Sacramento City Unified Moves Ahead With Distance Learning Plan

Sacramento City Unified will begin its distance learning program for students on April 13, exactly a month after students were sent home as a result of coronavirus stay-at-home orders. 

The district of about 40,000 plans to bring its lessons online to finish out the school year rather than having students return to campus. 

“We don’t expect that distance learning is going to be the way it is when they’re in school," Tara Gallegos, spokesperson for the district said. "We don’t expect that 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. they’ll be sitting at the computer or on the phone with their teacher, but a few hours of day of contact would be good.” 

The district is moving ahead with its distance learning plan without the support of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, which opposed the distance learning plan because not all students have computers or internet access. 

The Teacher’s Association put out a statement Friday in which they said 73 percent of secondary students would not be offered Chromebooks by the time distance learning was scheduled to begin, and that currently, just 8.7 percent, or 3,500 students, have Chromebooks. 

“Teachers want to teach. It’s time for District leaders to accept the offer of Sac City teachers to move forward on a Distance Learning program on April 13th, that builds on the instruction that teachers have already been providing on their own,” SCAT President David Fisher said in a statement. 

The district contested this number, saying they will have handed out 12,000 Chromebook laptops to students by the time they begin their distance learning program, but officials have admitted that the number of students asking for Chromebooks has exceeded their initial estimates. The district has placed an order for an additional 20,000 Chromebooks, and they say shipments of that order should begin arriving by next week. 

Gallegos said the district decided to move forward with their district learning plan due to the school’s large population of low income students

“Some students have received contact from their teachers, but then for every one of those students, there’s a student that received a call about whether they had internet and hasn’t heard anything since,” she said. 

For students who don’t have a laptop or internet access by next week, the district has said they plan to ask teachers to check in by phone with students and work out alternate ways to continue their schoolwork. 

In its announcement of the plan, the district said distance learning wouldn't require teachers and students to be connected online at the same time, so that instruction and learning can happen separately.

"The district’s plan is a hybrid approach, meaning that instruction can be conducted online, or by conference calls, phone, textbooks, other school materials, and assigned work,” the district outlined in a recent press release. 

They added that the Distance Learning Plan would focus instruction on essential standards that students would typically learn during this portion of the school year, which the district considers crucial for students to be prepared to move up in grade levels.