Middle school teacher Brandee Brandt pounded on the door of a ground level apartment in San Antonio, Texas, for the third time one afternoon in search of one of her students.
Her face close to the apartment door, she could hear voices inside. When someone finally cracked open the door, she asked them to get 13-year-old Davey, who suddenly stopped doing his online schoolwork.
Brandt and a fellow 8th grade teacher, Emily Countryman, would spend the day knocking on doors, from public housing apartment buildings to a middle-class suburban neighborhood where nearly every house had a doorbell with a built-in security camera.
Teachers from Rawlinson Middle School in San Antonio go door to door to find students who have stopped logging in for class during the COVID-19 pandemic. They knock until someone answers, and they talk to sleepy kids and overwhelmed parents about how to stay engaged during remote learning.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Since the beginning of the school year, a squad of Rawlinson teachers have visited around 100 homes. Once every few weeks, school staff develop a list of kids in urgent need of a visit. Two teachers volunteer, they set a date, and the school hires substitute teachers.
With half the school’s 1,350 students learning remotely, and thus at a higher risk of chronic absence, teachers from Rawlinson have come knocking at the first sign of trouble this school year.
“I felt a sense of urgency,” Rawlinson Principal Sherry Mireles said, “If they’re not getting their schooling it’s our responsibility. I’m not going to allow a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old to drop out. Not on my watch.”
Many of the visits pay off: Kids log on again or turn in work for the first time in weeks.
It’s often not a one-time visit. The teachers keep dropping by until the student is found, logged on, and participating. They know even the most disengaged kid can be found.
The teachers’ relentless pursuit of these kids is why Rawlinson averaged 99% attendance in the weeks after Christmas break, said Mireles — about 8 percentage points higher than the district middle school average.
Attendance is critical to learning in any situation, most experts agree: Kids can’t learn if they’re not in school, and already data from the COVID-19 era is grim. Chronic absenteeism among Black students in some Ohio districts is 47%. In Detroit the school year kicked off with only 78% of students in attendance after a week. In several surveyed California districts, the chronic absentee rate for Black, Latino, and American Indian/Alaskan Native students was between 19% and 29%.
The consequences are daunting. In the Ohio districts, reading scores have fallen by 7% after years of hard-won gains.
Back in Texas, most of the students on Brandt and Countryman’s list that afternoon had either stopped logging on for classes or turning in work. Some were just starting to show signs of giving up — regularly dropping single classes. Others hadn’t been seen or heard from in months.
Davey (the student’s real name is not being used to protect his privacy) was just beginning to show real signs of fading, Countryman said. He’d stopped participating in class online. Without his camera on, she couldn’t even tell if he was at his computer. He hadn’t turned in the most recent test in her class.
Around the state, districts are reporting dire numbers for remote learning attendance. The Dallas Independent School District reported that thousands of students, one in five high schoolers, are considered chronically absent so far this school year. Smaller districts have done away with remote learning entirely to try to re-engage kids.
During their visits, Brandt and Countryman wear matching masks and back up six feet. When the doors open, they make their pleas to students and parents to stay engaged.
As for Davey, when he finally came to the door, he was bare-footed and sleepy-eyed, explaining his sleep pattern had slowly changed over the past few months, so that he was staying up all night, and sleeping during the day. The teachers gave him a nudge.
He didn’t need to log on for Zoom sessions if he was too sleepy, they allowed. But he needed to turn in the work. He needed to retake the test he’d blown off. He needed to pass his classes.
“Don’t you want to go to 9th grade?” Countryman asked Davey.
“Yeah…” he said with a shy and sheepish smile.
At another stop, Rochelle Mata told Brandt and Countryman school Zoom calls overlapped with her job, which kept her tied to her computer from long before sunrise to mid-afternoon. Her middle school boys had started taking advantage, not logging on.
Even if they miss the calls, the teachers reminded Mata, her sons could still turn in their work, as long as it’s before 11 p.m.
Every need they can meet, every burden they can ease will make it more likely kids will have the support at home to engage at school. At Mata’s house, they left a bag of groceries. At other houses, they have provided tech help.
Several homes on the route were dark and quiet. They peered in windows to see if lights were on, pressed their ears to the door to listen for voices. On a previous route they once enlisted the help of a maintenance man who was on his way into the apartment, asking him to send a family member out to talk to them.
By the end of the day, the teachers were tired, but upbeat. In a time when so much seems beyond their control, these visits help stave off a feeling of helplessness.
“(The students) are capable of so much more,” Brandt said. “The pandemic shouldn’t be the reason they don’t succeed.”
Two weeks later, Countryman said, the visits had paid off.
One grandmother had made good on her promise, and her granddaughter is turning in her work, passing with flying colors.
The school found another student whose address turned out to be a maintenance workshop. She is logging into class again.
And Davey logged into class that very afternoon, completed his work, and took a make-up test.
He scored 100.
Bekah McNeel writes for The 74, a non-profit news site covering education in America. This story is part of the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. It originally appeared online here.
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