


“Pretty much the only thing you can do is cry or laugh, but you have 23 kids sitting there so you have to laugh.” ‘It’s 100% easier to hide’
#Santa rosa county kindergarten sight word list how to
Matteson said in some ways she is learning right along with her kids, so she can show them how to handle it when things don’t go as planned, when things go wrong, when what she expected to happen just doesn’t.

"Or playing games with a partner where you are socializing and it’s ’I see how that person did it so I can do it too.’“ Part of the magic of kindergarten is we are writing in sand, we are writing in shaving cream, we are writing letters on the board,” she said. Some lessons crucial to kindergarten are difficult to convey through a screen. They may not have any clue what real school is like, but they love school,” she said, noting it’s called “Zoom school” among her pupils.īut some parts are hard. Matteson, who now teaches kindergarten at Hidden Valley Elementary, says for many of her students, distance learning is the only kind of school they know. ”It’s got to be all ’We.’“ ‘You have to laugh’ "It’s not an us versus them situation, it’s a ’We,’“ he said. “I think there is a high level of stress.”Īnd that will take empathy going forward. “Think about all the challenges that each school has had to face, that each teacher has had to face,” he said. SCOE has hired eight mental health providers to help students and staff deal with cumulative stress, he said. Still more are likely to have social-emotional issues that will manifest as they rejoin classrooms and social structures. Not only will students have a massive amount of learning loss that started with the deadly Tubbs fire in 2017, but many are suffering from emotional trauma. The long term implications may be more so, according to Steve Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education. At the same time, increasingly desperate parents demanded schools be reopened. Educators, many forced to learn an entirely new way of delivering curriculum without the human connection that drew them to teaching in the first place, expressed increasing concern about the safety of returning to the classroom. More than 7 out of 10 Sonoma County teens who participated in a national wellness study reported anxiety about their futures. Teachers accustomed to white boards and worksheets were suddenly forced to manage video links and sometimes spotty Wi-Fi service.Īnd as the months wore on, the number of kids with failing grades skyrocketed. And still more were forced to work from home and were confronted by the competing the demands of careers, caregiving and educating. Some parents were unable to work and others considered “essential” went to work every day, some worrying about their own health and the health of those they lived with. Overnight, families scrambled to make arrangements for younger students who were suddenly at home all day. The phrase “distance learning,” and the reality it brought with it, was born. Students would learn from home, via a computer and paper worksheets, as teachers worked to communicate lessons remotely. The following morning Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Diann Kitamura alerted staff and students in the 15,700-student district that school would not resume in-person when spring break concluded. “I remember being in this weird place that Friday - what do we say to these kids? Do we say ’See you next Monday?’ or ’We love you and we‘ll see you soon?’ In that moment, because I didn’t know what to say, I knew that this was different,” Matteson recalled. While only two cases had been detected in Sonoma County, educators throughout the county were already worried schools might not reopen after their annual weeklong break. Two days earlier, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic. But she wasn’t sure what to tell her charges as they left campus on March 13, 2020, for spring break. Matteson, who was a first grade teacher at Steele Lane Elementary School last spring, has led her classes through an array of school closures caused by wildfires, power shut-offs and poor air quality in recent years. Hannah Matteson wasn’t sure what to tell her students.
