Distance learning continues to be a challenge for St. Paul's high school students, including many who can ill afford to fall behind.
Students were failing more than one-third of high school classes at the midpoint of the first quarter that ends Friday, a district official told school board members this week.
About 400 students, most of them juniors and seniors, have been targeted to work extra hours to make up the credits they need to graduate, leading in turn to a new effort to steer them into a Saturday workshop providing what many have been missing: in-person help.
"Very unsettling," Board Member Zuki Ellis said of the number of students needing to get back on track.
St. Paul has continued to teach most of its students remotely this fall, but expectations are higher than in the spring when the pandemic began. Then, the district allowed every senior who was on track to graduate at midterm to receive a diploma. No such provision is in place for 2020-21. Grades must be kept up and credits secured.
Grades have fallen elsewhere across the country, too, as students struggle to maintain focus while learning online and also receive fewer hours of instruction than they would in the classroom. Two districts in the Bay Area of California reported that nearly one-third of their students were failing at least one class, the Mercury News reported this month.
St. Paul has an "Evening High School" that it created for credit-recovery purposes, and it, too, is in distance learning mode, with efforts to provide synchronous, or live, online instruction, said Darren Ginther, the district's director of college and career readiness.
He expects the number of students needing to regain credits to rise from 400 to nearly 900 at some point in 2020-21, which would be double that of a year ago, he said.
