By Douglas Reeves
January 4, 2021
The Challenge:
Greenfield Middle School in Greenfield, Wisconsin serves approximately 750 students, the majority of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and more than 40% of whom have a home language other than English. In the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, many students did not have access to technology, and those who did often failed to engage in scheduled synchronous learning and failed to submit required work. Even after great efforts were made to provide computers to all students and provide internet connections for every home, student engagement remained elusive. Parents were preoccupied with multiple siblings and jobs that took them out of the home, and the district did not have a clear accountability system to identify which students were missing scheduled school work. Before COVID, in the 2018-2019 school year, student attendance was 96%. But once COVID hit and the schools were closed, half the students were not engaged in school.
Leadership and Teacher Actions:
With only two administrators for 750 students and a teaching staff that included many first-year teachers, every leader was stretched to the breaking point. The principal, Brad Iding, and assistant principal, Rebecca Stolz, divided labor, with Brad attending to the administrative duties for the school, and Rebecca diving into the challenge of missing students. Stolz identified every student who was enrolled, but not participating in on-line learning. She found students who were earning A’s and B’s in the pre-COVID semesters but were now failing. And disengaged from school. She began contacting families, one by one, to identify the reasons for student absences. Her single message was, “When you are not here, we miss you.” No blame, no accusation, no lectures – just “we miss you.” Stolz reported that some students were surprised that school administrators knew their name and knew that they were absent. “In the digital world,” Stolz recounted, “it’s easy to remove yourself as a student and believe that nobody will miss you when you are gone.”
Students were trying to do school on their own. Parents were not there to help. “It’s very hard for a 12-year-old to maneuver around school in a live environment, and nearly impossible in a virtual environment,” Stolz said. Students needed books and calls to remind them to get out of bed and log on. Stolz began a series of home visits, typically lasting 30 minutes, during which she simply listened to parents, grandparents, and students about the challenges of being successful in school during a shut-down. Stolz noted that in the many homes where grandparents were raising the children, they were not at all familiar with technology in general and had never seen Google Classroom or Zoom, two of the primary methods of communication that the school expected students to use.
Two administrative assistants at the school joined this communication campaign, calling any missing students the first thing in the morning. “You missed math, but it’s not too late to be in school for the rest of the day,” they said. “We miss you!”, echoing the primary message Stolz was conveying in person. Stolz used multiple methods of communication, including texts, calls, and personal visits. Automated e-mails from the school simply did not get the attention of most parents and students. But getting students connected was just the first step in the process. Many students, Stolz noted, would finally log on, but would cover their cameras and not participate in class.
“Students just didn’t feel connected,” she said, “even when they had a computer and reliable internet connections.” The response to this challenge was to create a small in-person school group two days a week. They took 20 students who were chronically disengaged, and brought them to school. Teachers would pull one or two students out for individual support and other teachers would remain in the room to help students with the basics of getting school work done. Specifically, students needed help in operating the computer, keyboarding, reading, and organization – all skills that are especially challenging for students who were behind their peers in a normal environment and absolutely essential for students in a virtual environment.
The Results:
The most important metric that reflected this work was student attendance. By December 2020, it was 99%, with only three students missing on the day I interviewed Stolz. Attendance was better in the middle of the pandemic than it had been before COVID struck the community. Moreover, Stolz noted, student engagement improved not only with respect to student-teacher communication, but also with students interacting with one another. They played games, had friendly competitions, and supported one another. “They were just happy to be in school,” Stolz said, a condition that doesn’t always happen with middle school students without a pandemic.
One of the most important inferences from this case study is that the school did not receive extra staff or other support to engage in this relentless drive for student attendance. They quickly accepted the fact that their traditional responses to student absences – calls and e-mails to parents later in the day – were not working. In a matter of weeks, they took the initiative to engage in new practices, including the time-consuming but essential practice of home visits. As a result, they changed not only the attendance rate, but also the emotional and psychological engagement of students. And they did it all with one consistent message: We miss you.