New Westminster Secondary School students are coping with heavy workloads and mental health challenges as they finish up their school year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those were some of the findings brought to the New Westminster school board’s operations committee meeting on June 9, in a presentation by the board’s three Student Voice representatives. The students don’t have a vote at the board table but have been providing input to the school board throughout the year.
At the last meeting, held virtually via Webex, Jalen Bachra, Sierra-Rose Hand and Rebecca Ballard presented the results of a survey they conducted to get NWSS students’ views on how online learning has been working, or not working, for them.
Their survey garnered 556 responses, about 25% of the school population, with a fairly balanced representation of all four grades from 9 through 12, though the younger students’ response rates were slightly higher.
Many of the results were positive – for instance, more than 76% of students said they felt they have all the supports they need to learn from home, and more than 92% said they had the necessary supplies and workspace to make home learning possible.
In total, nearly 75% of students rated their workload as either “manageable” (34.8%) or “it’s a lot of work but I can get it done” (40%). A further 22.1% ranked it as “overwhelming.”
“Not many people said it was easy,” Jalen told trustees. “I was actually surprised with how many people said it was overwhelming.”
In a series of open-ended questions, the survey also delved deeper into what students were enjoying about remote learning and what they were finding challenging.
On the positive side, Sierra noted, the students found it beneficial to be able to set their own schedule.
“There’s flexibility and self-regulation. There’s not a teacher over your shoulder telling you exactly what to do and when to do it, and there was a lot less stress,” she said. “A lot of the time when we go to school, the entire day’s set out for us, and we don’t get to do things at our own pace.”
On the negative side, however, she told trustees that students found they suffered from a lack of structure, a lack of communication from teachers and the difficulties involved in trying to learn independently.
“Learning physics or calculus from a textbook isn’t really easy when you don’t have a teacher over your shoulder to help you,” she said.
Rebecca also told trustees that students reported struggling with how to balance their school work and mental health – reporting that they were either focusing on school work at the expense of their mental health, or vice versa.
Rebecca quoted a student who’d responded by saying: “Most days I don't think about or take care of my mental health since I am busy with school work; but days that I don't have work to complete I do notice that I am more down than usual.”
“They’re seeing they’re more distracted with their schoolwork, and when they do have time to think about it, their mental health isn’t really that great,” Rebecca said, adding that the schoolwork/mental health balance was a recurring theme in the answers. “The amount of students who are doing poorly is astronomically higher than those who are balancing the two well.”
Jalen told trustees that students also had a number of concrete suggestions to help improve remote learning in the future. They’d like teachers to stick to one virtual platform – Google Classroom was the preferred alternative – and to work more collaboratively to make schedules more workable for students. Students suggested teachers should work together to ensure that students’ video calls, assignments and deadlines don’t conflict with each other.
They also expressed a need for more student-teacher interaction in the form of one-on-one sessions and better office hours.
“They feel it’s just the teachers sending information at them and then they don’t get in, they don’t have a chance to learn more about it,” Jalen noted.
The students summarized the survey results with a plea to teachers: “Just put yourselves, the teachers, in the students’ shoes, just because too much work won’t always provide the motivation that the students need to keep going from home, especially with all the distractions that may come with it,” Jalen said.
Superintendent Karim Hachlaf agreed with the students that the time-management issues and schedule coordination is something that will need more work moving forward.
“This has been a bit of a hurry-up offence for our teachers … , and a lot more work is required in terms of balancing schedules,” he said.
He told the students the data they collected will help to frame the district’s planning for September – when, depending upon how the COVID-19 situation unfolds, some form of remote learning may still be in place.
