Arkansas Board of Education members who checked in Thursday with different providers of remote instruction to public school students found that a smorgasbord of services and strategies are in use.
Leaders of the Guy Fenter, Dawson, Arkansas River and Wilbur Mills education service cooperatives, along with the coordinator of a consortium of three other education service cooperatives, described to the board how they are providing virtual instruction to students — a task they’ve not undertaken in the past.
Some of the cooperatives have hired teachers and written their own curriculum for the Arkansas students who have elected to learn from their homes and not in traditional classrooms this school year.
Others have contracted with education companies such as Pearson for curriculum and for teachers.
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At least one cooperative has made use of the Screencastify program to create videos that show parents and grandparents how to work the technology or, in other words, what to click on their computer screens to get to their student’s lessons.
And still another has set up a system of rewarding points to students who show up for their online school meetings that can be traded in for prizes.
All the reports Thursday were from cooperatives, but there are individual school districts in the state that have set up online instruction programs, as well.
“It was a challenge as we took this on as a co-op,” Roy Hester, director of the Guy Fenter Education Service Cooperative in Branch, said. “It is really not what we do — educating kids. We have specialists that go out to our [member] schools and help teachers and we go in and do some teaching of students.” The Guy Fenter cooperative, which has 22 member school districts and a charter school, is currently providing virtual instruction to 83 elementary pupils from 14 of those districts. The cooperative had prepared for as many as 250. Virtual Arkansas provides the course work for any secondary students who want online course work.
Taking on the responsibility of running a virtual kindergarten-through-sixth grade program goes beyond the cooperative’s earlier role, Hester said, but it is a way to help schools that struggled last school year when classroom teachers were called on to try to teach virtually and face-to-face with students.
“We as cooperative directors got together and asked what can we do, and this morphed out of it,” Hester said.
Hester said the initiative in his cooperative where students are required to participate in two online sessions every day is proving successful.
Darin Beckwith, director of the Dawson cooperative in Arkadelphia, said the covid-19 pandemic may have brought virtual instruction to the forefront, but now virtual instruction “is here to stay.
“That’s not bad,” he said, adding that some students learn better virtually, that online attendance of students is good and that the interactive nature of some online instruction results in more attentive students.
The Arkansas River Education Service Cooperative, based in Pine Bluff, is serving 485 students, said Cathi Swan, the director of the cooperative and a decades-long virtual education creator and facilitator. She said she is 110% confident in the cooperatives’ ability to deliver instruction.
State Education Board members have repeatedly expressed concerns that virtual education classes can have numbers of students that exceed state standards for class size.
Swan attempted to assure the board that virtual and fixed or traditional classrooms don’t have to be the same in terms of student numbers because the delivery of instruction is different.
In the virtual program, each student has a parent or learning facilitator in the home to help them, for example, she said.
Additionally, Swan said, the curriculum for a virtual student can be pre-packaged and adaptive. That can mean that an online teacher’s work does not have to include extensive lesson planning. And, as individual students do their online work, their rate of success on one level determines how they will be directed to the next appropriate lesson module for their learning needs. A student who misses 10 questions on a quiz will be directed to a lesson different than a student who misses no questions.
“We don’t have that in a fixed classroom,” Swan said.
The state Education Board heard the reports from the cooperative leaders at a meeting Thursday in which they approved requests from eight school systems to expand their digital learning plans to more grades.
The districts that originally received approval to offer a remote learning program to students in some grades but not in others now want to include previously omitted grades.
The districts with newly expanded remote learning programs are: Kirby kindergarten through sixth grade; Lonoke, kindergarten-2; Rivercrest,t kindergarten-8; Clarendon, kindergarten-6;, Nettleton, 7-12; Concord, K-2; Poyen, K-8, and Huntsville, K-2.
Additionally, the Education Board acted on almost two dozen proposed digital learning plans that were submitted to the state by Sept. 2.
The state Division of Elementary and Secondary Education in January had invited Arkansas school districts to submit digital learning plans for use this year in the aftermath of the 2020-21 school year in which districts struggled to provide online instruction during the covid-19 pandemic. More than 100 districts submitted those plans by May 1.
As the number of covid-19 cases began surging in July and August, the state Division of Elementary and Secondary Education re-opened the invitation to districts to submit remote learning plans.
The approximately 100 applicant districts were permitted to proceed with carrying out their digital learning plans in this new school year as long as they submitted detailed applications of their plans by a Sept. 2 deadline for state Board of Education approval.
The state Education Board must approve those second-round application plans because they include waivers of state rules and laws dealing with student recess, minimum number of clock hours for course instruction and reporting of student attendance.
Plans approved Thursday were for the Hampton, Lakeside in Garland County, Paris, Hope, Eureka Springs, Maynard, West Fork, Pocahontas, Nashville, Cotter, Two Rivers, Nemo Vista, Perryville, Quitman, Lafayette County, Pottsville, Caddo Hills, Atkins, Wonderview, Mt. Vernon- Enola, Hot Springs and Lavaca school districts.