos of your child’s screen showing their peers unless it is done at such a distance that you couldn’t make out names or faces of the students online. This is just a courtesy as we know not everyone is keen on having their image or the images of their children out there in Internet land.
If you are aware of any issues involving the misuse of technology I would ask that you immediately reach out to let your child’s teacher and building principal know so that we can follow up quickly. Just as we don’t tolerate these kinds of behavior in “regular school” we also will not tolerate these behaviors in “distance school” and we need your help to make sure we can appropriately address these issues as they may occur.