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Marshall County Schools Tech Up To The Challenge

MOUNDSVILLE — When COVID-19 struck locally in the early spring, Marshall County Schools, like most across the state and many more nationwide, struggled to come to grips with moving their curriculum online.

In the weeks and months since schools closed in April, the district has shifted to remote learning — online, in many cases, but also paper packets to be completed and returned at the district’s weekly food deliveries.

Much of Marshall County is heavily rural, with internet access or cell service not necessarily a given for many families. During the remote learning part of the spring semester, students had devices provided by the school district, if they did not have devices of their own capable of completing their assignments.

Carla Garrison, Director of Technology Services with Marshall County Schools, said the district had worked with both families of students and with teachers to ensure that students were able to keep on top of their education, in some cases having teachers check on the students’ families when they lived without easy access by phone or internet.

“There were some kids who had no accessibility to any internet of any kind, and they were given packets in their mailboxes,” Garrison said. “We also set up five locations which we called ‘Learning Spots,’ and they had to be parked close to the building. If you needed the internet, you could park in the lot and work on your stuff.”

An internet accessibility survey conducted by the county indicates that 25 percent of Marshall County students have inadequate internet — slow, unable to stream videos, or having to share one wireless hub with multiple people — while eight percent were completely without internet access

Improvements are also planned for the fall to standardize the programs used for certain functions, to minimize the amount of adjustment and number of programs a teacher or parent would need to learn to help a student. Additionally, greater wireless capabilities are planned for the Learning Spots, which are established at the board of education office, John Marshall High School, Sherrard Middle School, Cameron Elementary, and Washington Lands — the four geographic corners of the county’s school system.

“We had to use what we had at the time, which were indoor access points, so we basically just taped them to the windows,” Garrison said, laughing. “What we’ll do in the future is … expand it, so we have actual outdoor access points that would, for example, cover the entire parking lot. … We will expand on that. If all we can do is put more in the windows, that’s what we’ll do.”

The effort to get the county’s schools more online and more modern has been going on for several years, with iPads and other tablets having been available in some schools for years, Garrison said. Going forward, however, the district is considering the possibility of making them permanently available to the students, where previously the tablets had stayed on school grounds. Beginning with elementary students before moving into higher grades, students have had assigned tablets that they use throughout the day.

However, students have not yet been permitted to take their devices home with them, which was also not something Garrison expected to begin immediately in the fall.

“We’re worried about damage and loss, all sorts of things, and when they bring it home, that’s one more possible hassle for the teachers — ‘Did you bring your book? Got a pencil? Got your iPad? Is it charged?’ We were trying to avoid that stuff.”

The other concern, Garrison said, was with ensuring that teachers were properly using the tablets to their fullest extent as a teaching aid, rather than as just an expensive school supply.

“You need to give time for teachers to understand how to use them. If you’re just sending them home and the teachers aren’t applying things to them, making assignments on them, then you’re just allowing a lot of risk to your equipment.”

Superintendent Shelby Haines said that the possibility will almost certainly exist that schools could close with little warning due to a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall, if they return to schools in the first place. Should that happen, having ready access to technology would be a great boon for teachers and students alike.

“If your curriculum is not based upon technology, why do you need to take that technology home?” Haines said. “But now we have to be ready to go to remote learning at any minute. Our instruction is becoming more technology-based, because we have to be ready to go. It’s time, and going one-to-one (one device per student) — we’ve always had the number, but the devices were always kept here at school.

“Many of us here at the office are working with small groups of teachers to do an online platform that they can (use for learning), if they need to be out of school.”

Garrison said that teachers did not have much time for professional enrichment, by educating themselves on new skills and technology on the job. However, with the lockdown COVID-19 brought, that changed, and many teachers were happy with the results. The training began as soon as schools closed back in April, and has continued through the summer, including regular ‘Webinar Wednesdays.’

“Everybody was getting into it, and they were liking it. Most of them were very happy with what they saw, and the possibilities that they had. A lot of them did a lot of training during that time…” Garrison said. “I’ve also been putting together self-paced training for teachers to get before school starts. We’re trying to hone in on a best-practices system. There are thousands of things they could be doing. We’re trying to focus on what makes the most sense for us, so we can all be doing the same thing and trained in the same manner. There’s just not enough time or people for everyone to go their own way.”

“We’ve done a lot. The state has put out a lot of things, we’ve got things of our own, and our teachers are doing pretty good. Many of them are responding to this, and we’re happy to be able to get into the technology end of it,” she added.

For the fall semester, Garrison said she was working on a program to load assignments onto OneNote and Microsoft Teams, which will sync up at the school’s hotspots to complete offline. While this poses problems for group projects, Garrison said she’s working hard at getting the system to work.

“I’m working through those details right now. It’s a little complicated, jumping back and forth, but that’s what we’re trying to do. In our groups, everything we talk about includes ‘What do we do for our kids who don’t have the internet?’ and we have to work through that, too.”

Garrison added that Curriculum Director Woody Yoder was working with teachers to produce videos for use in class, whether they’re held online or in-person, and made in a format that could be preloaded directly onto the iPads.

Board of Education member Lori Kestner, who was sworn in for her fifth term on the board last week, said in a separate interview that she felt the administration had been moving too slowly in modernizing the county’s infrastructure in recent years, instead focusing on improving test scores. This was a sentiment Kestner feels she’s seen statewide.

“We focused on the hot topics of the day but we put technology and broadband on the backburner, and now we’re all scrambling. You try to do speech therapy at a Zoom meeting…” she said. “I’ve been on (the board) for a long time now. I can see where we were 15 years ago and where we are today, and I don’t believe that we’ve moved, in West Virginia, fast enough.

“We’ve talked about online learning, broadband internet, and we’ve talked and talked and talked. … We’ve been pretty lax about pushing our agendas at the state level. We as board members have not been the advocates for this (part) of education.”

Garrison said that at the state level, there was talk about establishing satellite internet access, but locally, their concerns were a little more down to earth.

“That’s a little above my pay grade. The state’s working on that — it doesn’t make much sense for me to call Elon Musk and say, ‘What can you do for Marshall County?’ The state’s on those more giant issues. … Hopefully some things will shake out there. I personally have satellite internet at my house. I can check my email, watch a little YouTube now and then. But if I’m planning on using that for my education, that wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s limited, and some days it works better than others.”

Kestner, who has been on the board since 2004, had added that the inexperience of the board of education members with technology contributed to what she felt was a lack of emphasis on technology.

“Our veteran (board) members are not technologically-savvy. They don’t use it. If you don’t understand the importance of something and use it, you don’t buy into it. We’ve been so focused on a number — where our test scores are — that we failed to look at how we get those going forward.”

Garrison described her department’s work as akin to chasing a moving target with regards to keeping on top of technology and the hurdles they need it to overcome.

“It’s changing constantly,” Garrison said. “But we can’t have every program out there. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that we get from parents is, ‘I have three children, and three different platforms for instruction.’ … At this point, we said, after listening to our parents, let’s standardize.”

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