‘Do you need food, emotional support?’ Survey checks in on Sacramento students

The Sacramento City Unified School District has rolled out a new survey for parents and their children to fill out as distance learning continues while schools remain closed.

Parents began receiving the surveys earlier this week, asking questions including: Did you participate in distance learning? Do you need more information about any assignments? Do you need food or basic needs, emotional support, or additional help with technology?

Several school districts across the country are sending similar surveys to students aimed at dealing with the high levels of stress amid uncertainties over school closures, stay-at-home orders, grades and college plans. One goal is to address concerns that the coronavirus pandemic will exacerbate the digital and economic divide among students, and will hit the most vulnerable students the hardest.

Those concerns ring true for local districts like Sacramento City Unified, where low-income students, English learners and foster youth account for more than 70 percent of the district’s students. Some students also face abuse, hunger or homelessness.

The surveys are one way of measuring absenteeism, which is about 18 percent during the regular school year, according to officials.

But attendance is just part of the picture, said district superintendent Jorge Aguilar.

“The goal isn’t just to make sure students are attending,” Aguilar said. “Engagement has to be defined more broadly, and has to look at the whole child - the whole child at a minimum.”

The survey allows teachers, who are often a second pair of eyes on vulnerable children, to check in on the district’s more than 40,000 students. Teachers are able to make sure students are healthy and safe, while being able to meet their academic needs.

“Who better to do that than our teachers and principals every single day?” Aguilar said. “They can see that one of their children may not be smiling as much as she used to, or not contributing as much as they used to in class.”

The survey is for all families - regardless of how much help and support they receive at home. The coronavirus pandemic causes such a disruption in student learning that the emotional well-being of all students must be looked after, said Fernando M. Reimers, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“We are committed to making sure that ... even when we see our students through Google Classroom, that we not assume that they are psychologically in a safe place,” Aguilar said.

The survey reflects some of the preventative measures the district already had in place to protect students from falling behind. The district’s already-existing Early Identification and Intervention System looks at three indicators that put a student at risk of not graduating: attendance, engagement and behavior, and academic performance.

With the survey results, teachers and principals can refer students to a number of resources including counseling, social workers, food banks and tech support.

Aguilar said that the concerns school districts face with student engagement through current distance learning models are similar to those that Sacramento City Unified has long experienced.

“I cannot as a superintendent say that we did not have students who were disengaged when we were operating normally,” he said.

Sacramento City Unified teachers were able to get in touch with most of their students in weeks prior to the launch of their distance learning program. But the district is still working to locate 1,600 students who have not been heard from since schools closed.

Those “1,600 represent individual lives in our community, and we are obligated ethically and professionally to figure out how to meet the needs of those students,” Aguilar said.

Efforts to contact those families continue.

District officials will have clear data of how many students are actively engaged in learning through their district platforms in the coming weeks.

Until then, the district continues to work with city officials to provide stronger internet access for students.

Nationwide, nearly one in five teens cannot always finish their homework because they lack access to a laptop or reliable internet, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center.

The district is also distributing thousands more laptops. The 20,000 Chromebooks it ordered in past weeks continue to trickle in.

The goal, officials said, is a laptop for all students who do not already have their own devices at home.