Posted on March 26, 2020 at 4:26 PM by Jason Macoviak
I am the principal of Lowell Junior High School. Governor Ducey and State Supt. Hoffman sent out the message on Sunday, March 15th that there would be no school starting Monday, March 16th. That was the first auto-dialer/facebook/website/text/email message that went out to our families. The next day, Supt. Woody met with us and we were instructed to coordinate educational resources for our students including both online and physical packets. As new information emerged about the extended school closing, the faculty came together Thursday, with social distancing being practiced, and we managed to get Google Classrooms and a packet pick-up system going before the end of the day. None of the teachers had formal experience with online teaching and they had to learn within a few hours. Thankfully, we had two teachers who used Google Classrooms a few times during the year, and they trained the other ones while still practicing social distancing as much as they could in a face-to-face faculty meeting. I instructed Mr. Hill to keep a running tally of families coming in, to ask about access to online resources, to encourage students to borrow Chromebooks at the district office. We coordinated with the district Tech Team to make sure all students could sign into their school emails. I sent out all-call messages via phone, text, email, Facebook, and website regarding our new systems being implemented. Our goal, per Superintendent Woody, was to keep those skills and learning going.
Other questions started emerging, though--such as, what about our Special Education program? What about those families who do not have online resources and have limited transportation or because of fear, health issues, family circumstances couldn't make it to the school? So we started making phone calls. Our special education teacher came in to contact all of her students, teachers came in to make phone calls to families. We kept logs, followed up, made tallies, reached out to other families to help us contact their friends.
Heroes have risen to the occasion. We have one teacher who hand-delivered packets to front porches. Others are sending encouraging emails to students. We had our first remote faculty meeting via Google Chats this morning and the teachers committed to doing online groups with students at least once per week, per class. Families have been reaching out to each other. Community continues as we continue to redefine it.