Last Kindergarten Teacher Standing
To better understand the extent to which COVID impacted education, one might start by looking at the kindergarten classrooms in one urban elementary school in Florida. After struggling through years of rapidly changing COVID-related policies, procedures, and practices, Ms. Lee was the only kindergarten teacher left. She explained that eight other kindergarten teachers moved on during this difficult time, with most leaving the profession because they felt as though they could no longer balance their home and work responsibilities.
I’m the only kindergarten teacher that stayed from the start of pandemic to the end. We lost all of them. We lost maybe eight different teachers or more if you count this year. Some of them had small children at home, and they had to take care of their own kids at home, so they quit because they couldn’t handle it anymore.
This mass exodus was put into motion in March of 2020 when Ms. Lee and her colleagues learned about the COVID pandemic. As rumblings of the effects of the pandemic started to spread across the county, their school district decided it was time to temporarily transition to online instruction. However, as COVID transmission spiked, the district made the decision to remain online for the rest of the school year.
Honestly, we thought we were going to have a week off. We thought it might be a day or two. We had no clue that those kids were going to go home and never come back or only be online.
As students went home in March of 2020, Ms. Lee’s school district was able to equip all students with laptops so they could participate in online instruction during this time.
I have to say my county was amazing the way they came up with computers for every single student.
Additionally, the district took exceptional measures to ensure students were online and present for instruction. Ms. Lee recalled that the district even enlisted the help of social workers to go out and check on students that weren’t online in those first few weeks.
It was just unbelievable how hard they pulled together. . . . They literally had social workers going out and checking on why [students] weren’t online. So they really, really did a heck of a job.
The majority of Ms. Lee’s kindergarten class were English Language Learners (ELL). To bridge the language gap, her students regularly used Immersive Reader software3 on their computers to help with translations. Ms. Lee noted that the Immersive Reader software was extremely helpful during online instruction.
I speak a little bit of Spanish, but we have Immersive Reader on our computers, and it was already there because of being an ELL school. We just had to figure out how to use it more, and it was amazing how well set up [my school] was. . . . We were really set up and ready for [online learning], and I don’t think anybody could have ever imagined, but we just were.
The school district provided teachers with a lot of autonomy when it came to deciding what content to cover with students during online instruction. Although it was not mandatory, Ms. Lee chose to teach science.
I do have a very strong background in science. I have an associate’s degree in biology, and I was a medical illustrator, so science is my thing. I integrated a lot of it into my choices because at that point, we were pretty much on our own to do our curriculum.
Because of her passion for and background in science, Ms. Lee also decided to use curriculum materials provided by her county to discuss COVID-related topics. She noted that she aimed to not only involve her students in learning about COVID, but also their parents.
There was a curriculum my county posted that was online, and so I utilized it for discussing washing your hands and how to cough. . . . And I also had that in my curriculum for the parents to do with the kids, so they could go and educate themselves.
Instruction remained online for the first part of the following school year (2020–21), with a shift back to in-person instruction in December 2020. As students returned to the classroom, the district requested that teachers emphasize mathematics and language arts in an effort to combat learning loss.
They really just wanted us to teach the kids the letters, their sounds, and the basic math skills, their numbers, how to count. So we were so geared towards getting the basics into them.
3Immersive Reader is an online tool designed to help students improve their reading and comprehension. It also translates text into different languages.
