State of the schools

Mar 11, 2021 By MEGHAN BRADBURY 8 min read

With a challenging year in the books, Oasis Charter Schools continues to meet student needs, while moving forward with its strategic plan and Oasis STEM Makerspace initiative.

Superintendent Jacquelin Collins provided a State of the Charter Schools Address during a board meeting Tuesday night.

Although the city of Cape Coral’s municipal charter school has been in existence for the last 17 years, the past year has probably taken the prize in terms of being uncertain, she said.

“Even though we had the pandemic and specific demands, our charter school handled it very well and smoothly and (we are) progressing through this year with flying colors despite the challenges we faced,” she told the board.

During the address she covered the areas of how the system of four charter schools managed the COVID-19 pandemic, resources and mandates; COGNIA accreditation renewal process; the strategic plan design and objectives and the Oasis STEM Makerspace initiative.

COVID-19

When students went on Spring Break last year they did not know they would get extra break time due to the pandemic. This led to a very hectic transition for teachers, some of whom had to learn the virtual platform in just seven days.

From there they had to shift gears when the governor mandated that schools would be going to a face-to-face model five days week in the fall with measures put into place to keep everyone safe.

Collins said over the course of the summer and into the fall, staff worked diligently on developing an employee policy on how to handle COVID; developing a student transportation protocol system; figuring out how to keep students safe in the classroom, lunchroom, walking in line, playing at recess and participating in sports and clubs after school; establishing disinfecting and sanitizing procedures and developing a reporting system for the CDC and Florida Department of Health to report the number of infections and quarantined students.

“Those are the big major projects that our teams focused on starting in March and all through the summer and the most part of the fall looking to perfect those procedures,” she said.

In December, the charter school system was tasked with a spring reopening plan, which was very difficult, Collins said.

The plan forced them to identify students who did not learn well virtually for many reasons, such as not having the support at home or not being self-driven to do work on their own.

The staff identified those students who were regressing in academic performance and monitored those students.

They had to report to the Florida Department of Education what they were doing to help make that progress, which resulted in coming up with procedures and learning paths for the students, Collins said.

If the students were not making progress, they asked them to come back to school face-to-face. For those families who did not agree with sending their children back to school, they had to come up with additional plans such as after school tutoring, small sessions and summer programming, which is still being planned.

“We cannot let these children slip by,” she told the board.

Collins said they have 3,481 students, educators and staff within Oasis Charter Schools. As of August 2020 to March 5 they have had 14 teachers with COVID infections, 81 students infected positively and 955 students quarantined because of the 101 infections at all four schools.

“That’s roughly a 3 percent infection rate. All of our efforts to mitigate the spread of the illness came through,” she said.

Each time a student tested positive, Collins said their principals had to measure where that student was on the bus, in classroom, cafeteria, or walking in line to identify how many students were within six feet. She said that number could be four students, or 27 students.

“Our mitigation efforts were wise and well developed. I’m really proud of these,” Collins said.

Learning Platforms

The charter school had three learning platforms at the start of the school — face-to-face, virtual-only at the two elementary schools and a hybrid model for secondary schools utilizing both face-to-face and virtual.

At the first quarter there was 61 percent of the entire student population learning virtually. At mid-quarter, Collins said they found it was not for everyone, especially at the elementary level.

At the second quarter there was a significant reduction of virtual students-35 percent of the population. Collins said by the time they got to the third quarter only 18 percent of the students were learning virtually. If all things stay status quo, Collins is hoping the numbers continue to drop with a goal of 100 percent face-to-face at the start of the new school year.

“The hybrid model of teaching is very taxing. They are doing things twice. It’s been quite a year of teaching fatigue,” Collins said. “This spring break is really needed for mental and physical health.”

Mental Health

Mental Health initiatives were taken under consideration due to the new learning environment and COVID-19 being taxing on the students. Collins said there has been an onslaught on students having unusual behavior fatigue due to the COVID environment and what they can do socially and where they can go.

“Back in June we had a safety and health task force that we convened because mental health of staff was really in question,” she said. “We spent a lot of time working with health professionals and other physicians and mental health professionals to train our staff to figure out what to purchase and how to come back to school.”

They focused on what mental health struggles would look like and how to prepare for that.

“Those measures are still in place. We meet with staff monthly to determine what students are at risk and what we can offer as far as services in the area,” Collins said.

The charter school hired a social worker who, almost on a daily basis, has meetings with students who are not showing up virtually, or in person. She said the issues stem from mental health stress, suicide, stress in dealing with other students and cyber bullying.

COGNIA Accreditation

This year marks the year of the charter school authority to be credited, which is quite a process. Collins said they focus on three domains — leadership, learning and resource capacity. The principals collected teams of teachers to help collect and analyze evidence but, due to COVID, many times those teachers and principals were called away to contact parents for COVID tracing and missing the meetings.

As a result they asked for an extension, with many other schools doing the same, and were granted a later deadline, giving them a chance to have visitation dates in either late October, or early November.

Strategic Plan

The strategic plan addressed the areas of teacher professional development, governor’s allocation for starting salaries at $47,500, streamlining operational departments, professional development for the governor’s board and branding and community outreach.

Collins said they do not do enough in terms of teacher professional development and it is not consistent across all four schools. She said the professional development has a new evaluation system to evaluate teacher and staff, which is a major project that is expensive.

In terms of the governor’s allocation of starting salaries, Collins said they are working on a hiring schedule that is a little bit ahead of Lee County, so they can be competitive.

She said they have found that IT is a big ticket item this year with cyber security becoming a problem. Collins said the city has offered to share responsibility with them on having someone in place to handle cyber security.

STEM initiative

A middle school STEM curriculum and makerspace has been implemented. They have designed a lot of those great elective courses that they want to develop at the middle school and pathway to the high school level, Collins said.

Some of those STEM areas include biomedical engineering, green architecture, marine robotics and cybersecurity.

To fund that initiative House Bill 2707 has been formed to secure funding to design and develop the “makerspace,” or collaborative work space, at the rest of the schools. Collins said the funding has a price tag of about $350,000.

“The Gutenberg Foundation has matched that amount at 50 percent. Even if we don’t receive full funding, getting something will help us develop these areas,” Collins said.

The charter system developed a STEM Advisory Board, which consists of eight members with a vast background. They recently had its first meeting and there was a great deal of insight of coursework and subject area advice.

In addition, Collins said they are advertising with the University of Florida College of Education. They have students who graduate with majors in math, engineering and science who want to teach in those subject areas. Once finished, the students will receive their degree and additional coursework on how to teach students.

“Those are going to be our specialty teachers and high-level talent that will go into engineering classrooms,” she said.

The high-level pathway STEM Progression plan starts at the elementary and middle school levels with coding and builds its way to a capstone project/shark tank for high school students.

“A lot of our students didn’t know what STEM was and what the courses consisted of,” Collins said.

The capstone project will take all the different levels of STEM and progression through a collaboration and brainstorming project to solve an authentic real world problem, by designing and implementing an idea for their audience.

“We are in draft form right now,” Collins said.

To reach MEGHAN BRADBURY, please email news@breezenewspapers.com