The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

The Student News Site of Black River Falls High School

BRFHS Paw Print

Online Learning Days Explored

Online+Learning+Days+Explored

The School District of Black River Falls is considering online schooling days in place of making time up after snow days.

These online learning days would be only for when the district has a snow day. Teachers would put assignments online for students to finish and turn in while they are at home. It would allow the school to use this instead of having to add on extra time to the school days near the end of the school year.

“In total we have added back in over 37.5 hours of instruction. The high school school day began this fall with 6.75 hours of instruction each day,” said Superintendent Shelly Severson.  “That means that just over five and a half days have been added throughout the year.”

With missing as much school as we did during winter of 2018-19, the school has been leaning towards implementing this topic.

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“We’ve recently had some conversation with the administrative team and the School Board, and we all agree that BRFHS is really not far away from being able to quickly implement e-learning days,” said Severson. “So much of your course content is already uploaded into Canvas, it’s really just a matter of us figuring out procedures to allow for teachings to be available for students throughout the day, either through email or phone calls.”

These assignments would be mandatory as if it were like going to real classes.

“The model that we looked at from another district has families even call their child in sick if they are not going to be able to be doing schoolwork from home,” said Severson. “The students are responsible for engaging with each of the instructors on their course material at least once during the course of the day.”

Students have a lot of mixed feelings about this proposal. Some feel that this takes away from the joys of having unexpected days off of school.

“I think that if we had online schooling it would just add more stress and pressure onto students in the winter,” said junior Samantha Hansen. “It would be almost just like having busy work since we don’t have a teacher to explain the criteria or assignments”

There are also students who feel like adding these online classes into snow days would be beneficial since it would ease the worries of having to scramble trying to find places to add time onto the school days.

“I think that we might as well get some work done during snow days so we don’t have to add onto the time we have to go to school for,” said junior Cassidy Bunnell. “It’s not like anyone does anything all day anyway because we can’t even drive around due to the weather.”

Not only does having online schooling days interfere with high school students, it has been an issue trying to find things to do to keep the middle and elementary schools on track, too.

“What about the buildings that we don’t give a device to? We then go a little further and talk about what does that even begin to look like for kindergarten students,” said Severson. “The other district that we’ve talked to send home paper packets with their youngest students, but we’re not sure that this feels like high quality instruction.”

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Online Learning Days Explored