The New Bloomfield R-3 School District Board of Education heard Thursday about efforts to ensure learning wasn't lost due to the pandemic last spring.
The spring semester was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with students and teachers sent home and thrust into an unprecedented and unexpected nationwide distance learning experiment.
At the start of this school year, New Bloomfield teachers focused on ensuring students grasped the concepts from last year.
For some ages and subjects, this entailed review lessons and assignments.
High School and Middle School Principal Paul Cloudwright told the board about how the school has handled assessing learning in classes with more complicated transitions.
It's clear to see where Spanish I ends and Spanish II picks back up - the teacher can assess any gaps easily and implement any review materials as needed.
But for other subjects - for example, in social studies where a student might move from government one year to sociology the next - the situation was slightly different, Cloudwright said.
"So in essence, to put it in a nutshell, in the areas where there's a non-linear progression, they worked on academic skills specifically associated with that academic area," Cloudwright said. "In science, that's the scientific method and reason, and for social studies, it's thinking like a historian."
In a written update submitted to the board, Cloudwright outlined the ways instruction was calibrated in each subject.
In her report, elementary Principal Jennifer Fletcher noted teachers are reviewing any missed curriculum from last year and incorporating some of it into similar units as they arise in the school year.
"We do have some students who have had a decent slide in their learning, but we are hopeful that they will pick it back up quickly," Fletcher wrote in her report.
Written versions of both reports, which also include other monthly updates, can be found at https://bit.ly/3hJpy0f under the elementary and secondary report sections.
Plans for Monday Academy were also impacted by the pandemic.
The district planned on determining which seventh- and eighth-grade students would participate in Monday Academy, coming in for extra attention outside of the normal four-day week, based on Missouri Assessment Program scores.
That testing didn't take place last spring. Instead, the district looked at reading skills.
"Reading is very predictive, especially moving forward, of how well a student does in all academic areas," Cloudwright said. "No other subject has as high a correlation as reading. If you're reading a textbook with technical jargon and you have not developed the proficiency in actual reading skills, then it doesn't matter your natural IQ at that point - the content just caught up and passed you."
For high school students, Monday options include drivers education, studying in the library and an internship program the district hopes to launch this year for juniors and seniors.