Kentucky School Advocate
May 2020
By Brenna R. Kelly
Staff writer
There were no field days, no passing around yearbooks, no long hugs goodbye. Nothing about the last day of class for the 2019-20 school year was usual – no one knew it was the last day.
“Every teacher in the Commonwealth is wishing they could go back to March 13th. Knowing what we know now, we would spend that day differently,” Beechwood Independent teacher Amanda Klare (left) wrote on April 20, moments after Gov. Andy Beshear announced that Kentucky schools would remain closed to in-person classes for the remainder of the school year.
For Klare that day would have been spent eating lunch with her 4th grade class, chatting about whatever they wanted and playing games with her students instead of teaching them how to get on Google Meet.
“Most importantly I would have made sure to tell each student I loved them as they walked out of my room for the last time this school year,” Klare wrote in the Facebook post which has been shared nearly 4,000 times.
But like thousands of Kentucky public school teachers, administrators and staff, Klare did not let the closure stop her from serving her students.
“We will get up tomorrow, put a smile on our face and teach our students from our houses because that is what our kids deserve,” she wrote.
In his announcement closing classrooms, Beshear urged districts to continue to use the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) Non-traditional Instruction (NTI) program until the end of the school year.
“It’s very helpful for our kids, it gives them structure, it gives them an outlet, it keeps them intellectually challenged,” he said, while also asking districts to continue providing food service.
Before the closure than began March 16, less than half of Kentucky districts participated in NTI, a program originally designed for intermittent closures for weather or illness. Though all districts quickly switched to using NTI full time, mostly through online instruction or paper packets, Interim Education Commissioner Kevin Brown acknowledged that after several weeks students, teachers and parents were experiencing “NTI fatigue.”
To help districts meet the state-required 1,062 instructional hours for the year, KDE allowed districts to count NTI days as seven hours of instruction. That increase helped many districts to meet the threshold much sooner than previously possible.
Some districts also attempted to combat the fatigue by moving to four-day weeks to give both parents and teachers a break, others asked students to complete projects instead of daily assignments.
Districts in some states, including Texas and Georgia, decided it was just too much. Those districts choose to end online learning up to a month early after deciding that on-line learning was too cumbersome for parents, teachers and students.
While it wasn’t easy for Kentucky school districts to upend the school year and move to remote instruction, “not one district complained,” Brown said to superintendents during a recent webcast. “And the kids in Kentucky are better for it, because you all are rising to the occasion. It is tough and it’s wearing on everyone but I’m proud of us as Kentuckians and, as I refer to us, as the education family.”