Episode 13 - Return to School Overview and Preparation with Dr. Tracy Vitale

SHOW TOPIC
Return to School Overview and Preparation

SPECIAL GUEST
Dr. Tracy Vitale, Seneca Valley Superintendent of Schools

Dr. Tracy Vitale proudly serves as the Superintendent of Schools for Seneca Valley, which is one of the largest public school districts in Western Pennsylvania. Prior to becoming Superintendent in 2011, she was an Assistant Superintendent, Principal and Teacher in urban, rural and suburban environments in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. She has a strong understanding and experience in community relations, public education advocacy, business partnerships and workforce development. She also has an extensive background in personnel selection, training & supervision.

IN THIS EPISODE, WE WILL REVIEW
• COVID-19 Phases – Then vs. Now
• Systemic Issues – Small Pebble, Big Ripples
• Economic Drivers – Schools as Childcare
• Language Barriers – Terms and Information Overload
• School Environments Today – Staying Engaged

USEFUL INFORMATION
www.svsd.net/ReturntoSchool
www.svsd.net/LearningModels

Transcript

FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)

Voices E13 Tracy Vitale

File Name: Voices E13 Tracy Vitale.mp3

File Length: 00:18:03

SPEAKERS

Int - Introduction

JK - Jeff Krakoff

TV - Tracy Vitale

00:00:02:24 - 00:00:10:14

Introduction: Welcome to Voices, a Podcast brought to you by the Seneca Valley School District.

00:00:10:24 - 00:00:28:15

Jeff Krakoff: This is Jeff Krakoff. I'm with Dr. Tracy Vitale, superintendent of schools for Seneca Valley. Dr. Vitale and I know you've been a teacher, you've been a principal, you've been the assistant superintendent and you've had your current role at Seneca Valley since 2011.

00:00:28:17 - 00:00:51:18

Jeff Krakoff: So you've you've seen education from a lot of perspectives. When we're talking about COVID-19, the pandemic, getting everybody back to school, there has been a lot of phases, right? Things have changed quite a bit. Things are changing it seems weekly, sometimes daily. What kind of challenges does that present for you?

00:00:53:04 - 00:01:33:27

Tracy Vitale: Well, I think one of the biggest challenges has been the fluidity and the fact that schools are typically planners. We plan our school calendar in February prior to the next school year. That's how far out school systems plan and overall administrators and school systems and teachers, we intuitively are planners. As a matter of fact, when I think about opening teacher in-service day, which we would under normal circumstances open this Friday for over 900 employees, we begin planning that almost a year and a half in advance.

00:01:34:03 - 00:02:25:27

Tracy Vitale: And so the biggest one of the biggest challenges of this pandemic has been for a school system, especially a large school system like Seneca Valley, to plan and to prepare our parents for what's coming. And in a pandemic, even the best plans just have been difficult. And I think you know from a parent perspective, I too am a parent. It's been difficult to plan for my own children and what their school system might do. And the fluidity of this is what we're thinking today, but by tomorrow that could change based on the pandemic, based on local case numbers, based on state case numbers, based on new guidance from the CDC, from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

00:02:25:29 - 00:02:59:14

Tracy Vitale: All of these sources that we are relying on for good, vetted research, information and best practices are changing with the pandemic, as they should. But, it's been very difficult not for us to pivot, because also as educators we tend to be pretty innovative and we understand we need to pivot and be flexible, but in order for us to pivot and be flexible and then move the ship or turn the ship is even more difficult in a large school district.

00:02:59:27 - 00:03:00:12

Jeff Krakoff: Right.

00:03:00:14 - 00:03:14:02

Jeff Krakoff: Right. So if you think about schools it's been for a long time, schools and school systems they've really been built to to work in person during certain scheduled times.

00:03:14:04 - 00:03:18:23

Jeff Krakoff: How has that changed your thinking as we as we work our way through this pandemic?

00:03:18:25 - 00:03:46:17

Tracy Vitale: Well I would say at Seneca Valley we're very lucky that we had our own full-time cyber program for a little over 12 years. So I think Seneca Valley was positioned a little better than most in that we were already changing our thinking and offering environments where students could take part-time, hybrid, in-person, or full-time cyber classes.

00:03:46:19 - 00:04:27:21

Tracy Vitale: And so because we were already leading in this notion that school can be anywhere any time. That helped, but the overall system and what our parents wanted, for the most part, hasn't changed traditionally as a system. Because parents are still attending to a work schedule that is primarily that 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. kind of system unless unless our parents are in a high tech environment unless they're working for a companies that has been flexible and already had remote working hours from home.

00:04:28:08 - 00:04:51:22

Tracy Vitale: But for the most part our parents are still in these traditional workplace environments, even if they're working from home the hours still are 8 a.m.- 5 p.m. You know that daytime environment. And so schools have been built from the beginning of time in the United States to complement the work schedule of parents.

00:04:51:24 - 00:05:29:08

Tracy Vitale: So that has been challenging for a school system to talk to our parents about well just go back to March when the pandemic started. And many of us were sheltering in place and many parents were. But our employees that were working you know, our parents that were working in grocery stores, or hospitals, or feeding our children here at Seneca Valley, our cafeteria employees and our custodian maintenance staff, they were deemed vital and necessary employees for the school system in the buildings to keep them up and running it to a certain extent.

00:05:29:12 - 00:06:07:00

Tracy Vitale: So they have been coming in since since March and they have not missed a beat. But many of our parents were sheltering in place per their company procedures. And so I think many of them thought OK we'll do this from March, April, May, we can get through this. And they thought, like many, once Pennsylvania or parts of Pennsylvania got back to the green phase then we were just going to open and things would be pre-COVID like they were in February. And I think many have been shocked and surprised to find that this is the new normal that we're not going back to pre-COVID at anytime soon.

00:06:07:02 - 00:06:27:10

Tracy Vitale: We're not going back to normal behaviors or normal patterns like we did, like we had in February and that's been almost a grieving process for our community and for so many of us that we won't go back to that kind of normal anytime soon.

00:06:27:12 - 00:06:41:17

Jeff Krakoff: Right. So so you brought up a good point, a lot of parents, people in the community they may have flexible workplaces they may not. Is it fair to say that schools are an important component of keeping families employed?

00:06:42:17 - 00:07:28:00

Tracy Vitale: Absolutely. We are a huge part of the economic machine. Whether educators want to admit that or not while our number one goal is academics and instruction, the reality is many parents rely on schools to take care of children and educate them during the day so that they can be part of the economic engine. So while we feel a huge responsibility to bring our children back in face-to-face because we know from a mental health perspective, the psychologists and the mental health professionals are telling us children need some of this face-to-face instruction, even if it's a small amount, even if it's not five days a week.

00:07:28:03 - 00:07:51:02

Tracy Vitale: They need to have some normal activities to get through this pandemic as well from a mental health perspective. We also know that a second piece of this is we need to find some sense of normalcy for our children so that their parents can attend to their work schedules as well. We own that and we understand that and we're empathetic about it.

00:07:51:11 - 00:07:51:26

Jeff Krakoff: Right.

00:07:52:13 - 00:08:17:19

Jeff Krakoff: So so as I followed you know Seneca Valley's back-to-school plan as well as other districts throughout the area, throughout the country. You know I've been hearing so many different terms. Everything from in-person, remote, hybrid, cohort. Is is there a difference between the terms hybrid instruction and a cohort model and if so what are those differences?

00:08:17:23 - 00:08:49:16

Tracy Vitale: At Seneca Valley there is a difference because pre-COVID we had many choices for our students because we had the Seneca Valley Cyber Academy of Choice. We already had many opportunities pre-COVID for students to customize their schedules. So hybrid was something we were already focused on pre-COVID when it came to customizing and offering options for our families and our students. During COVID we have begun to think about hybrid in a different way.

00:08:49:18 - 00:09:30:19

Tracy Vitale: And so cohort is defined at Seneca Valley as 50 percent capacity. So we take the entire alphabet. We divide it in half. We put half of those students at the beginning of the alphabet in Cohort A, the end of the alphabet in Cohort B and we bring students in every other day. So Cohort A is Monday, Wednesday; Cohort B is Tuesday, Thursday. Everyone is on remote learning on Fridays where teachers are checking in with students, conducting virtual office hours, conducting virtual tutoring sessions, and in the cohort model it allows us to be at half the capacity to better achieve social distancing.

00:09:30:21 - 00:10:02:03

Tracy Vitale: Our school board agreed to move to the cohort model and they decided to do that to ease into this so that if there are any kinks, any bugs we need to work out we have four weeks to do that with the hope that by October 5, we would have students coming face to face five days a week. If that's something that our families chose. We do have 5,540 families, students at this point who have elected for the face-to-face instruction in the cohort model.

00:10:02:05 - 00:10:37:28

Tracy Vitale: So if you divide that in half, that's how many students will be arriving for the first four weeks. We have about 1,129 students who have opted for full-time cyber at home that remote instruction and we have about 250 families that are still deciding what they're going to do for the fall. So at Seneca Valley, cohort means dividing the kids in half so that we can better achieve a lot of the safety protocols. Now come October 5, we need to have worked through those safety protocols and we need to have them down.

00:10:38:00 - 00:11:02:00

Tracy Vitale: If you think about the businesses that opened back up in April just watching how some of our retail businesses have worked through this we've learned a lot from them. I hold a seat on the Butler Health System Board. Learning from them how our hospitals shut down and they opened in phases, we think as a school district we've learned a lot from our retail businesses, from our community

00:11:03:25 - 00:11:29:00

Tracy Vitale: community outreach programs, and we've learned a lot from our local hospital and how we can go about doing this. So we've chosen to start in the cohort model. The board will re-evaluate this cohort model by the end of September to decide should we stay in cohort or open up for those 5,540 in a full blown face-to-face five-day a week model.

00:11:29:09 - 00:11:31:00

Jeff Krakoff: Okay. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying.

00:11:31:02 - 00:11:41:00

Jeff Krakoff: So hybrid is more mode of instruction, in-person versus remote, cohort is all about dividing the students just to manage in school.

00:11:41:02 - 00:11:41:17

Jeff Krakoff: Great.

00:11:41:19 - 00:11:42:08

Tracy Vitale: Yes.

00:11:42:10 - 00:12:06:18

Jeff Krakoff: So you're getting back from one of the things you said earlier you talked about maybe it's a little bit of a mourning grieving process of how things used to be because we are in a new world here. I've heard from parents, there their kids, from teachers about how much they miss the interaction with each other. Teachers are missing their students, students are missing their teachers. How

00:12:06:20 - 00:12:08:14

Jeff Krakoff: How important is this-

00:12:09:12 - 00:12:15:25

Jeff Krakoff: staying engaged and having one-on-one discussions between faculty and students and families?

00:12:17:11 - 00:12:50:29

Tracy Vitale: We learned a lot since March in a short amount of time and the research continues to evolve each day. When you look at the intersection between public health and public education. And what we've learned is that students do need to stay connected to their teachers, whether it's virtual or face-to-face. So even if we go back to a model where we have to shelter in place, we hope we don't, but the reality is we are prepared to do that and we are prepared to do that better than what we did in March, April, May.

00:12:51:01 - 00:13:23:02

Tracy Vitale: So the thinking now in public schools, at least at Seneca Valley is, I personally need to be prepared to work tomorrow morning from this office at the school where I'm sitting or from my office at home in the basement and I need to be able to carry my things that are vitally important to my work back and forth and I need to be able to pivot every night and every morning. And we're training teachers with that and we're talking to them about this year is a COVID year.

00:13:23:04 - 00:14:03:13

Tracy Vitale: We've accepted that. It will not be business as usual. So how do we make sure the instruction continues? How do we make sure regardless of what chair we're sitting in tomorrow morning, how do we make sure that we are staying connected to children? It's vitally important mental from a mental health perspective. It's vitally important that we are staying connected with our students and with our families. And so we are prepared to do that. And that's why we're having a significant amount of in-person training for our teachers in the next two weeks to work on live streaming, to work on how do we conduct and not miss a step?

00:14:03:15 - 00:14:17:16

Tracy Vitale: We can't afford to pause on education this year. So how do we every night go home prepared to deliver instruction, no matter what seat we're sitting in. As a teacher, as an educator, or as an administrator.

00:14:17:18 - 00:14:29:21

Jeff Krakoff: All right. Thank you so much. So if I'm a parent listening to this what what's the main takeaway, what do I need to be thinking about as a school is about ready to begin.

00:14:29:23 - 00:14:32:26

Tracy Vitale: If, you know an I am a parent,

00:14:32:28 - 00:15:25:19

Tracy Vitale: so I think I can speak from the mom perspective. I need to be prepared that should my home school need to pivot to a cohort model, to a five-day a week model, in person or to complete shelter in place, which could happen again like it did in March. I need to be prepared with backup plans, of how that impacts me and possibly my work schedule, how it impacts my spouse or significant others work schedule, what support systems do I have in place? I need not to be afraid to ask for help, from my neighbors from my community, from my faith-based organization, and I need to have those plans prepared and talk through this with my children because this will be a year like no other, but we can.

00:15:25:21 - 00:16:02:10

Tracy Vitale: it is my personal belief we can co-exist with this virus. We cannot afford mentally to shelter in place for long periods of time again. But if we have to, we need to be prepared mentally. We need to accept that, I'm choosing a mode of instruction for my students and I need not to perseverate about that. I need to make the choice, go with it make it work. That I need to be flexible, flexible, flexible this year like no other year, and this will not be easy, but we will get through it and we will get through it together.

00:16:02:13 - 00:16:30:21

Tracy Vitale: And parents should not be trying to prepare backup plans alone. They need to ask for help and they need to be willing to accept help. And I think sometimes in America we're very proud people and we are afraid to say we don't know, we are afraid of the unknown and we are afraid to ask for help. And we need to be brave in this moment for our children because we can get through this and we will get through this.

00:16:30:24 - 00:16:36:16

Jeff Krakoff: OK so so again if I'm a parent and I realize that I do need help.

00:16:37:11 - 00:16:40:25

Jeff Krakoff: Any suggestions and resources available to me?

00:16:40:27 - 00:17:12:02

Tracy Vitale: Neighbors, family, faith-based organizations, maybe ones that you don't even belong to, are willing to help many of them have web pages that you can go to and the first thing other web page is I need help or I'm looking for help. Calling the school. We have a director of advancement that's working closely with our Foundation. Just this week she has helped families match with daycare centers or backup plan situations.

00:17:12:06 - 00:17:38:02

Tracy Vitale: And I think planning now in the next three weeks will be vital. But that plan cannot be just plan B. It needs to be plan B because something may go wrong in plan B. Plan C and Plan D. If this happens, we'll do this if this and then talking through that with our children about it's OK if the plans change in the morning or the plans change the night before, it's ok, we can get through this.

00:17:38:04 - 00:17:39:21

Tracy Vitale: and this is how we plan to do it.

00:17:39:23 - 00:17:46:21

Jeff Krakoff: all right well thank you so much for your time. I know this is an extremely busy time of year.

00:17:46:27 - 00:17:52:15

Jeff Krakoff: Dr. Tracy Vitale, again thanks and here's to a wonderful getting back to school this fall.

00:17:53:16 - 00:17:55:25

Tracy Vitale: Thank you, it's been a pleasure speaking with you.

00:17:55:27 - 00:17:56:21

Jeff Krakoff: All right, take care.