Finding ways to serve: South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind shares its pandemic story

Feb. 4—When classes resumed at Cedar Springs Academy in August, teachers were sanitizing and disinfecting their rooms just like other teachers nationwide because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The academy, located on the campus of the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind in Spartanburg, serves students with a vision or hearing disability with at least one other physical or intellectual disability.

Susan Mitchell, who teaches kindergarten through third grade at the academy, has a class of four students. She said teachers are used to cleaning but they are cleaning more now because of the pandemic.

"We cleaned before, but we clean multiple times a day now," Mitchell said. "We have certain protocols for cleaning desks and things that are touched more often."

Mitchell has been teaching her students in-person, five days a week since they returned in August. Her classroom has changed in much the same way as other classrooms — her students wear masks, sit at plexiglass-shielded desks spaced 6 feet apart, and they all have their own box of work materials that they aren't allowed to share.

Mitchell said she and her assistant have to sanitize all of the reusable lesson materials. And since many of her students need one-on-one assistance, often through the use of hand-on-hand instruction, Mitchell also has to be very conscious about not transmitting germs between students.

"When I go from student to student, I have to plan my lessons, so that I allow time to move from student to student and wash my hands in between. I still rotate (between students), but it's more planned out so that I work with one student; my assistant works with one student and then we switch off in larger chunks of time, instead of smaller chunks," Mitchell said.

In addition to using personal protective equipment and increased cleaning, teachers also are using technology to help them in the classroom.

"We have an FM system and we have speakers for the iPads so that allows the students to hear the lessons better," Mitchell said. "I have a microphone clipped on me so I don't have to speak as loudly, and it picks up my voice more clearly than if they were to hear it from a distance underneath my mask."

When SCSDB got word that all the children would need to return home last March, teachers began working to get paper packets ready for each of the students. The school's Director of Educational Services Jolene Madison said they wanted students to have materials they were already familiar with to work with while they were away from school.

"We strongly felt that our students needed to utilize resources that they were very familiar with," Madison said. "We ran our buses and we took our materials to all different parts of the state as well as children's technology."

Teachers also had to instruct families in the methods used to support students so families could help their children with assignments at home. Some of those activities involved hand-over-hand instruction where a teacher physically guides a student through completing an assignment. Often, this was done through video conferences, but with students living all across the state, there was no one size fits all solution.

"A lot of families are in some rural areas where they didn't have cellphone reception and so forth, so we had to ensure that those services were provided to those families," said Scott Falcone, SCSDB director of Statewide Outreach Services in Columbia. "Oftentimes, we sent some of our staff members out in state vehicles and kind of worked with them at a distance to provide some instruction."

Falcone said they would also provide families with taped instructional videos so various kinds of family training could continue safely.

In addition to finding ways to serve students living in areas that do not support Wi-Fi, the administrators also had to find solutions for students who lived in homes that did not have Wi-Fi for other reasons.

Because of the school's traditionally small classrooms — sometimes fewer than 10 students per class — the school decided to bring students whose families wanted them to attend class in-person back five days a week in August.

The school's residential students were also allowed to return to their dorms in August, though they are being roomed at half capacity — a double room is a single now, Madison said, and rooms that would have housed four to six children now hold two.

Madison said the school implements the same screening and quarantining measures as schools in the public school districts. For example, when a student is being dropped off by a parent or picked up by a bus, their temperature is taken and if they have a fever, they aren't allowed on the bus or campus.

However, Madison said they've only had a handful of students who had to be sent home before entering the campus because they were showing symptoms and said they have not had any COVID-19 outbreaks on the campus.

Madison noted that mask wearing has not been an issue on the campus, though some of the masks look a little different from the ones you see in stores.

"Our kids are amazing. They're wearing their masks and they're not complaining. We purchased masks with our logo on it and a lot of the kids really enjoyed that, but we also keep a steady supply of paper masks for kids who prefer that," Madison said. "We have some masks that have the clear inserts for our students who are deaf to be able to aid in communication."

The 2020-21 school year has been one of learning, preparation, and adjustment for both the school's campuses and Outreach Services.

In the fall, the S.C. Department of Education purchased the Canvas digital learning platform for the school. Students were given small weekend assignments to help them get used to the platform, and then the school went fully-online between Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks as a test-run, Madison said.

"They knew how to access assignments, they knew how to track what they were supposed to be doing, how to log in. So if we had to go remote again, we would be prepared to do that," Madison said.

In addition to providing an alternative way to hold classes, Canvas has also helped supplement activities teachers were already using in the classroom. Digital Art instructor at the school's Applied Academics Center Iosop MacDougall said Canvas has made it much easier for students to submit their video essays.

Both the school and Outreach Services are also providing support to families whose children are medically homebound or who chose to keep their kids closer to home and send them to a school in their district. Madison said the school is making sure the students have access to the materials they need, from technology to books.

"When you're working with Braille, when you're working with large print, that is not always readily available when you're off-site," Madison said.

While keeping up with the ever changing guidelines and increased number of off-campus students has been challenging, both Madison and Falcone said providing for their students through the pandemic has been rewarding in many ways.

"To witness the perseverance of all the staff members in their willingness to go the extra mile to ensure that their students are receiving the services they need has been very rewarding to me," Falcone said. "The South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind is going through a pandemic, embracing all the possibilities of being able to provide these direct services, whether it be on campus face-to-face or within the school districts."

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