The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and the Kenai Peninsula Education Association, in response to the State of Alaska’s declared state of emergency and uncertainty related to the instruction at the District during the COVID-19 pandemic, came to agreements on teacher evaluations.
Two Memorandum of Agreements were acknowledged and agreed to at Monday night’s Kenai Peninsula School District’s board of education meeting. Both were acknowledgements of teacher evaluations being affected because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pegge Erkeneff, Director of Communications, Community, and Government Relations for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District spoke to KSRM that that the agreement was also for the support staff, “Some of the things that we know is that evaluations are helpful especially for our non-tenured teachers and those will stay in place because we do believe that that helps them form their experience and develop with their professional development, or PD, and become a better teacher. But for our tenured teachers, so anyone who has worked for the first day of their fourth year, this will just be supportive of recognizing how much more everybody is doing because of COVID. Some teachers are teaching remotely, but we can still do observations. This is just really being helpful recognizing how much is on everybody’s plate and recognizing we’ve got good teachers and we’ll be as supportive as we can, but this offers just a little more breathing room for everybody.”
She also explains how difficult it’s been for education in general during this COVID-19 pandemic, “This school year that we started in August, even though we have remote learning, is different than when Spring Break ended and we resumed school in March. One of the things our district did last March was we took that two weeks that the governor gave all of the schools was he extended spring break for students, but all the staff came back to work, and we kicked into high gear with our team and we offered a week of professional development. We offered hundreds of classes for our teachers and all of our staff to start shifting that mindset of how well I change my classroom to be 100% remote learning. We recognize not all of our students can learn remotely with a digital platform because some of them don’t even have internet at home so we also have paper packets. Now in our district, we offer on-site, at school learning or 100% remote learning. There’s a lot of students that weren’t able or couldn’t because of health reasons or family situations to come back to on-site school as long as the coronavirus is in effect.
Erkeneff thanked her staff in recognition of how difficult this pandemic has been for teachers, staff and students.