The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District has plans to ensure that students, scheduled to be out of school until the end of March, retain access to an education from their teachers and schools.
Teachers in the district will be returning to classrooms on Tuesday, March 17, and part of their responsibilities with no students in the classroom will be developing methods of keeping their students educated from afar.
Pegge Erkeneff of the KPBSD: “We’re working on how we’re going to be delivering things, both over the internet, and we also know lots of families don’t have that access. They’ll need the ability to create packets and we may end up using buses to deliver them. We haven’t figured that all out, but we are working to meet the needs of our diverse communities and give lots of options for people. So, that is definitely in the works – we’ve been planning that for over a week.”
She added that parents can expect to be contacted about their family’s specific needs with regards to education, food, and more: “Everybody can expect a call in the next several days from the school district to assess what their needs are. What they need, what kind of ability they have to get information and content online, how are they for meals, so we’re going to be checking in with every one of our families over the next couple of days.”
As a third-party measure, Scholastic Education has a program called Learn at Home that allows students to keep learning while schools are closed. The online program offers daily courses for students from pre-kindergarten to grades 6 and higher. The program provides approximately three hours of learning opportunities per day, for up to four weeks of instruction. Students can expect writing and research projects based on nonfiction articles and stories, virtual field trips, reading and geography challenges, and more. The service is free-of-charge to parents.
Lauren Tarshis of Scholastic Classroom Magazine: “As more and more teachers, students, and families around the world are affected by the coronavirus, our priority is to support them in the best way we know how: by providing them with rich stories and meaningful projects that will keep kids academically active.”
For more updates on the Kenai Peninsula School District, they recommend using their social media accounts, such as Twitter, or visiting their website.