(continued from page 29 - No Going Back from Hybrid and Remote Learning, Districts Say) Officials in the 73,000-student Guilford County, N.C., school system learned something surprising from their COVIDdriven foray into remote learning. “It offers parents a unique opportunity to be much more deeply involved in their children’s education,” Sharon Contreras said. Superintendent “They actually get to observe instruction regularly. That hasn’t happened before.” Prior to last school year, online offerings in Guilford County consisted mostly of asynchronous supplemental and creditrecovery courses for high school students. The district was still recovering from an illfated experiment with 1-to-1 computing several years earlier, and schools still had to contend with a significant digital divide “Stronger Together!” Page 30 in the surrounding community. As a result, teachers’ live instruction availability was limited to an hour or so per day in the weeks immediately after the coronavirus hit. Many parents weren’t happy. So this summer, the district decided to triple the amount of live remote instruction schools offered. “Expectations changed dramatically,” said Chief Academic Officer Whitney Oakley. She and Contreras wanted to avoid hybrid instruction as much as possible, believing it’s not realistic to ask teachers to teach in two fundamentally different ways at the same time. They also wanted to provide certainty to parents who knew last summer they wouldn’t send their children
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