Ilsa Minor | Daily Press Students in Becki Leisenring’s class at the Webster Kindergarten Center work on various activities recently. While some parents have opted to keep their kids home rather than risk exposure to COVID-19, the vast majority of students are still learning in the classroom.

ESCANABA — Online education is difficult for many families, but there are unique challenges when the students are kindergartners.

Currently, there are 211 students enrolled at the Webster Kindergarden Center in kindergarten and begindergarten. Of those students, 30 have been learning from home this year due to the pandemic.

“The remainder of the kids are here face-to-face, but teachers have been here diligently trying to replicate the kindergarten experience online as best they can. Of course, the social-emotional part is hard to do, but they’re doing the best they can to provide the content to those kids,” said Krista Johnson, principal at Webster Kindergarten Center.

Three classrooms at Webster include online students. One is a self-paced classroom, where the students log into a special website filled with teacher-created videos. Those students meet with their teacher once a week via Google Meet, a video conferencing app, on iPads the school has provided them. The other two classrooms, one begindergarten and one kindergarten, have set times of the day when the students log in through Google Meet to learn and interact with their teachers and other students live.

For some projects and assignments, the students have to work with physical objects, like dice. Those projects are included in folders the students pick up, along with any necessary materials, once a week from the school’s lobby. After the week is over, the folders and materials are brought back to the school to be reviewed by the teacher.

Occasionally, students learn using other apps on their iPads, but the majority of online learning is done through the video lessons. Because kindergartners don’t have the ability to read, the videos present material in a way that’s easily accessible to them, and the video conferences give students some of the social and emotional interaction that is necessary for their development.

“The other day, our self-paced teacher had her kids that were on a Google Meet, and she walked them around the building just to show them the facilities; to introduce them to some of our staff members — and that’s really one of our goals this year, to make sure that those families that are online feel connected,” said Johnson.

Some experiences can only be had in person, but Webster is working hard to bring as many of those experiences to the students as possible without the risk of exposing them to the virus. One way the school is doing that is by moving the annual trip to a pumpkin patch to the school. Today, the Webster will be receiving a delivery of 220 pumpkins for students, and the school will be hosting hay rides over the next three days for the kids.

“We’ve invited our kids who are online to come either before school or after school so that they can experience that. So they may not be interacting with other students, they can still have some of that normal kindergarten experience of going to a pumpkin patch,” said Johnson.

These modified experiences reduce the risk of transmitting the virus responsible for COVID-19, but so far, Webster has been lucky. Unlike other schools in the district — like Lemmer Elementary and the Junior/Senior High School, which shut down earlier this month due to a spike in cases — Webster has had no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among students or among staff in the last two weeks.

That doesn’t mean the effects of the virus haven’t kept some students home. Some of the students who have been participating in in-person education have been sent home this year to quarantine after being exposed to a family member or someone else in the child’s life outside of school.

“Usually it’s short-term. Maybe a week, at most two weeks, and then we provide work for them at that point,” said Johnson.

Whether students are participating in online education for the long-term or the short-term, parents may face new struggles, acting as both parent and teacher. However, Johnson said the school does its best to support parents with the struggles they’re experiencing on a case by case basis.

“There are some (parents) that have expressed that it’s been difficult and there are several of them that have, because of that, sent their kids back face-to-face, but I think our teachers have done such a phenomenal job of communicating with parents, and as parents are having issues they work directly with those families to make it easier,” said Johnson.

“If parents are struggling, then we’re here to help them and try to work through that,” she added.