We Created a Virtual School in 3 Days and 95.6% Showed UP!
Like educators around the globe, Team Ednovate has spent the past week working on our plan to go completely virtual, as we help our communities in the best way we can to get our current public-health crisis. After a lot of quick, hard work by the team and our fantastic group of innovative educators, we went virtual starting on Monday, March 16. And I wanted to share some of the learnings we’ve had and the adjustments we are making.
Currently, we are at 95.6% attendance across all schools. Spirits are up and being boosted by the adrenaline rush that comes with a rapid, teamwide response to a new challenge facing our schools.
Here is a short 60 second video of what learning looked like on Day 1 between students and staff. I’m really proud of how everyone came together and put in so much great effort and camaraderie in a very unusual last week before our spring break, which begins March 23.
Ednovate is a network of five high schools in LA and Orange County with 86% qualifying for free or reduced lunch. We focused on personalized learning starting in 2013 so our infrastructure might be a little different.
3 Days before Closing School (3/11-3/13)
3/11 surveyed students on tech access at home
3/11 set up an academic task force to design minimum academic model for online learning which included assistant principals at every school
3/12 -3/13 every student who wanted to check out their Chromebook did after signing our form.
3/13 called lunch vendor to set up meal drive by pick-ups for week of 3/16
3/13 established staff remote guidelines (thanks Alliance and Dan for sharing this and more!)
3/13 all staff video conference on updated 4 week plan
Things we've learned since launch (3/16-3/20)
We needed to build a better system for the attendance of both students and staff to get up to date info by 10 a.m. Working on that now.
Need a better communications plan between school/network to parents. Everyone's heart is in the right place to answer questions fast, and we had to explicitly share emails knowing that whatever our support team sent to schools, they would be forwarded quickly to parents. We also purchased a central system for more coordinated parent communication.
Google hangout has its limits for both classrooms and team meetings. Piloting Zoom now.
Schools that had the highest attendance (97%) send out daily surveys at 8 a.m. which have mental health check-ins, academic planning and maintenance questions. At 10 a.m., school leadership and teachers started to call students who did not complete the form to make sure they were ok and have the resources they need. Showing that we care if they are present and connected seems to be the most important thing we can do right now.
We realize that leaders need updated training on facilitating team meetings in a virtual world. Created a video-first culture and kept our daily 10-minute huddles across the whole organization.
We purchased hotspots for the 3% of our students who don't have access to wifi and didn't quality for the free resources out there today.
Questions that we are currently thinking about
We are planning for Q4 (10 weeks) to be all online. Rethinking schedule of classes from daily to block scheduling. What is the next level of training for teachers when we return?
What do we do about graduation, college signing day, prom? Can we do any of those virtually?
How do we think about community-service requirements?
Should we be worried about cash flow and if so, how do we prepare if it takes our state government six months (or more) to figure things out?
How do we repurpose people like culture staff, office manager assistants, coaches during this time so they can help ensure a great student virtual experience?
What about ACT, college acceptances and financial aid?
Some of the brightest highlights
Staff has really rallied behind this challenge by sharing resources across all schools, hosting virtual dance/happy hour/workout sessions.
Parents took way more food than we expected and brought a lot of family and community members with them.
Attendance and engagement are really high. We have about 95% attendance and about 75% of work being submitted on time, a rate we’re looking to improve upon when we return!
If any of you have questions...or answers to our questions...feel free to email me directly. And if there is anything we can do to help, please let us know. Here’s sending along well-wishes to all of our dedicated educators everywhere.
Oliver Sicat, CEO