What’s it like in MS Coast classrooms during COVID-19? Here’s a look inside one.
Half an hour into Wesley Rogers’s broadcast journalism class at Gulfport High School, he was talking at a computer monitor on his desk.
He and his virtual students were strategizing about coverage of upcoming football games for WGTV, the school’s television station.
There were supposed to be seven virtual students on the Zoom call, in addition to the four in Rogers’ classroom, who were cutting highlight clips from a three-hour video of one of last year’s games. But two of the virtual students were absent. Most of the virtual students were temporarily quarantining and supposed to come back to campus soon.
Evenly dividing his attention between virtual and in-person students, Rogers said, was “one of the issues I’m having now— other than the fact that we’ve never done this before.”
Gulfport High School, like most schools across the Coast, reopened in early August with most students on campus and a sizable minority learning at home.
Gulfport was better prepared than many other districts. The district always intended to offer a virtual option. They hired a virtual learning coordinator, provided internet hotspots and Chromebooks, and worked with Sparklight to more than double their bandwidth, allowing most classes to offer “synchronous” instruction, meaning virtual students are joining their on-campus peers via video.
The district even won praise for its reopening plan from Gov. Tate Reeves, who said Gulfport has “taken immense cautions to provide for the safety of their students.”
Rogers said that thanks to the district’s advance planning, virtual learning has “gone pretty well, considering.”
Even districts like Gulfport, however, are dealing with the pandemic’s disruptions. Teachers balance two separate groups, while students struggle to come to terms with all that this year will be missing.
Every new routine is subject to the sudden interruption of quarantine. During the first full week of school, 100 Gulfport High students were sent home for 14 days after possible exposure to someone with COVID-19.
On Rogers’ monitor on Aug. 20, five small boxes containing the heads and shoulders of his students peered out, facing a wall instead of the classroom where their peers were working. How were they feeling about the school year so far?
Adjusting to the situation was “a work in progress,” said senior Alex Raybourn.
Senior Morgan Miller said she was trying to get used to the “new normal.”
“I don’t call it that,” Raybourn said.
‘It’s kind of weird’
The journalism class that Thursday was preparing for WGTV’s first full broadcast of the year. It’s scheduled to air Sept. 4, the day of Gulfport’s first football game of the season, against Oak Grove.
The on-campus students were each set up at a computer, responsible for viewing a quarter of the video of last year’s game against Oak Grove. They were looking for highlight clips to play alongside the interview Raybourn will do with Gulfport’s coach.
The pandemic has introduced all kinds of new technical frustrations for students and teachers, but it has not eliminated the old ones. The long video files were loading “so slowly,” senior Nar’Quita Tyler said.
Gulfport’s new safety rules made typical classwork more challenging, said D’Janee Harris. Usually, they could go from class to class and pull out students for interviews. Now, they have assigned seats in every class and aren’t allowed to move around much in the building, because that would complicate contact tracing and quarantining.
Harris said that even with her virtual classmates on screen nearby, it felt like they weren’t “on the same page.”
“We can’t collaborate,” she said.
The students had talked about how to cover the effects of the virus at their school on WGTV.
“We want to do a day in the lives of people at school, a day in the lives of people doing virtual,” Tyler said. “But we don’t want to keep it going every episode, because we want WGTV to be something fun, an escape.”
Rogers got up from his desk to help troubleshoot computer issues. He left his speakers on and told the virtual students to shout if they needed anything.
On Zoom, his virtual students started chatting with each other.
“Have y’all done a lot of college applications yet?” asked senior Julian Dedeaux.
They talked about deadlines, the arduousness of certain applications, and early acceptances.
But senior Cristina Lee said this was the first casual conversation she could remember having with her virtual classmates. Usually, when Rogers is working with the kids physically in his classroom, the virtual students sit quietly at their screens.
“Now, everyone’s on screen and the teacher can hear everything you say,” Lee said. “It’s kind of weird.”
The big quarantine
Lee started out attending Gulfport in person. After 100 students were sent home to quarantine, she decided to switch to virtual learning. It felt safer.
“I was like, ‘You know what, I’m good,’” Lee said. “I’m just gonna end the semester at home. It was so scary, and it just happened all at once.”
Sandy Commer-East, communications director for the Gulfport School District, said a few other Gulfport High students made the same decision. Now, 694 of the school’s 1,768 students are learning virtually for the entire semester.
Beyond the group of 100 that was sent home, an additional five teachers and 38 students were in quarantine on the day the Sun Herald visited in mid-August, Commer-East said, all because of the same possible exposure to a student who tested positive. No one was ill.
Two of the broadcast journalism students who were quarantining were still deciding whether they want to return to campus or keep learning virtually. One of them, Dedeaux, said he liked studying at home, in his own space. He also has family members at high risk of serious effects from the virus.
Raybourn was ready to go back to school. Even when she’s participating in class via video, it’s not like being in the room.
“Sometimes you feel like the teachers kind of forget you’re there,” she said. “They’re talking to the class that’s there.”
Virtual choir class was particularly odd. Raybourn and her classmates learn their music and sing into their laptops. The teacher mutes them to avoid the blurred cacophony of dozens of teenage voices emitting from his computer at once.
‘Once things get back to normal’
By the end of the period, the students in Rogers’s classroom hadn’t made much progress in cutting down the game video. Tahj Talley, a senior who is new to Gulfport High, was the only one who’d been able to get the file to load. Harris helped him cut the clips he wanted to use.
Rogers and the virtual students were talking about the need for new cameras. Had the broadcast journalism program ever done fundraising? someone asked. Rogers said no. And the pandemic would complicate any effort they might launch now.
“People that my have been contributors may have lost their jobs,” he said.
Maybe they could discuss fundraising later.
“I’m hoping once things get back to normal, I think that will really help,” he told his students. “I think that’s at least a year down the road.”
