2. Our union negotiated an almost entirely async day on Mondays. This allows for teachers to grade, prep, meet, and check in with kids. Honestly, I will miss it so much when we go back.

3. On Mondays we do meet with a small group of kids for check in (for some sites this is advisory for other sites it is not) this is met with mixed results. Advisories are such a tough program to run and I really think async did not help. I basically do the Anne show for 30 min.

4. District: We have opened learning pods at each site. These are groups of kids who just couldn't make distance learning works. It is a SMALL number of kids but they do their distance learning in a room with a sub. They stay in the same room all day.

5. Union: The union negotiated extra pay and some teachers are running the learning pods and helping kids after they teach. This is a big ask for teachers but they are being paid to compensated and it is CHOICE.

6. District/Union: On Mondays we go through our attendance and if kids are not coming to zoom class or completing work teachers reach out to them.

School: My school's attendance is actually up this year.

District: if a kid is on the no show list for multiple classes the AP and social workers are doing home visits to figure out why. They are delivering tech and anything else.

7. District started in April planning online course shells and goals for the year. Teachers built these all summer. These are available to all teachers and teachers got almost two weeks of extra prep at the start of the year (and also Mondays)

8. Huge shout out to our Superintendent who said, "You need to cut 40%-60% of your curriculum. It is just not possible this year."

This sentence lets me breathe.

I think that is all the district/union stuff. Okay, here's all the things that are working at my school, which for context, has 800ish kids in grades 9-12 and was set up in a way that really made this transition doable.

Some more background: Our 9-11 graders are villaged which means they spend their days with the same 30-40 kids. Each set of 3 village teachers have the same 120ish kids. Math is outside the village and when the kids are in math their village teachers can meet.

Also, each grade has two teachers per subject (not math). So there are like 2 9th English and so forth.

I teach 1 section of Math 9 and 2 sections of Math 11.

Okay, back to way this all works.

9. Our kids are really only tracking 4 classes as once. This really really helps kids stay on top of stuff.

(Oh I forgot UNION: we must but sync for only 33% of the class period which allows kids to breathe between classes)

10. I am on two math teams (math 9 and 11) we take turns building the lessons for the day. So instead of planning sync and async work for the kids everyday I am doing about 1/3 of the time.

11. SCHOOL: Our principal allowed us out of teaching days to unit plan as a group. This is HUGE. Having fully planned lessons and units allows us to focus on kids and not content (always my goal).

12. SCHOOL/TEAM: We have discovered 2-3 10-15 minute async assignments per week is enough. More than that and kids get overwhelmed and panic.

13. School: Okay, our grading policy pre-pandemic is one of the best things: we only grade on individual competency. Basically all the formative work, though important is ungraded. If a kid is competent at a skill they pass. (this is a bigger convo for another time)

14. School: Because we don't grade on behavior there is no such thing as later work. Student can submit for +2semesters (I cannot go into this now but I will link)

Bah, here is the link
https://4.files.edl.io/f59c/08/08/18/160649-3ba246f8-251a-4e58-99a6-9364f87e35f3.pdf

15. School: I am sure there are more things but I want to end on the thing that is working best: A shared belief that school is not the most important thing in kids lives right now and however we can help we should. This includes adding routine and structure to this bizarre time.