The Tehama County Department of Education Story (December 2020)
Jim Southwick:
The need was how do we serve families who have students that are distance learning and parents who need to go to work, especially like first responders and medical workers and those folks. And so, our afterschool team is incredibly creative and responsive and started brainstorming what we could do as a county office to support our education community. And through that we started looking for facilities to be able to house students, and we were lucky enough to have enough students that, enough families that wanted to do it to have each grade level have a classroom, and so then we had to find facilities.
We went through several options. We thought we had a community center, became a testing center, so we didn’t get that one. We had a private high school that had closed down. Thought we were gonna get it, but the diocese had another plan for it. Carla Stroman, our director of afterschool programs, reached out to Shasta College. They had an empty campus here in Tehama because students were distance learning at the college level, and they have beautiful facilities, and said, “Yeah, we’d love to have you on our site.” And they gave us access.
We had kindergarten through eighth grade, each grade level had their own classroom. We had two facilitators in each classroom. We probably had students from six or seven different districts in a classroom, by grade level, with a structured schedule. Those students had a laptop, had earphones. They were listening to their teacher through distance learning and responding as appropriately. And just, you know, through the collaboration of the community, a need that was identified by our afterschool staff, the pandemic that really created it and how we responded is just, it’s a tribute to our county superintendent who really stresses community relationships and partnerships. And because of that, we had some in place that we were able to respond. And so, you know, really it was a team effort led by Carla Stroman in our afterschool department.
Let me just talk for a second about what I see as our district and county office’s biggest need going forward. Obviously healthy staff. Our shutdowns that have occurred have happened because we have staff that are in quarantine much more so than students. And so, healthy staff would be a really good thing. There’s such a limited number of subs that we just are not able to keep their doors open in some of our districts, and so, you know, that’s a big deal.
The other one is really social emotional needs. We’re seeing it not only in our students, but in our staff members, in our adults. We started a social-emotional learning community last year and continued, this is our second year now. We’ve grown to about 80 people that were at our first social-emotional community of practice last month. We have leadership team with folks from most of our districts that are the steering committee for that. And again, our Rich DeVarney, our county superintendent, has set the stage two years ago and said, “This is what is gonna be a focus for us for the next five years,” committed resources to it. And that again, came from a response of listening to our districts and what they were wanting and needing, and so we luckily had that structure in place and had years of experience under our belt when the pandemic hit and are able to really focus on the adult SEL this year, which is what we’re doing.
And so, you know, that’s the biggest need, I think, is to continue to support our adults in the system so that they have the capacity to support the students in the system. Yeah, and so, we’re focusing on that and putting a lot of energy in that. Allowing students to answer each other, and not feeling like, “Okay, I’m the moderator of this room, this chat room that has all these people in it,” but set the stage that students can ask and answer questions of each other within that environment, and so I see those things happening.
I also know that students have their computer set up, and they may have a laptop or a phone where they have two or three friends on the side while they’re having a lesson, right? And so, they’re interacting at the same time that they’re interacting as a whole class. And so, teachers have embraced that, and, you know, we kind of got to a point where we had a choice. We can fight against it and say, “No, you need to be focused solely on this classroom experience,” or it’s gonna be okay to have your friends over here and have some side conversations, as long as when we’re doing check-ins, you know what’s going on.
I talked to a fourth-grade student who does that with three other students from that class, and they almost have a small group going on at the same time that they have their big class group going on, and so that’s turned out to be helpful. And so, teachers have, and I’m not saying that all teachers are doing that, but in this particular case, this teacher has embraced that and allowed those conversations. They can talk about a math problem on the side without having to talk about it in front of the whole group. And then they can respond and feel confident about their answer.