On Friday, March 13, 2020, all 13 local Sacramento County school districts announced plans for school closures due to the coronavirus outbreak. That last day of school felt anticlimactic – there were no big goodbyes or instructions for special homework. Other than a brief announcement, the day ended and students and parents were left with more questions than answers. School closures officially began Monday, March 16 with the first day of no school.
College campuses were closing before of the K-12 schools. During the first week of March, 2020 several prominent colleges moved classes online and urged students to leave campus. Closures varied from a set number of days to others eliminating all or the rest of spring term. Plus, sport tournaments and study-abroad programs were canceled and academic associations canceled conferences. Higher education experienced a massive shift.
No one expected that one full year later we would still have shuttered campuses.
Students and teachers endured distance learning for the remaining months of the AY 2019-2020 and then began AY 2020-2021 again in distance learning. The 100th day of school (a fun elementary school milestone) was celebrated remotely this year.
Elementary schools in the Folsom Cordova School District returned for hybrid shortened days of in-person class in November, 2020. Elk Grove school district, the first to close in the county, welcomed back hundreds of elementary students on March 16, 2020 – one full year after the county closure.
Future Sacramento has had many concerns for our students during this pandemic year.
- Closed campuses cut off access to in-person tutoring and support services.
- Students coped with learning online-school skills.
- Limited internet access and unreliable devices.
- Loss of student engagement (an essential factor in success).
- Disconnection from classmates.
- Insufficient peer-to-peer collaboration.
- Families’ income losses
- Isolation
- Scare resources
All of these concerns, and more, negatively impact student academic performance and well-being.
Remarkably, our students are persevering! Schools closed, but Future Sacramento remained open!
Throughout this pandemic year, Future Sacramento staff have remained connected with every student and continued to support each student through their high school or college experience. Our services during this pandemic year grew and included:
- Blog series Covid and Education – ongoing
- Social media, text and email student updates
- Countless Zoom student check-in meetings
- Class of 2020 Summer Book Club
- Academic planner production and distribution
- Workshop series on productivity, prioritization, and goal setting
- Financial Aid virtual workshops
- Cultivating Student Success in distance learning workshop
- Motivational mailings
Future Sacramento students created their own workarounds by utilizing established connections with classmates, finding new ways to harness technology, learning how to manage their time with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous schooling, and staying connected with our program for support.
The retention rate (students who continue at their school) of our enrolled college students was near 100% with only one student forced to drop out due to extreme challenges caused by the pandemic and school closures. Even this one student is still persevering, taking this time as an opportunity to adjust her plans, set new goals, and work with Future Sacramento to get back on track.
The Class of 2020 again is in an unique situation – they graduated online and now began college online. They all chose in-person campuses, but those campuses remain closed. Starting at a new college, knowing next to no one, is a challenge but that becomes an up hill battle when your classes are online, fellow students keep cameras turned off and only appear as silent black screens, and you can’t join other students at the library for a study date. But again, together the Future Sacramento college freshman are overcoming these challenges!
The coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020.
A thread of announcements on Twitter was recorded on March 9, 2020 with a long list of universities closing campuses and making moves towards online instruction.
“California has recorded more than 3.5 million lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases. About 55,000 Californians have died. Hundreds of thousands grew sick enough to require hospitalization, straining hospitals in some places. More than 95,000 infections and 1,500 deaths have come in Sacramento County, population 1.5 million and the heart of California’s capital region; another 600 people have died across El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties, home to roughly another million. On top of the direct loss of life, … Children have missed as much as a full year of in-person learning, with Sacramento’s largest K-12 districts still on remote schedules now.”The SacBee – March 12, 2021 “A year gone: How the COVID-19 pandemic upended life in the Sacramento region”
