As countless families struggle with schooling from home, one standout district is setting the bar higher and overcoming challenges presented by Covid-19 and remote learning.
We’re told to listen to the Centers for Disease Control when it comes to handwashing, social distancing, and sanitizing, but why are Oregon education policy makers not listening to the CDC when the CDC says that children should have no more than one to two hours of daily screen time per day, while also ensuring at least an hour of physical activity daily? Current screen time for most public schools in Oregon is four to six hours per day. This is clearly not healthy.
Many Oregon public schools are also excluding parental involvement, asking parents to step out of the room during lessons, or not listen to content being taught. These policies have created mistrust between parents and the districts, at times also creating a strain within the household. Many families have also expressed concerns over privacy, due to webcam policies requesting that they are left on at all times. After a recent incident that took place during a West Linn High School virtual class, as reported on by the Northwest Observer, privacy issues and questionable content are growing concerns among parents across the state.
According to recent polling, there is an erosion happening of the public’s trust within public education institutions. Additionally, Oregon students have experienced instability as several Oregon counties oscillate between phases, unable to meet Covid-19 metrics needed in order to fully re-open for in-person learning.
But—as hundreds of families have already discovered—there may be a better way to educate at home, with a continuity of expectations for students that is not through a “go it alone” homeschooling option, which many families feel ill-prepared to cope with. Other families who are trying to maintain paying for private school while one or more parents or caretakers struggle to juggle the loss of availability for full-time employment feel helpless as financial reserves dwindle and debt increases.
In my opinion, the tension between school districts and parents has seemingly been brought close to a breaking point, despite record amounts of financial resources allocated toward the overall educational budget here in Oregon, as real estate and property taxes continue to increase and measures like the Student Success Act pass through the legislature. This growing tension has served to both undermine the confidence and trust enrolled families have, while also illustrating the fact that districts are massively ill-equipped—or maybe even unwilling—to implement the kinds of creative options (like physical distance learning supports to pair together with digital solutions and a flexible schedule) needed to reduce stress among working families with whom they are aiming to serve.
One small public school district in Alsea, however, is paving a new path forward that combines both old-school mailed materials together with one single integrated secure digital platform to bring balance and simplicity forward with virtual learning together with off-line learning opportunities. And while this new program emerged, the bricks and mortar campus also reopened August 22, offering families a choice for how they wanted to proceed at the start of the school year. This in-person campus reopening was no small feat and required a $300,000 investment into new safety and sanitation measures, equipment, PPE, and staff to meet the guidelines set forth by the Oregon Department of Education. This large investment into reopening represented an entire school year’s worth of discretionary budget spending, but has, thus far, kept students and staff safe from Covid-19. Currently on their thirteenth week of operation as an open campus, the Alsea School District has a Covid-19 positivity test rate of 0%, despite operating in a county that was recently put on Governor Kate Brown’s watchlist due to an uptick in Covid-19 case counts.
The other upside to the introduction of a new distance learning program right in time for fall, was that it could be available to any family in Oregon, not just in the immediate Alsea area, as the three percent enrollment cap placed on virtual schools in the state does not apply to the Alsea “non-virtual online charter school program.” In addition to some initial marketing, word spread quickly as families shared their excitement for the program with their friends.
Alsea School District Superintendent Marc Thielman, who spearheaded the push to develop the new program, called Learn at Home Oregon, stated, “We created these options to maximize our ability to serve our families in the way they needed us to serve them, whether on-site or at home, and we did so without any judgement for the individual choices that each family chose to make.” Thielman also added, “We introduced an online school two years ago, but are sensitive to the fact that some families want a balanced approach and limited screen time for their children, so I decided to create a third option to provide even greater choice.”
Learn at Home Oregon (LAHO) is a new K-8 home-based distance education program that allows parents and students to take learning anywhere and get hands-on, while saying goodbye to stressful school routines and feeling isolated behind a computer or tablet screen all day. The program, created and provided by the Alsea School District, is free for students living anywhere in Oregon and has been specifically designed “with the learner in mind.”
Many parents have been struggling to manage several different learning sites and logins for their children, and often face technology challenges, rising frustration levels and teachers who were not ready or trained to teach predominantly online, or have the experience to remember to double check that “all links are working” before assigning schoolwork.
LAHO allows families a better way to enjoy the benefits of learning from home it seems, while having the support needed to make the switch from traditional classroom settings or virtual-only learning. Their mission is to “make at-home learning relevant, meaningful and impactful”—and students across the state are already benefiting from making the switch.
Personally, in my household, we are dealing with no less than five to seven different websites or platforms and logins daily, and we are one of the “lucky” ones paying for private school for our second grader. However, we are grappling daily between the pros and cons ourselves as we chose a religious private school and leaving it would mean leaving behind the religious lessons that are included in our current weekly curriculum that are still missing as our church remains closed. We have also chosen to stick it out as much as possible to bring a sense of continuity for knowing people in real life like classmates she attended school with last year, albeit now seeing their faces digitally is something we as parents could help facilitate outside of school. It’s been a tough path to sort out, and each week feels different as we try to navigate and continually reevaluate, with the high likelihood of making the switch, too, especially considering current out of pocket costs, missed work hours and grappling with tech challenges hopping between so many different places online, some of which are buggy or not secure.
“We were hearing horrible first-hand accounts from parents and students alike in Oregon, and across the nation, about major challenges they were experiencing—I immediately decided to explore other ways to build something better for these families,” shared Thielman. “I’m proud to say we chose to listen to families and have worked to fill gaps, not previously met by existing programs. As a smaller district, we have had the freedom and flexibility to move swiftly and creatively to meet those needs.”
The Learn at Home Oregon program approach also renews the trust between parents and public schools which is needed now, more than ever. They claim to work toward fostering a familial bond and offer several standout program features aimed at supporting parents and caretakers alongside their children.
“I am forever a small school advocate—I love being able to be directly involved with everything for our three different education programs, and to be able to provide different public choices for families in the Alsea area and now across the state through Learn at Home Oregon,” added Thielman. “Building trust and solid relationships to work together with families is key, and being open to looking at what’s not working to create even better solutions is something that I firmly believe in and am willing to invest in for the future of education options for families here in Oregon.”
Thielman, having heard from several families as well as those of Alsea School District employees who live in the Alsea region, but whose children and grandchildren attend other school districts, were comparing these outside experiences and contrasting them with the experience the Alsea District was providing its students and families. The disparity became obvious he says, prompting many employees to transfer their students into his district.
“Supporting families, or putting families first if you will, meant that we had to do more than deliver quality online education; we had to invest both time and resources to ensure that all families had adequate Internet access, regular food and meal delivery among other basic needs, which sometimes meant the very basics like toilet paper—literally.”
Considering the Alsea District draws students from several surrounding communities, the closest of which is 25 miles away, this is no small feat and should set a precedent during such challenging and uprooted times. Thielman shared that he and other staff members drove buses and vans hundreds of miles to deliver items door-to-door (and still do when needed), to each enrolled student’s household. To me, as a parent and former adjunct professor (and daughter of two lifelong educators), this speaks to the kind of leadership we need across the state helping to guide policy with our education system.
When I confronted Thielman about the overall cost and debt that I assumed he had to go into in order to provide such end-to-end services, I was shocked.
“We operate in the black and have done so for quite some time,” he said. “School finance is one of my key focus points and we have structured our school system in such a manner as to fully utilize the state school funding in support of our mission to serve students and their families, even in changing circumstances.”
In a recent video released by Senator Kim Thatcher, who ran for Secretary of State, statements she made correspond with the sentiment felt by Thielman, which speaks to families across Oregon communities and transcends political perspectives.
“As a mom I know just how frustrated parents are all across Oregon, because their kids are losing ground in their learning. Oregon invests billions into public education, but the Covid crisis is dramatically changing how those dollars are spent. For some families, the current situation is neither fair nor equitable—especially for those families who rely on health and social safety nets schools provide. As your next Secretary of State, and until our kids are safely back in their classrooms, I’ll immediately establish an independent audit team focused solely on helping school districts monitor outcomes, so that even if happening at your kitchen table, our education dollars meet student needs.”
Thatcher’s video also includes information about just how many billions in funding schools have received across the state: “$9 billion in school funding, a 10% boost.” The video also states that, “A 2019 audit found deep racial disparities in student achievement in Portland Public Schools.”
Thielman added, “The success and quality of education for Oregon students is something that we can all agree upon, and as part of a public entity, we have an obligation to both listen to and provide student and family centric services, even if that presents having to take on doing something different like the Learn at Home Oregon model.”
LAHO was clearly created to meet the needs of families in Oregon who face these dynamic and unprecedented circumstances in place of in-person school opportunities, or who want more flexibility to enroll in a school that offers a full curriculum geared toward learning in a home-based environment that is not strictly digital. The program “provides opportunities to study in various settings from the comfort of your own home, while learning through proven models with the support of a dedicated teacher and offers a blended model of live interaction, technology integration, and individual real-world, project-based learning.”
This customized learning model allows students to work at their own pace to maximize learning gains, close learning gaps, and accelerate new opportunities. Their blended curriculums reinforce the concepts in contexts of how they are actually used in everyday life.
According to their website (www.learnathomeoregon.com), Learn at Home Oregon is:
- Free and open to all residents of Oregon. This is a public individualized home-based distance education program.
- Learn at Home Oregon is a fully-standardized Kindergarten through 8th grade level education program and part of the Alsea School District.
- Grade-level appropriate learning materials and technology equipment are delivered directly to a student’s place of residence.
- Free physical school supplies are included for each student to provide for an integrative on and off-line learning experience.
- A computer is included for each student and shipped to their door if the family wishes to have this technology (although they say it is not required).
Experiencing household education pain points seem to be a key intersection among every family and demographic I’ve spoken with, which has resulted in many districts across the state seeing enrollment decline by more than 10 percent as families jump to homeschooling and other programs. While Thielman points the way forward to a differentiation of public program offerings, others don’t seem to be actively working together with parents, or investing into an updated modality to create an innovative Oregon specific family-oriented solution that also reflects limited screentime for kids. The Alsea District has applied its resources as a small district into developing a three-pronged approach to meeting the needs of all the kids and families it serves and their preferences.
Large investments into safely returning to in-person K-12 classroom instruction did require a complete restructuring, including for the K-12 online program Thielman runs, and finally the birthing of Learn at Home Oregon, which has apparently paid off. The Alsea District ended the previous school year with 176 students, but is now successfully serving nearly a thousand students during this crisis. That’s not bad, especially considering that Thielman’s district was among the fifteenth smallest in the state, and now, he tells me, their phone “literally rings all day.”
Amber Sims is a former adjunct professor, business owner, award-winning entrepreneur and publicist who works to elevate meaningful brands and organizations who serve a higher purpose here in Oregon and across the globe.
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