Caroline Carlson | Daily Press Elaine Cousineau’s first grade classroom enjoys lessons in their pajamas on Pajama Day at Lemmer Elementary School in Escanaba recently.

ESCANABA — The school year has been a challenge to both students and teachers.

Reflecting on the school year so far, area school superintendents praised their staff, saying that despite this being a difficult year, teachers are working harder than ever to give students the best education they can provide in difficult times.

Escanaba Superintendent Dr. Coby Fletcher said one challenge has been attendance. He notes the state changed the way attendance is taken — in an effort, Fletcher believes, to make things easier. Instead, he said it has created another learning curve, amidst many. Gladstone Superintendent Doug Leisenring also remarked on the change the state made to recording attendance, sayingt it is measured via two-way interaction. It can be through text, online applications, email, logged-in and online or on-camera. Leisenring said how this ipacts teachers is harder to track.

“That’s the direct result of teachers trying to work in both worlds. Sometimes things get missed. That’s why it’s so much better to have kids in school,” he said, noting his teachers have been more lenient on attendance as a result.

To head off issues with attendance, Manistique schools has chosen a very straightforward approach for its online students. “Kids are kids, and if you allow them to ‘no video,’ they may walk away. Let’s just say there may be some that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. So we allow them that they have to be where you can see via camera. And if teachers don’t see them, they’re marked absent,” Superintendent Harold Parmentier said.

Mid Peninsula School Superintendent Eric VanDamme said teachers there continue to take attendance the same way they did in the past with in-person teaching. The teacher calls roll and each student unmutes and says, “present.”

What VanDamme’s teachers sometimes do struggle with is students “ghosting” them. This means when video is not streaming students sometimes walk away from the class and are not actually engaged anymore. In response to the problem, VanDamme said teachers will ask a specific student a question and give them about 30 seconds to respond. When students are caught ghosting, teachers will reach out to the student by email. If the behavior continues, they follow up with the student’s parents. “We like to try and give students the opportunity to manage their own success,” said VanDamme. He added most of the time the students get back on track without having to pursue parent involvement.

Parent involvement is another common thread superintendents are noticing this year. “We’ve had more parent involvement than we ever had,” VanDamme said, calling the parents, “phenomenal.”

The involvement hasn’t always been easy however, says Parmentier. “It’s hard because obviously parents get aggravated with the district, for example, with quarantine and things like that. Yet we’re following the health department. One thing I’ve often shared with parents is, ‘I understand your aggravation, but that’s a question that you need to contact LMAS about because I’m not a doctor, I’m just following guidelines that I’ve been given,'” he said. LMAS is the Luce, Mackinac, Alger, and Schoolcraft District Health Department.

School officials are also monitoring how students are doing academically,

“We have some idea in the short term that kids are doing okay. I think we’d all prefer to have them face-to-face. In the longer term we’ll have a much clearer idea of how the kids have done over the course of the first few months of school after the early new year, January/February. We’re hopeful that it will be comparable to what we would see in a normal year,” said Fletcher. He pointed out it can be difficult to determine the quality of education students are receiving because of the differences in instructional formats. Fletcher said the same content may not be absorbed as well by some kids who just don’t do as well learning remotely.

Fletcher noted while some kids struggle academically in a remote environment, others struggle socio-emotionally, and some have a hard time with both grades and the isolation. “We have to be conscious of the fact that there are kids who are going to need much more attention than they would normally need face-to-face, so we have to be attentive to that and try to overcome the challenges of remote learning for kids who may struggle,” he said. This sentiment was common among the superintendents.

Mid Peninsula School is “trying to maintain a rigorous standard and pushing these kids academically, so trying to keep in mind their social and emotional health are more important than ever,” said VanDamme. To help in this effort, Mid Pen has a “Check-in, Check-out” system in which students communicate with staff via email, phone, and text. “Kids are communicating that they need to be back in the building,” VanDamme added.

Mid Peninsula has added class-building exercises to help students with morale. One recent sunny day, for example, students in a computer science class were asked to go outside, take a selfie in the sun and upload it as their Google profile picture. VanDamme said while exercises like this may take a little time away from academics, they are beneficial to the students emotionally.

Parmentier believes high school sports is very important to the students’ mental health, stating that his district is disappointed about athletics being shut down. “I would love to be able to talk to the health department and the governor, and just say — and I’m not saying that they don’t have the data — but can I at least see that it shows that sports or at least high school sports are causing, you know, so many cases that we need to shut that down,”

Leisenring said his teachers are doing a good job. There are some departments that don’t translate to an online learning environment. Career and Technical Education, for example, houses the machine shop in which students create projects using tools they are not otherwise likely to have access to. The Learning Center is the school for moderately cognitively impaired students. Not all of the tools available to students in the center can be expected to be available to students attending remotely, Leisenring pointed out.

Mid Peninsula, like many other districts, has some students in-building, some doing hybrid learning — splitting time between classroom and online — and some attending entirely remotely. This often necessitates teaching several students online while having almost a full classroom in-building. VamDamme credits his teachers with exceptional effort, adding that the upcoming two weeks off is probably going to be more important than ever for staff.

Teacher morale is as much a concern as student morale. “I think it’s taking a toll on the students as well as the teachers. We know that seclusion and things like that have mental aspects, and teachers are no different,” Parmentier said. While his teachers are continually adapting and learning as they go, the unique educational situation this year is affecting teachers’ stress levels. “You want that interaction, you need that interaction. So I would say again that our teachers are doing the best that they can,” Parmentier said.