Those responsible for teaching Alabama’s children are now learning lessons themselves as they navigate the new normal of remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to Gov. Kay Ivey’s March 26 order, which shut down school buildings for the rest of the school year to prevent the spread of COVID-19, educators are coming up with a variety of ways to ensure students get what they needed so they can continue their learning from home.

It’s lights, camera, action for Mobile County Public Schools. The state’s largest school district was busy all last week transforming one middle school into multiple classroom sets where teachers of all subjects are being filmed as they teach lessons for students in pre-kindergarten through 11th grade. About 33 hours worth of lessons a week is being broadcasted on the district’s channel MCPSS TV on Comcast, AT&T U-verse, Mediacom, and Roku. Students can watch the lessons live on MCPSS TV’s Facebook page as well as on Fox 10 News’ channel. Staff members are also uploading the lessons to MCPSS TV’s YouTube page.

Spokeswoman Rena Philips said the filmed lessons, which started airing on Monday, are supposed to accommodate the district’s remote learning plan, which gave parents two options based on their internet accessibility. Those who have the internet and are connecting with their teachers through digital platforms like Google Classroom are using the broadcasts to enrich the work they are doing with their teachers. For those who don’t have online access or a device, the televised lessons serve as the primary method of instructional delivery as students work through their learning packets, which contain education materials students will use throughout the remainder of the school year.

MCPSS has more than 54,200 students with different home situations, Philips said. The district has been working long hours to try to accommodate everyone, she said.

“We have reinvented public education in two weeks,” Philips said. “It’s our goal to reach every child and we are providing different avenues for them to get instruction and lots of support so they can be successful.”

Transitioning to remote learning hasn’t been a smooth road, but district leaders said they are learning from the feedback they are getting from parents.

Alice Speake felt like she was risking her health when she went to get a learning packet for her kindergarten son at Glen Iris Elementary School in Birmingham on Wednesday. Instead of having teachers hand out learning packets to parents, Speake said the packets were placed in plastic bins which were labeled by grade levels. Parents, who didn’t have on gloves or masks, had to shuffle through unstapled sheets to find their child’s work because there weren’t any teachers monitoring the distribution table. Speake said there wasn’t any hand sanitizer available for the parents to use. After standing in line for a little while, Speake left the school without her son’s packet.

“The longer I stayed there, the riskier I felt like this whole thing was,” Speake said.

Speake spent the rest of Wednesday making phone calls and sending emails to different officials, from city council members to the Alabama State Department of Education. When she received a call from her principal, Speake suggested the school up the ante on health safety by placing the bins six feet apart and to separate documents using Ziploc bags.

“I know this is an accessibility issue. Not everyone has the ability to print at home,” Speake said. “I told (the principal), ‘If this is the way it had to be done, then it shouldn’t have been done at all because one person can infect that whole table.’”

Like many districts, Birmingham City Schools officials chose a hybrid model as their remote learning plan. Chief Academic Officer Selena Florence said administrators at each of the city’s 42 schools choose whether to do learning packets only, all online coursework or a combination of both. The decision was based on the needs of each school. A community partner has volunteered to print and make copies of materials for the schools’ learning packets, she said. Florence didn’t give the name the business.

Florence said the schools that decided to distribute packets were instructed by the district to put the packets in bins, and to place those bins outside of the entrance of the schools while still adhering to guidelines stressed by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. While some Birmingham schools did allow teachers to volunteer to hand out learning packets to the students, the districts didn’t require teachers to do so due to safety concerns, Florence said.

“Our staff members have families, too. We didn’t want to put them in danger,” Florence said. “We thought this would be the safest method without any face-to-face interaction while also allowing parents to get what they need at their convenience.”

Florence said the district has informed the community partner who is making the copies to make sure all papers for the packets are together and stapled correctly so parents wouldn’t have to dig through bins to find their child’s work. She said other methods to prevent the spread of the virus will be considered during the next distribution.

Most schools that put out bins didn’t have a problem with distribution, Florence said. But the district is willing to learn from any hiccups.

“It’s a learning opportunity. None of us have been through a pandemic before. So, we are learning along with all the other districts in the country about how to make this work,” Florence said. “There will be mistakes that we will have to learn and grow from, but our goal is to keep moving forward and to make sure the kids have what they need to finish off the school year strong.”

Bessemer City Schools had multiple health protocols in place as a small group of teachers and administrators passed out learning packets to parents via a drive-thru method.

As an educator who has been with the district for more than 40 years, Katherine Thomas said she volunteered to hand out the packets to parents because she didn’t want her students to suffer from gaps of instruction. Since teachers were required to wear gloves and masks, and parents were told to stay in their vehicles after they drove up to the front of the school, Thomas said she felt safe as she placed the students’ packets in the trunk of the parent’s car.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Thomas saw her children in the classroom setting, but she didn’t feel the urge to hug the students. She said teachers have reinvented the way they communicate love and care to the children. As the children smiled and waved from their car windows, Thomas said teachers taught students how to hug themselves. In response, the teachers will hug their own bodies, too.

“You just grab your arms and hug yourself and the kids know that’s a hug from us,” Thomas said. “That’s the ‘distance hug’. So, they are still getting our compassion, our love and learning from us. They still know that we care.”

“Staying away from each other is the best thing,” she continued. “Although it’s nice to hug, a hug can hurt right now.”

Bessemer City Schools Superintendent Autumn Jeter said only kindergarten and first grade students received packets. This freed up devices to ensure families with students in third through 12th grades, which are doing online-only classwork, had at least one device in their household. Those with three or more students were given more devices on a case-by-case basis.

In order the curb the pandemic’s spread, Jeter encouraged administrators to think differently about the method of delivery, such as using the school’s front windows or library book drop offs to pass and receive packets. When the learning packets are returned, teachers will be required to wear gloves as they place them into envelopes and isolate the packets in a room for a least two days before handing the papers back out for teachers to look over.

“You need to quarantine these things as well because we are all touching these items,” Jeter said.

While safety is a priority for all school systems, Selma City Schools had to focus on equity. Almost 80 percent of the district’s 2,966 were considered economically disadvantage during the 2018-19 school year, according to the state department. So administrators and teachers had to think about how to prevent students from falling through digital gaps due to lack of internet access.

Superintendent Avis Williams said teachers were required to reach out to each student to see if they had devices or internet at their home.

“We found out that nearly half of our families don't have one or the other, device or the Internet. Really, the number is more dire than that when you consider families with multiple children,” Williams said. “So, the connectivity piece is definitely something we have had to grapple with and know that we're going to have some scholars that will not be able access our online resources.”

Selma City parents can choose between online learning or learning packets. But even with the learning packets, the district backed into another issue: lack of transportation.

While several schools mailed packets to parents, district leaders teamed up with their local grocery stores and placed bins full of learning packets at Winn-Dixie and Food Outlet. Edmundite Missions, where many parents receive food and financial support, also served as a packet pickup site. The district is eyeing additional locations for the future.

Using grocery stores as pickup sites wasn’t part of the original plan, but Williams said most parents in her district go to the grocery store to get school supply lists at the beginning of the year instead of downloading the lists online.

“They may have transportation to certain places they have to go to by necessity, like the grocery store, but may not necessarily have reliable transportation to get to other places,” Williams said “And it may be a time constraint. Not everybody is working from home. Some people actually have to go to work and may not have the time or the flexibility to pick up packets during a certain time frame.”

Williams said the remote learning plan is establishing a foundation for future. A remote learning project team, which was formed two weeks ago, will soon be looking into grants so the district can provide devices and internet access for every family. They will also create a handbook which will state how the district would conduct remote learning post-pandemic.

“Instead of (a student) being expelled, you are remote learning for three weeks or whatever the case may be. It can be used for students who are homebound,” Williams said. “It’s just about really having an intentional way to ensure that learning can truly continue even if it's being done remotely.”

Life during COVID-19 has transformed a lot of role for many Alabamians. Bus drivers who were once responsible for dropping off students at their homes are now delivering meals, school materials and for many districts like Montgomery Public Schools, internet access.

Since Wednesday, six MPS school buses equipped with WiFi are being stationed at the following locations so students will be able to access their online classwork Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. except for one location.

Winn Dixie’s parking lot located on U.S. 31

Sikes and Kohn’s on U.S. 231

Cleveland Avenue YMCA (only available every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday)

BP gas station on Union Academy Road and Alabama 94

Gibbs Village Boys and Girls Club

Alabama State University’s football stadium parking lot

Chief Academic Officer Bernard Mitchell said district members rode around the city and asked for community feedback to identify the locations. He said they will re-evaluate the locations as they continue with their COVID-19 plan.

“We are asking the parents to communicate back with us,” Mitchell said. “The most important thing is that the information and the conversation in between or schools, our parents and our community. We have to engage in conversation.”

On the week of April 6, a fleet of 116 Tuscaloosa County School buses delivered about 2,500 learning packets to students who are bus riders. Bus drivers traveled their normal afternoon routes and arrived in neighborhoods for packet pickup around the same time they would normally drop off kids.

Heading your way:):) Posted by Lake View Elementary School on Monday, April 6, 2020

TCS Spokesperson Terri Brewer said the buses help implement the district’s blended learning plan. She said an all-online remote learning model wouldn’t be feasible for their district. Tuscaloosa County is the second largest county in the state and students living in the west and northern portions of the county don’t have reliable access to the internet, she said. Thus all students received paper packets, and those who have internet access can use additional online resources.

While some parents came to their child’s schools to pick up packets from teachers, Brewer said more than 50 percent of the district’s 18,820 students are bus riders.

“That is something our families do rely on,” Brewer said. “So, if they rely (buses) for transportation to school, it’s quite likely they would need that to deliver their packets as well.”

Transportation Director Donna Christian said bus drivers were taught about social distancing during a meeting before the buses were deployed. To prevent a crowd from gathering around buses, parents and students were told not to approach the vehicle, until their packet was ready. Each bus driver had a staff member on board who wore gloves and used hand sanitizer as they handed out the packets through the emergency windows.

Christian said the bus drivers aren’t just delivering the packets. They are also returning personal items kids may have left at school and a sense of normalcy. Students haven’t seen their teachers or friends in a classroom setting for about a month now, but for at least once a week every two weeks, they can count on seeing their local bus driver.

“Drivers get close to the kids, too. They consider them their kids who ride their buses,” Christian said. “We miss the kids and part of our job is to service the them. We’re glad we are able to offer our assistance to help make it easier for them.”