WICHITA, Kansas — Less than a week into the new school year, the warning came: The school district’s COVID-19 learning plan expected too much from teachers.
“It’s unsustainable,” Greg Jones, a representative for the Kansas National Education Association, told the Wichita school board. “We don’t think that things can continue as they are.”
Public schools in Kansas are asking a lot from remote teachers this year. They must figure out how to shift their lessons online — without the wiggle room granted in the spring. Teachers need to learn new technology. Students need help getting their new computers and tablets working, too.
All that must happen while teaching twice as many kids to compensate for the split between in-person and online classes.
Some educators warn that they can’t do right by students — or their own families — under the current conditions. Unions said teachers are already leaving.
“It’s becoming such an overwhelming challenge that many teachers are resigning early,” said Marcus Baltzell, the spokesperson for the Kansas National Education Association. “Many are just outright quitting.”
In Sarah Westbury’s 10 years of teaching, she says she’s never worked this hard.
“It’s honestly not best practice for our students,” she said.
Westbury teaches fourth and fifth grade — remotely this year — at Franklin Elementary in Wichita. Tech problems have plagued her classes since the start of the school year. Students keep getting booted off district-provided internet devices. Some kids had never opened a laptop before. Teachers still battle with the Microsoft Teams platform.
While the tech problems are taking longer than expected to get over, educators expect them to get better. Inflated online class sizes are a more stubborn issue.
Wichita Public Schools says about 15 students is the ideal number for a class doing the normal number of in-person lessons. But Westbury has nearly 40 kids in one class, which she has managed as tiny squares crammed into a computer screen.
In Wichita, elementary students were allowed to sign up for in-person classes. Middle school and high school students must learn online for now. The district needs more teachers for in-person classes to keep them small enough to leave room for social distancing. That means the few teachers available for online lessons must take on more students, often twice the norm.
And those students could come from different grades. Westbury teaches both fourth- and fifth-grade students at the same time. Some lessons crossover between the grades. Yet as the year goes on, what those students are supposed to learn drifts farther and farther apart.
Between the class size, the different tech needs of each student and teaching two grades at once, Westbury does not believe she or other teachers can deliver what’s best for students.
“Lord knows, we’re trying,” Westbury said. “But we definitely can’t sustain this with the staffing that we have.”
