May 5, 2020

By Rob Swenson, for Sioux Falls.Business

A school year like no other still needs a yearbook to chronicle it.

That’s among the many challenges Brittany Hamann, a teacher at Roosevelt High School, has had to overcome in remotely instructing and assisting some of her students. So have about 10 of her students on the yearbook staff.

Hamann teaches biology and astronomy/meteorology at Roosevelt in southwest Sioux Falls. She’s also the co-adviser for the school yearbook and had to figure out how students could finish documenting their year for an annual publication when their school is closed and they, like many other people in the community, have been sequestered in their homes because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To complicate matters, the other yearbook co-adviser recently had a baby. Although it was a joyful event, it also was one that added to Hamann’s content and deadline worries. She has not been complaining, however.

“Putting out a yearbook now is a huge opportunity for students. We are documenting a time in history that a yearbook staff has never had the opportunity to document before, which is really exciting. There’s a lot of responsibility that goes along with that because we want to make sure we’re reporting correctly,” Hamann said.

The project has required more work than she would have imagined, she said, but the yearbook is slowly coming together.

Hamann’s husband, Kevin, is an air traffic controller. He cares for the couple’s 18-month-old son on days that he’s not at work. That makes Hamann’s teaching duties easier to manage.

Teachers throughout the Sioux Falls School District and beyond have been facing a variety of unique challenges as they adapt their teaching methods to the limitations dictated by the pandemic. They lean heavily on communications technology, from email to videoconferencing, to do their jobs. But connecting with students also requires creativity.

For instance, Grace Gill, who teaches AP Government at Roosevelt, arranged this Zoom conference for her students with U.S. Sen. John Thune.

The Sioux Falls School District alone employs about 1,850 teachers and 3,400 staff members overall, which makes it one of the largest employers in Sioux Falls.

Changes in education also have been life-altering for many of the parents and guardians of the nearly 25,000 students who attend public schools – especially for the parents of younger children who need a lot of personal attention and guidance.

Kitchen tables, home offices, bedrooms and patios have been the new classrooms since mid-March, and they will remain local hubs of educational activity, at least for the rest of the 2019-20 school year.

Stacy Nelson is among the working parents in Sioux Falls who have taken on the added duty of being a teaching assistant. She works from her home for the risk department at Wells Fargo. She oversees her three children and one niece who share the home. Her husband, Ryan, is a welder for Marmen Energy in Brandon, so he can’t work from home.

The couple’s two older children – a 17-year-old boy who attends Lincoln High School and an 18-year-old niece who takes classes from Luverne, Minn., High School  – are seniors and don’t need parental help. “They can figure it out,” Nelson said.

Her sixth-grader doesn’t need much help, either, she said, but the kindergartener requires a lot of attention.

The niece, who lives with the family because she plans to attend Southeast Technical Institute, assists with teaching duties in a tutor-like role, Nelson said.

Shifting to a home-based education system has been a major adjustment for everyone – students, parents and teachers, Nelson said. “It was a learning experience, for sure,” she said.

Kids wanted to be at school with their friends, and parents had to figure out ways to help their children keep up with classes, Nelson said. The experience today’s students have using technology has been a big help to learning from home, Nelson said.

She has been especially impressed by the adjustment that teachers have made to keep students engaged. For example, kindergarten teacher Erica English thrilled Nelson’s daughter by showing enthusiasm for the girl’s artwork during a Zoom conference. And third-grade teacher Jaime Rockvam takes time in the evenings to chat with her students, Nelson said.

“I feel like they (teachers) are working even harder now than before,” Nelson said.

Other parents shared similar praise in responding to the recent SiouxFalls.Business COVID-19 survey, conducted in partnership with the Augustana Research Institute. Of those with school-age kids, nearly all said they are adapting at least on average to remote learning, with 38 percent saying it’s going very or somewhat well.

More than 100 readers shared comments about how teachers have stepped up, including everything from virtual meetings to sending postcards, driving by in teacher parades, delivering remaining items from lockers and stopping by with a birthday card.

Dr. Beth Jensen also appreciates the work teachers in Sioux Falls have been doing in the new educational environment. She and her husband, Matt, have three school-age daughters, age 14, 12 and 11.

“I think the teachers are doing an exceptional job of being light on their feet and figuring this out,” Jensen said.

She is a part-time family physician who works for Sanford Solutions in Worthington, Minn. She commutes there two days a week. Her husband is the CEO of Vance Thompson Vision and principal at Matt Jensen Marketing. These days, he works mostly from home.

“I think we have the ideal ages of kids right now for what’s going on. The three girls are really independent. The teachers have made it very clear to them what the expectations are,” she said. “I’m feeling like there is very little that I’m needing to do for them.”

The family lives on an acreage near Garretson. The small farm has a garden, greenhouse and variety of animals, including goats, sheep, mini donkeys, a pig, alpaca, ducks, chickens, a dog and cats.

The Jensens’ home is about a 20-minute drive from Sioux Falls. However, the girls attend three different public and private schools in the city. So taking them to school and picking them up afterward had taken about two hours a day.

Jensen appreciates the driving time the family has been saving. What has been lost in extra time for academics or activities at school has been offset by the extra family time and life lessons. Areas of focus can range from cooking and cleaning to healthy living and sustainable agriculture.

“I feel like we have been able to do so much because, one, we are forced to stay put, but also there’s not that fear of missing out,” she said, because other families have been confined to their homes too.

Jensen notes with fascination the different reactions that her three daughters have had to their schools being closed. The oldest girl has really missed participating in show choir and losing the opportunity to perform in concert. The youngest daughter, meanwhile, has embraced the experience to take on home projects, such as figuring out how to hook up an old video system so the family could watch a movie.

“When I went into this, I had all these big plans on how to use their free time. But what’s interesting is seeing what they do with that time when left alone,” Jensen said. “I see unstructured playtime as being really important and maybe something this generation of kids has been missing out on.”

Left to themselves, children can really put their imaginations to work in potentially productive ways, she said.

Penny Brunken is providing parental teaching assistance at home while also teaching other students as a professional instructor. She teaches financial courses at the Career & Technical Education Academy, which is part of the Sioux Falls School District. CTE serves high school students from public and private schools in Sioux Falls and from some neighboring districts.

Brunken’s husband, Austin, who works for AT&T, also is working from home. They have a freshman son, seventh-grade daughter and a third-grade son.

After realizing they both would be working from home, one of the first things they did was contact their internet service provider to increase their service level to accommodate the household’s increased need for bandwidth.

Brunken is in her 20th year as a teacher in the Sioux Falls School District. She also taught for two years in Revillo, so she’s an experienced educator. Teaching other students and assisting your own students takes long hours, a lot of juggling, good communication and good scheduling, she said.

“What’s really changed for me is that typically I would have the business community come in and present to my students about the concepts and topics that we were learning,” she said.

She also liked to have successful alumni come in and speak to students. “That’s been the big change for our program. We had a lot of face-to-face learning and tying in trends and what’s current,” she said.

Initially, teachers thought schools would be closed only for a few weeks, so longer range planning wasn’t an immediate priority. Then, the shutdown was extended for the rest of the school year. That changed class planning and execution.

Students who attend classes at CTE might have to do extra planning because they come from different schools operating on different schedules. Factoring in variables such as jobs also affects student availability.

Brunken, like other teachers, pre-records some of her presentations so that students have flexibility in when they watch or listen. Recorded lectures offer the advantage of providing students the opportunity to stop and rewind presentations so they can listen to parts again. That’s a plus, Brunken said.

Teaching students in their homes remains a work in progress. “It’s trial and error. I think that’s where we’re at in education right now,” Brunken said. “I think something good can come from this in the future. We just need more time to figure it out.”

Teachers said they worry about students whose families are struggling through the economic challenges of the pandemic.

For example, Hamann of Roosevelt said she had students who were doing stellar work during the third quarter and has not heard from them during the fourth quarter. School administrators are trying to reach out to those families, Hamann said, but she still worries about kids.

It’s amazing what some teachers are doing to make sure these students have what they need and are being taken care of, she said.

“Regardless what age you are, you’re having to navigate something that is unimaginable. We’re just trying to teach (students) how to balance a thing like this. How do we make sure we’re checking in on ourselves mentally as well as academically and hitting all of those sides of a person,” Hamann said.

Here’s more of what readers said in describing how teachers have gone above and beyond:

“Mrs. Childress with Rosa Parks has done an amazing job and has a daily ‘masked student’ game where she describes the student and reveals their identity the next day. My son loves to guess, and it keeps them engaged with an interest in their classmates.”

One teacher “created a parent email chain, so parents could talk to each other about biology.”

Another teacher is sending personal video messages on students’ birthdays.

“They are having Google calls. Talking with them. Getting to know them more on how life is going for them.”

“We are in the Spanish immersion program and Sr. Naranjo, my daughter’s kindergarten teacher, has connected with his students via Google Meet in numerous settings, one-on-one, two-on-one and groups multiple times a week in order for the children to continue to get the Spanish language at home.”

“One teacher spent the hour just talking and connecting with students about how they are processing the virus and how they feel emotionally. French will catch up in a day! She was awesome, and our student felt very validated and heard.”

“Robert Frost did ‘miss you’ messages from all of the staff. My oldest daughter didn’t understand some math problems, and the teacher created step-by-step videos for her.”

“Ms. Jensen organized a Zoom meeting and called it Bring Your Pet to School Day! It was a huge hit. My daughter has been wanting to bring her dog to school for show-and-tell.”

Survey results: Sioux Falls residents weigh in on life during COVID-19