Fort Recovery uses first E-Day

FORT RECOVERY — There were no students in the hallways or classrooms Monday in Fort Recovery.
But teachers were still communicating with students, who were working on school assignments. It counted as a day of school, even though no one entered the brick buildings on Butler Street and Sharpsburg Road.
Fort Recovery Local Schools used its first E-Day.
E-Days are a program the neighboring Mississinawa Valley School District piloted during the 2010-11 school year that allows teachers to make pre-planned assignments available to their students via the Internet. Schools can use the option after all of their five “calamity days” have been taken. It’s an effort to save districts from being forced to make up missed days at the end of the school year.
The option has been available to schools throughout Ohio since 2011, but Fort Recovery had not been in a position to use an E-Day until Monday. It is using its second of three possible E-Days today.
Shelly Vaughn, superintendent of Fort Recovery Schools, had been looking forward to seeing how an E-Day would work.
“I just wanted to try it … because we have it in place and the teachers are prepared and ready,” she said. “There are some bugs to work out, but for the most part … it’s been very positive today.”
During an E-Day, students retrieve their assignments via the Internet by visiting the Fort Recovery Local Schools web site at www.fortrecoveryschools.org. A link to the E-Day portal appears immediately at the top of the page.
From there, students can click on either their grade (for elementary school) or teacher (for middle and high school). Students are then directed to their assignments, which teachers have pre-planned.
Teachers must have their assignments for each of the three potential E-Days posted by Nov. 1 but can change them throughout the year to coincide with the material they are studying in class at that time.
“It allows the kids to keep what we were doing, the content we were working on, fresh in their mind,” said middle school history teacher Brian Patch, noting that he felt it was particularly helpful Monday since students just had winter break and semester exams are scheduled for Wednesday. “You can work on some things, give the students some things you wanted to do while not being in the classroom.”
Because all students do not have access to the Internet at home, assignments can also be completed on paper. But, having attended school on Friday with the knowledge that inclement weather was on the way, Patch said students without access were encouraged to print out the assignments ahead of time at school in order to work on them at home if an E-Day was declared.
All students have two weeks to complete their E-Day work.
Vaughn and Patch expressed their support for the program not only as administrator and teacher, but also as parents. Vaughn has children in fifth, eighth and 10th grades, and Patch has a son in third grade and a daughter in sixth.
“As cold as it was today, I know my kids didn’t leave the house,” said Patch. “It gave them something to work on. Otherwise, they’re just sitting in the house doing nothing. … It kept their minds active.”
Olivia Patch and her brother Daniel, who sat across a kitchen/dining room table from each other using laptop computers to work on their E-Day assignments, agreed that it was a positive experience.
“It didn’t take that long,” said Olivia. “I like this better … rather than going in the summer.”
The lessons vary based on grade level, with first graders on Monday being assigned to listen to a story at www.pbskids.org, answer corresponding questions and play a game for their language arts class period.
Fourth grade science students read articles about Earth as a magnet and electrical safety while Patch’s seventh and eighth graders read passages about King Tut and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” respectively. Each group then answered questions related to what they had read.
High school students who have math class with Janet Osterloh were to complete study guides for their upcoming semester exams in Algebra I, geometry, informal geometry and AP calculus.
All students were able to communicate with their teachers throughout the day, via email or phone. Patch said he had six to eight students contact him with questions about the assignment, and even more asked for feedback after they had turned in their work.
Both Patch and Vaughn feel an E-Day is preferable to tacking an extra day onto the end of the school year, when many students have their focus on summer break.
“Quite often, after the achievement tests are finished in the spring and the weather starts to get nice, it’s pretty tough to get kids focused and to keep things going,” said Vaughn. “I found it to be great today because my kids were involved in doing something meaningful when they couldn’t do anything else.
“I think it’s a much better day of learning than it would be if we were trying to do this in June.”[[In-content Ad]]