Oswego School District Board member: pandemic has lessons for students, families

Oswego School District 308 Board member Toni Morgan acknowledged during a Jan. 11 board meeting the challenges that remote learning has posed to the district’s students and their families.

But Morgan, a teacher in Yorkville Schoo District 115, suggested there are also lessons to be learned from the pandemic, including the need for students to develop good study habits.

“Education can be very hard to get in different parts of the world and in different circumstances. Some people persist and they get it, no matter how many things are difficult,” Morgan said during the board member comments portion of the meeting.

Morgan said board members hear from parents desperate for their kids to return to their classrooms and about the negative impact remote learning has had on their emotional and social needs.

“We know that that’s huge and that’s very real,” she said.

But Morgan said she would be remiss, if she did not mention that some students in remote learning who are not participating or have struggling grades, do not have emotional issues or special needs.

“Or some of the kids, they have poor habits. They get on Zoom, they refuse to turn on their camera; whether or not that’s a problem for their house, I don’t know, but some of them refuse to turn on their cameras,” she said. “They’re not participating, they’re not attending.”

Even though, as a community, we feel compassion for those children and for others in the community, Morgan said that the issue of building habits “that will get us through our education” must be addressed.

“This might not be the last pandemic,” she pointed out. “This might not be the last time that we have to address these issues, so we really have to think about how we’re going to support a good attitude, good activities, creating things for our family that make this endurable, things for our students that make this endurable, things that the social connections keeping those going in whatever form they can happen.”

Morgan said that she would not “let everybody off of the hook,” because she believes that some of the struggle comes from the notion of “just blame somebody.”

“Don’t work it, don’t fix it, just blame somebody, and that really bothers me,” she said.

“So whatever happens tonight, I hope that families will take that to heart and look at their own situation and say, ‘What could I do to make a better social life for my children? What could I do to keep those social connections going? What could I do to make sure that they have a good attitude about learning?’ Because that’s super important, and that’s something that is going to help us no matter what happens to the school plan.”

Phase two of the district’s reopening plan will begin Feb. 15. The changed plans will include split A/B groups for junior high and high school students similar to the first phase, while elementary school students will attend school in-person for five half-days a week and continued remote learning in the afternoon, followed by five days of remote learning.

No students will eat lunch at school, allowing the district to maximize the amount of in-person learning they can engage in.

The majority of the district’s more than 17,000 students have been participating in remote online instruction since the start of the school year last August due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.

Morgan and member Heather Moyer both voted against the plan at Monday’s meeting.