SV teachers urged to focus on students first
With Seneca Valley School District's cohort teaching model underway, Superintendent Tracy Vitale took the time at Monday's school board meeting to update parents on the district's approach to teaching during this time.
With many parents in recent meetings asking whether the district would implement synchronous learning, and a petition circulated calling for Seneca to do so, Vitale said the district did not require it, but left it as an option for teachers.
“We did not mandate that teachers do live-streaming last week,” she said. “Some of them did it.”The district has asked, although not mandated, teachers to do more live-streaming, and Vitale said parents “will be seeing more and more of this as we go through the cohort model.”Presently, the district's online-learning option is asynchronous, meaning classes are prerecorded.Vitale said a major concern of the district was the emotional health of many of the students. She shared a story of an elementary student being upset because she didn't know what grade she was in.The superintendent said she asked teachers to pay attention to students who were returning to school for the first time since March and not focus on the technology.That, Vitale said, is one example of why the district did not immediately mandate live-streaming.“We made the decision not to mandate live-streaming on day one because we asked our teachers to pay attention to the children in front of them, the children getting off the buses,” she said.While the district is currently operating on a hybrid schedule — groups of students, divided by the first letter of their surnames, attend school two days weekly and learn virtually the rest of the week — it appears at the moment students will return to school full time Oct. 5.Some other districts in and around Butler County have either returned full-time in-person or implemented mandatory synchronous learning for online days. But, the superintendent added, that does not mean Seneca Valley must follow their lead.Vitale said the district has taken its time in rolling out live-streaming because she wanted teachers and students alike to get used to the technology — and technological challenges.“Every district I speak to has had significant, significant technical difficulties. I have not met a district superintendent who has said their live-streaming is working perfectly,” she said. “Please know that as we wade into this territory it still won't be smooth and perfect, as evidenced tonight on our Zoom meeting.”
