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Students at St. Matthew School meet through Zoom to continue learning. The video meeting service has helped the school pivot to online learning in the wake of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Courtesy photo)
March 30, 2020
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Within 24 hours of receiving notice on March 10 all Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of San Francisco would have to switch to distance learning, St. Matthew School’s digital campus was up and ready to continue educating students online while the parochial school’s hallways and classrooms were quiet.
“The cool part about it is we went from being a physical school to an online school in less than 24 hours. We did a great job and I'm very proud,” said Adrian Peterson, principal of St. Matthew School in San Mateo.
Peterson said the school developed how its learning protocol looked from scratch, quickly building out a daily grid of lessons and how teachers presented material and students would work on their own.
The archdiocesan schools department issued principals expectations for online learning, and from there “each individual principal had to create the standard at their school, making up how many hours, what a day looks like,” she said.
Students in junior high generally have two live lectures per day through Zoom and spend the rest of their time with pre-recorded lectures and independent work based on their daily lesson plan, while students in younger grades have Zoom classes staggered through the week.
Peterson said students brought their books home with them before classes were suspended, and any student who needed a device to access the internet was allowed to check one out from the school.
As a Google for Education school, an alliance that gives students and teachers Google products that have been customized for educational settings, the school was already equipped with some of the tools it would need. Teachers use Google Classroom to check on students’ work and use Google Hangouts to answer student questions, which Peterson said had been an enormous help.
One of the decisions the school had to make was how much video-conferencing to do with students through Zoom. Peterson said she thought they had arrived at a “healthy balance,” but would continue fine-tuning it as distance-learning continued.
“I think that has been the most critical element," she said. "We’re adjusting as we go."
Even with all the changes, some things have stayed the same: the school records a video for morning assembly, announcing birthdays and beginning the day with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Peterson said the school has also continued to do spiritual formation for students. Instead of school Masses on Fridays and a school-wide participation in Stations of the Cross, students will watch Mass online or do spiritual reflections. Msgr. John Talesfore, pastor of St. Matthew Parish, will also do some lessons on spiritual formation, she said.
“We've tried to be as normal as anything. We’ve done really well and I'm proud of where we are,” Peterson said.
Meghan Daschel, a fourth grade teacher at St. Matthew School, said distance learning has helped students work on their technology skills and made them “more independent and responsible for their own learning which as a teacher has been really wonderful to see.” But she, like many teachers, looks forward to seeing her students again in person.
“I know that this experience has truly made me grateful for the time that I get to spend with them,” Daschel said.
One notable outcome of moving learning online has been for parents to see just how much work students do, Peterson said.
“We’re sticking to our minutes: kids are doing seven hours of school work during a day,” she said.
That can also be a challenge, as some parents juggle working from home with assisting their children with their schoolwork.
“And the uncertainty over when they’re going back (to school) is causing great alarm,” she said.
The school also faces institutional uncertainty, as the closure of archdiocesan schools has been extended to April 17 and no one knows when counties’ shelter-in-place orders will be lifted.
End of year testing is currently on hold for students. St. Matthew’s biennial auction, which tends to raise around $250,000 for the school, has had to be retooled into an online format. The consequence of the economic disruption to parents’ lives could have a profound effect on the tuition-based school.
“Those kinds of decisions weigh on a principal,” Peterson said.
Despite the sudden changes, St. Matthew’s has been able to continue its mission to educate students. “Catholic school students are still being educated, I truly believe that. Our kids are still getting the amount of work they normally would. I think the hardest thing is they miss their friends,” she said.
The switch to online learning has had one unexpected reversal, Peterson said. “We were trying to get kids away from devices and now we’re trying to get them on. This is one time it's worked to our advantage.”