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PALO ALTO — With dark, yellow-orange skies hovering above her, Kaliopeta Taufalele walked through a desolate and eerily quiet Gunn High School Wednesday morning, her first day back since the coronavirus shut down schools and sent thousands of students home to learn from a distance.
As she walked past classrooms and common areas that would have been bustling with students just a year ago, Taufalele instead saw the signs of the coronavirus pandemic that upended public education: hand-washing stations, hand sanitizer bottles, and dozens of signs warning against the spread of the deadly virus.
“I’m really back, but it’s rather ominous. I’m getting apocalyptic vibes,” Taufalele said. “It’s all kind of a lot at once. It’s like I’m here, but I’m not here.”
Like many of her peers, Taufalele, a 17-year-old senior, found it difficult to transition to online school. She skipped classes, turned her online camera off or simply didn’t turn in assignments during the previous school year as her family dealt with the financial impact of the pandemic and struggled to keep the lights on at times.
But now Taufalele will go through Zoom classrooms, break-out groups and online assignments like the rest of her peers while at school as part of a new in-person support program that began this week at Palo Alto’s middle and high schools. She’s among the the first high school students in the Bay Area to return to school.
Palo Alto Unified School District Superintendent Don Austin said the program called PAUSDPlus is designed to support students that struggled to adapt to an online learning environment and need the in-person supervision of tutors and adults to “stay engaged and logged in.” Though only two students were here this week, the district expects more to attend in the coming weeks, and if all goes well, the school district could have “cohorts” of between 14 and 50 students learning online at every school site by next month.
Unlike school districts who are requesting waivers from Santa Clara County to start elementary school classes, the support program at Palo Alto schools isn’t technically “teaching” or a “class” and so doesn’t violate current rules guiding school re-openings. Schools that opt to make programs like these need only abide by social distancing requirements and other guidelines for extracurricular activities.
“The parents who have students who are struggling the most can start to expect to have some in-person help that has been void for a long time,’ Austin said. “Whether it’s students who have historically struggled in our system or have special needs, we are going to start serving them differently as we gear up for an eventual reopening.”
For Assistant Superintendent Yolanda Conaway, the aim of the new program is to get students into an environment with reliable internet, space to do work and all the supplies they need. Since March, Conaway has seen how students struggle to adapt to online learning: distractions are everywhere, and there’s almost no accountability. But the biggest issues are about equity and the socioeconomic divide within the district, Conaway said.
“You’re seeing four to five kids working in one house all trying to use the internet and get work done,” Conaway said. “I don’t care whether you’re well resourced or not. No one can support that many devices working at once on a home internet connection.”
The goal is to make school a hub for these cohorts of students, Conaway said, and maybe catch some of them before they fall behind too much. Conaway said the district is relying on staff volunteers to supervise students, a job that Joey Ordoñez, who usually runs the high school testing center, took up without a sweat. While teachers instruct through Zoom, volunteers like Ordoñez can be there to make sure students are paying attention.
Sitting at a desk about 10 feet away from Taufalele, Ordoñez said he volunteered because he wanted to go back to the fundamentals of teaching. To him that means building relationships with students and helping them outside of a computer screen.
“Everything is different now so it’s going to be hard to adapt,” Ordoñez said. “But this is why you do it. You do it for the kids. A lot of these kids have been so isolated for a while. Just a little human interaction that says ‘we’re here to help’ is going to make a big difference.”
