Classes will be virtual when school starts again Monday in Juneau.
Students and teachers hope the lessons learned from the quick transition to virtual learning last spring will carry over.
Linnea Lentfer says this is not how she imagined her senior year of high school going.
“It was a disappointment, but not a total surprise,” she said on Friday.
Lentfer grew up in Gustavus, but came to Juneau to attend Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé.
She said when students were first sent home as the pandemic spread in March, none of them could have guessed they would still be attending virtual classes five months later.
“There’s people from that day who I’m quite literally never going to see again, like the people who I’d just say ‘hi’ to in the hallways every day,” Lentfer said. “Then it’s just like, ‘oh, we’re out for a week. We’re out for a month. We’re not going back to school.’”
With classes starting up again, Lentfer may be luckier than some of her peers. She has a lighter course load as a senior.
Still, it’s hard to imagine how her Oceanography class will work virtually.
“I’m pretty sure that we will have some opportunity to come in to school in small groups for labs, but I’m not sure what that looks like,” she said.
The Juneau School District announced earlier this month that it will begin the school year virtually.
Depending on the number of cases of COVID-19, the district may decide to allow small groups of students to attend in-person classes after Labor Day. But large numbers of students won’t be allowed back until at least mid-October.
Kelly Stewart is the president of the Juneau Education Association. She’s also a special education teacher at Glacier Valley Elementary School.
“When we shut down, we were in full survival emergency mode. And I think our staff did a fantastic job at doing the best they could at something that was so unknown,” Stewart said on Thursday.
This time around, Stewart and many of her colleagues have spent the entire summer planning for the new school year.
Staff spent the last two weeks training with the programs they’ll use to keep track of students. Kindergarten and first grade will use Seesaw. All other grades will use Canvas.
“It’s still going to look different, and we’re going to probably have to work a little harder to engage and get kids involved,” Stewart said. “But I think we’re much better prepared now than we were in March.”
Elementary teachers will also be collaborating in groups to help support one another and to help students become familiar with more than one person.
“So that when they do come back face-to-face at school, or we do move to the hybrid model, that they are going to already know six to nine adults because they’ve been working with them,” Stewart said.
Students and their families have been picking up textbooks and supplies all week, and can continue to do that next week too. The district is providing Chromebooks to students that need them.
Even with all the preparation, Stewart says there are bound to be some hiccups with technology. The roll out of one of the apps teachers will be using is already a little delayed.
Lentfer said she worries that getting to know her new classmates won’t be easy. Last school year when her classes moved online, she already knew everyone.
“So being on Zoom, there was already kind of a classroom culture. And just what that will look like when we start on Zoom for the beginning will be really interesting to see,” Lentfer said.
She’s grateful that she still has the cross country season to look forward to, even if they won’t get to travel. They have their first meet on Saturday, competing remotely against other Southeast teams.
She just hopes that her senior year won’t have to end the way it did last year.
“I really hope we get a little bit more of a graduation and kind of all of those end of high school pieces,” she said. “That’s definitely the hard unknown.”
Classes for grades 1 through 12 begin Monday. Kindergarten starts Thursday and preschool begins the following week.
Breakfast and lunch will continue to be served for pick-up at each school this fall. Masks are mandatory for anyone on school grounds.
