Oshkosh staff and students navigate turbulent waters of COVID and uncertainty
As Wisconsin and Winnebago County struggle with rising coronavirus cases, students across Oshkosh have been forced into myriad hybrid and virtual changes, scrambling between in-person, asynchronous, and live, online classes within weeks. Analyzing data with the support of health organizations and experts, the Oshkosh Area School District (OASD) attempts to stay on top of COVID trends and shift between school models as necessary.
“We have been working in tandem with the Winnebago County Health Department,” OASD Superintendent Vicki Cartwright said. “I participate in a call that goes throughout the entire Fox Valley region where we get advice from all the global health departments as well as medical experts. I also participate with local calls here at Oshkosh. We’re constantly providing information to one another: status of community spread, what the situation is looking like, and things we can put in place. We need to take into consideration what our local data is, as well as our regional data.”
There has been a large effort to understand such data, involving several facts and figures.
“We started taking a look into what’s known as the burden rate, which is out of a number of cases, how many cases of confirmed COVID-postive tests you have. We look at that in the Winnebago County and within the Oshkosh Area School District boundaries themselves,” Cartwright said. “We look at trends within the data - if it’s trending upward or downward. We also look at the positivity rate. But there, we have to consider the ability of people who are asymptomatic to get tests and even for people who are symptomatic.”
Prior to the closing of the district, schools adopted a hybrid schedule for the beginning of the school year, where A and B groups would attend in-person classes on alternating days while performing online tasks in between.
“Given the data from schools closing from last spring, we knew it would be important to provide some type of face to face instruction because our students and teachers needed the ability to get to know each other,” Cartwright said. “We also had some grade levels for which our students had never worked online and on Chromebooks before, for example, the kindergarteners, first graders, second graders, and third graders.”
The plan to adopt a hybrid plan involved groups from all around the OASD.
“The district had put together teams of teachers, support staff, secretaries, principals, and district office administrators and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provided a document that was basically guidelines and recommendations for returning to school,” West Principal Erin Kohl said.
At West and other schools, various procedures were implemented to keep students and staff safe during hybrid instruction.
“All the school buildings were given new, top-of-the-line air filters,” Kohl said. “There are regulations regarding not using fans and keeping windows and doors closed so viruses in the air aren’t getting moved around. Our custodians were given training on different disinfecting and sanitizing practices.”
There were also many changes at a more universal level.
“We had the mask mandate. We purchased a thousand of the individual barriers because we were not able to put kids six feet apart in all situations,” Kohl said. “Students used every other desk or table space in alternating class periods so they can be disinfected and sanitized in between. Another recommendation was to maintain one-way hallways as much as possible so that students are facing the same direction and not facing each other. Then reducing the number of students in the lunchrooms - instead of two lunch shifts, we had four lunch shifts. And then we also had to reduce students just gathering before school, requesting students not to come to school until ten minutes before their first class.”
Despite the district’s best efforts, a risk still remained in the hybrid classes, which was unavoidable due to the large number of students.
“While I understand why the school took some precautions with the hallways and lunch, there was no way you could limit exposure to COVID when you had 750 kids in the school at once,” senior John Koth said. “You can’t do it. Even when you had all of these precautions and these standards while we were sitting in a ‘jail cell’ at lunch, there were many ways to still get infected. Now people are saying COVID can even come through your eyes. The school tried their best, but it just wasn’t enough.”
On top of safety concerns, teachers were faced with the prospect of restructuring curriculums.
“The most challenging part of changing the curriculum for teachers is that the lessons that we would like to do that are the most interactive are not feasible alongside the safety precautions we need to take, so there has been a lot of reworking to make things less group-oriented and more of individual assignments,” CAPP Speech teacher Carrie Newton said. “In the hybrid model, we had to make sure that kids in the virtual world alongside kids in the classroom had a learning experience for each day.”
Student engagement was also necessary to allow classes to run smoothly, which has been a greater hurdle because of discontinuity.
“Having students in-person every other day made it difficult to keep things sequential for students,” CAPP Biology teacher Sara Dobish said. “It’s also been challenging to make sure everyone is on the same page. If students at home on virtual days didn’t do the work they were asked to complete, then they weren’t ready when attending class in person the next day.”
Predictably, the load on school nurses had dramatically increased as well, as they raced to quarantine students with possible symptoms.
“We had to quickly identify students that were displaying symptoms, determine who may need to be in isolation and how we were going to get them home,” West nurse Stefanie Rebholz said. “We also had to communicate with the other schools who may have siblings or parents in the district because they also need to go home.”
In the event of a COVID-positive test, people who were in contact with the case would have to be quickly isolated.
“If a student or staff member tested positive to COVID-19, then we had to determine which students and staff were within six feet of the person for 15 minutes or more and then had to call all of those students to inform them of their quarantine time,” Rebholz said. “We keep a list for ourselves to keep track of this but we also have to communicate with the Local Health Department about any positive cases. We relied heavily on our staff members at West to help us with this identification.”
Inevitably, the OASD was forced to close due to rising numbers. At West, approximately 100 West students were quarantined and there were several positive cases. Now transitioning to a virtual model, students and staff faced the prospect of 100% online instruction. Senior Andrew Engedal, who was quarantined before the closing, found new challenges in the new virtual model.
“In quarantine, it was a little bit difficult. I was following A/B and with the classes that had a live link I could join in virtually. Having everything online made trying to plan a little bit harder, but it was still okay,” he said. “Now, it is a little bit worse. The online lectures are okay, but I’d much prefer an in-person class every other day. It’s just harder to coordinate and oftentimes tech just doesn’t cooperate that well. They still help, but it feels like they waste more time than in-person classes. I do enjoy how the classes are split up by day, but either way, we get assigned work from all our classes every day. It feels like we get more work most of the time.”
As well as difficulties with schoolwork, students and staff alike face the larger issue of mental health and staying optimistic in a unique situation.
“Being away from everybody is really weird. There’s no one around and you can’t see anybody,” senior Olivia Stellpflug said. “If you’re a freshman and you don’t have a car, you don’t have a job, and you’re being safe at home, you’re not going to see anybody besides your family and that can be really hard.”
Despite difficulties, students have also taken initiative in their situation, making use of technology to try and maximize their school hours.
“I was in a live session with some of my freshmen and something I had not seen until then that was great was students putting questions and answers in the chat of Google Meets,” English teacher Shelby Brey said. “I have been very impressed with students. This has been a year of changes: we’ve had to expect the unexpected. But students are handling it well.”
The 2020-2021 school year has been distant from desirable so far, but if the last month tells students and staff anything, it is that continued perseverance will inevitably pay off.
“We’re all in the same boat. It’s a strange year: it’s difficult and there are challenges for everybody,” Brey said. “But we just need to sort of roll with the punches. While we would love to be in-person, we just need to make the best of the situation we are in. And students and staff are doing a great job.”
By Akashraj Karthikeyan
Oshkosh West Index Volume 117 Issue I
October 3rd 2020