KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On Thursday morning, St. James Academy will held a virtual senior mass to celebrate and recognize its graduating class.
They’re hoping to have an actual in-person graduation ceremony to celebrate in the summer.
July is the time academic leaders will come together to talk about what exactly next school year will look like.
Class sizes, social distancing and sports are just a number of different factors they have to consider. They’ve scheduled three to four days with each department to figure out what will be best for its students.
“We’ve talked of different structures to the day and different ways that we can try to maintain that distance with kids, but really with still so much unknown and everything changing day-to-day, he best thing we though the could do is schedule time with each individual dept in July, then we can start cranking out a plan," principal, Dr. Shane Rapp said.
While they plan on being back in school in the fall, it’s still a "wait and see" what happens in the summer situation to determine the next steps.
"We know that there’s going to be a learning gap whether it’s our eighth graders who are going to be freshman next year or even the students that we had this year you know," he said. "We just can’t learn as much when we’re not together for the same amount of time in the same way and we’re going to have to be aware of what that looks like and creative in how we close that."
Rapp said for students who may be behind, student services staff does regular Zoom check-ins to make sure those students are turning in the late work or missing assignments.
"Whether its kids who traditionally struggle with school or kids who usually do great in school but this new environment just doesn’t work for them in that way, just to make sure that they’re getting as many supports as possible," Rapp said. "’They've done home visits with students we were worried about on the social and emotional side, just kind of checking in on kids and seeing, making sure they know we care about them and support them."
As the year wraps up, students have been taking finals, as they usually do during this time.
But the types of finals they're taking is a little unique compared to years past.
Because of virtual learning, these finals include more presentations, projects and students finding alternate ways to demonstrate what they've learned over fourth quarter.
"Students are sharing more authentic examples of their learning outside of a traditional test model," Rapp said. "Otherwise that temptation to maybe cheat or look things up or maybe some students having advantages over others would be a little bit greater."
Rapp said looking at the future, with how effective as virtual learning has been during this time, they're looking at ways to possibly incorporate it more when potential severe weather hits.
"I’m not going to say we’re never going to have a snow day again," Rapp said. "But we should, for as effective as this has been, we shouldn’t have to add any extra days at the end of the year because of snow, ice, weather, parades, whatever that might be where school gets canceled."
