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Ruth Cusano, a teacher at Partin Settlement Elementary in Kissimmee, interacts with her students online as the school district closed schools until May 1 due to COVID-19.
First-grade teacher Ruth Cusano reads her students a book every day at 9 a.m.
They can watch it live or on-demand anytime through the Microsoft Teams, which the School District of Osceola County is using to educate its 70,000 students.
Teams features a chat function, video meetings and file storage, and it’s the crux of the district’s digital learning platform that was quickly developed when schools closed last month to stop the spread of COVID-19.
“I’m not a technology person, so to be thrown into this was scary,” said Cusano, a teacher at Partin Settlement Elementary in Kissimmee.
Typically about 12 or 13 students out of 20 tune in live. Most of the other children can’t attend classes in the mornings because their parents work. So those students can watch Cusano’s videos later when their parents can help them. She can’t see or hug or talk to her students in person, but she does interact with them online. She filmed class from underneath a shady oak tree in her yard one day. Last week, each student made a “Worry Worm” out of a sock and then wrote down a worry that their worm “wiggled away” – a craft Cusano made up on the fly.
“I had a lot of questions and worries from my students wondering if they were ever going to see me again,” she said.
She doesn’t have all the answers but does the best she can, said Cusano.
She said she also does her best to stay in touch with parents, such as one mother who works at a hospital and doesn’t get home until nearly midnight.
They spoke late one night last week after Cusano’s phone pinged after receiving a message from the mother in Teams. Cusano said much of what the woman needed was a comforting voice and someone to listen to her.
“I tried to ease her mind,” she said.
Her children are grown, so Cusano said she has the time to cater to her students and their families.
“I’m feeling comfortable,” Cusano said Saturday. “I feel like what little that I’ve accomplished is enough for me to get my kids their assignments and communicate well with them.”
Teachers are getting time to adjust to digital learning thanks to lesson plans provided by the district.
Building lesson plans for all teachers from pre-K through 12th grade was a “Herculean” task, said district spokeswoman Dana Schafer.
“We wanted to remove that burden from teachers and give them the lessons so they could focus on the technology side and move everything over to the digital learning platform,” Schafer said.
“Teachers have risen to the challenge. They have been phenomenal. They quickly jumped on board,” she said.
But the technology curve has been tougher for students, she said.
Much of the problem is students’ lack of access to desktop or laptop computers at home.
With nearly 60 percent of Osceola students receiving free or reduced lunch, the district anticipated the need early on and has been scrubbing computers at schools and district offices and prepare them to loan out to students.
The district has already loaned out 5,000 computers and is in the midst of a second round of distribution. Each computer must be specially prepared for a student, including installing a firewall to prohibit access to inappropriate material and certain kinds of websites.
The district learned two important lessons during the first week of the digital year, Schafer said.
The first is that smartphones and tablets generally aren’t sufficient for students to properly access and complete school assignments. And the second is that one computer per family is also not sufficient in many cases.
“We’re looking everywhere. Instead of computers sitting in empty rooms, we’d rather give them to students. There’s still a lot of need,” Schafer said.
Students who cannot access their assignments online are working with paper packets provided by the schools.
“Everybody is coming together to solve the problems and help the family and kids,” she said.
“Our teacher and the school district want to be the voice to the kids that says ‘It’s going to be OK and we’ll get through this together.”
Schools are officially closed through May 1, but the school year doesn’t end until May 27.
Parents can request a laptop for their child by calling their child’s school directly. Other questions can be answered by calling the district’s Digital Learning Hotline at 407-870-4037.
