E4: COVID-19 and K-12 Education

Dr. Timothy Williams serves as the Superintendent of the York Suburban School District in York County, PA. His district has a long record of high student achievement as is evident in its frequent recognition by national ranking organizations such as US News and World Report. Dr. Williams inherited this when he came to York Suburban in July of 2018. Prior to that, he was the Superintendent of the Westmont Hilltop School District in Cambria County, PA. He began his 34-year career in public education as a middle school English and Social Studies teacher and also held various administrative post, including IT Director and Assistant to the Superintendent. He is a graduate of Wilkes University with a BA in History and an MS in Education. He earned his doctorate at Immaculata University where his dissertation research focused on a variant of online learning called “virditional.”

Warehaus:

My name is Matt Falvey and I’m your host for today’s episode. Today we will be talking about the impact of the current pandemic crisis on K-12 education and its delivery. Today’s guest is Dr. Tim Williams. Dr. Williams serves as the superintendent of the York Suburban School District in York County, Pennsylvania. His district has a long record of high student achievement as is evident in its frequent recognition by national ranking organizations such as US News and World Report.

Dr. Williams inherited this long history of student achievement when he came to York Suburban in July of 2018. Prior to that, he was the superintendent of the Westmont Hilltop School District in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. He began his 34-year public education career as a middle school English and Social Studies teacher, and also held various administrative posts, including IT director and Assistant to the Superintendent.

He is a graduate of Wilkes University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Master of Science and Education. He earned his doctorate at Immaculata University, where his dissertation research focused on a variant of online learning called ‘Virditional’.

So, Tim, welcome. We’re glad to have you on. I thought we’d start off by having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what led you to education.

Dr. Tim Williams:

Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. When I was in college, I was actually pursuing a career in journalism. At the time – in 1985 – it was difficult to find a job and I really wanted to be a teacher, but my family had discouraged me from that and I was having a difficult time finding a job in journalism. My father came into me and said, “Did you ever think about going back to school to get your teaching certificate?”. And that was all I needed to hear. I went back to school, got my teaching certificate, and my first teaching job in 1986. And then a long, 34-year career as a middle school teacher, central office administrator and superintendent began. “Best job I’ve ever had”, is what we like to say to each other among the superintendents, especially these days. We say it half-jokingly, but it is true. We’re enjoying this new challenge that COVID-19 has brought us, and it certainly is never boring, especially these days.

Warehaus:

Yes. Talk about a haymaker being thrown to all types of industries and professions. The impact for you though – what a day! I can’t wait for you to tell the audience about your particular Friday here, but I guess let’s get into that. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, in what ways have you adapted the delivery of K-12 education in your school district York Suburban? And I guess you can take it from here.

Dr. Tim Williams:

Sure. Well, York Suburban has a long history of providing quality face-to-face instruction. And though online learning has never been something that we believe is the best way to deliver instruction, in these circumstances, in these days, we really did not have a choice. So, we had to adapt. In my mind, a good way to deliver face-to-face instruction is to have some online elements as part of your face to face instruction – more of a hybrid approach to instructing students.

This pandemic has created a situation where…Over the next couple of years, I was planning to bring the staff along to get them ready to deliver some elements of online instruction as part of their face-to-face instruction. And the pandemic really, provided essentially, an opportunity to move that process along more quickly because, under normal circumstances, we would have taken a few years to get teachers prepared to deliver some online elements in their instruction. And now instead of taking a couple of years, we did it in a couple of weeks – which is really a phenomenal kind of a task. The teachers have responded incredibly well. The administrative team has worked incredibly hard to make this all happen. And, the whole, entire team approached the whole thing with such gusto, and is producing really, very good online instruction for something being done for the first time ever.

Warehaus:

Yeah. We’ve seen so much and are very thankful for technology and how intuitive technology is now. We just did an interview with a cybersecurity expert, and certainly there are some challenges that we’re all facing with the proliferation of Zoom, Microsoft teams, etc. So, what are some of the challenges you faced during the implementation of your plan, and your delivery of education?

Dr. Tim Williams:

Yeah, the first task we had to face is……We have the equipment – the end user equipment – that would be needed to do such a thing. It wasn’t all deployed where it needed to be deployed, but we did have it. So, we had to ramp up deployment pretty quickly. But the biggest hurdle for our folks, particularly our students, was access to internet to get their work completed. We’ve got… People are usually surprised to learn that York Suburban – typically considered an affluent school district – has 34 to 35% of its students in the free/reduced lunch program. So roughly one in three kids get some kind of subsidized meal at school – breakfast and lunches. So, we have a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students than people realize.

And that presents a challenge because if you’re on the free/reduced lunch program, the chances of you having internet access are probably not as great as if you’re not in the free/reduced lunch program. So, the technology department had to really ramp things up very quickly, to figure out ways and get creative about ways to get connectivity for students. The devices…that was a no brainer, but then, they had to be a little bit more creative in working with cell phone companies, working with Comcast, and other internet service providers to allow our students have access to the internet so they could complete online instruction.

Warehaus:

Yeah, and it rolled out great, obviously! I mean, we have friends, parents – as I spoke to you beforehand – some of my coworkers at Warehaus are parents and alumni of your school district – they have been very, very pleased with what’s transpired, and what you’ve been able to do. I guess, you know, that ties into the fact that, sometimes good things come out of hardship. What, if any, innovations, themes or positive impacts do you see maybe, becoming permanent or more permanent going forward?

Dr. Tim Williams:

Yeah, that’s an excellent question! We’re leveraging this bad situation to make good, positive, permanent change. Not only are we getting teachers prepared to deliver online elements in addition to their face-to-face instruction, but we’re also, creating scenarios where teachers from across the district are now collaborating more than they ever have at York Suburban. There’s this perceived East side, West side, kind of…I wouldn’t call it a contradiction…but a difference. And my plan over the next few years is to make a grade level realignment in a way so that there is no longer, you know, third graders on the East side and third graders in the West side. It’s just third graders at York Suburban. So, that requires us to physically change the way we run our buildings. But along with that process, we also have to have our third-grade teachers on one side collaborating with the third grade teachers on the other side. And this whole pandemic has prompted us to do that kind of collaboration more naturally, because we have to collaborate out of necessity to be successful. So, we’ve got some collaboration going on that we’ve never had before, and that’s a really neat thing. So, I would say that’s a necessary and wonderful byproduct of this terrible situation. So, that’s a big part of how we’re going to change things going forward.

Warehaus:

Well, it’s amazing! You know, something like this is pretty remarkable! This team that you have in your school district – and you look, you see this in military athletics where any time there’s some sort of Rite of Passage, you build teamwork, and you build comradery going through something difficult –that’s a great example of what you just said. What do you see, perhaps with this pandemic, how does this impact the design of school buildings and school property, perhaps going forward?

Dr. Tim Williams:

Yeah, that’s a great question as well! Of course, we’re always going to have, you know, safety and security concerns to design into schools. But from an instructional point of view, it may prompt schools to look differently about how they create collaborative spaces in their buildings. For example, perhaps the library area becomes more of a collaboration space, such that if students have…if they’re engaged in a hybrid kind of learning approach, they may need work spaces where they can complete their work in a non-traditional classroom setting. And in my mind, the library areas, can easily be transformed into such a thing. So as we design future schools, we probably should be thinking more along the lines of “How can we create collaborative spaces for kids to be able to get their hybrid learning work done in a comfortable but engaging kind of an environment?”. So, I think that’s going to prompt school designers to think a little bit differently about what kind of spaces they design for students.

Warehaus:

Yeah, that’s great. Really appreciate sharing that. Certainly, a practicality and it is something that I think could even drive performance of the kids, GPA and so on and so forth. So not really going off script, but if you will, have you ever seen anything like is? Have you experienced an event similar to this? I suppose 9/11 maybe? But anything you can think of in the past that that was similar to this?

Dr. Tim Williams:

Not really. This, really takes the cake. 9/11 didn’t impact schools as much as it did businesses per se. Particularly, in the financial industry. I would say the closest thing that comes to this would be, maybe the housing crisis of 2008, which from a financial standpoint required us to look at things differently. This pandemic is – of course, there’s going to be financial implications – but there’s also educational implications of this thing, so this makes this pandemic unique in the sense that it’s impacting not just the financial end of things, but also the instructional end of things, and in many ways for good reasons, good purposes. For example, one of the other innovations we’re looking at right now is, if we were able to ramp up online instruction this way, and we’re able to educate kids remotely without going full blown online learning – we are talking about ideas like – maybe we have physical school from Monday to Thursday and then Friday is an online instruction day and do that throughout the year. So, we’ve shown that we can do this. So, since we can do this, maybe we should be looking at ways we deliver instruction differently in a permanent way. Those are the kinds of conversations we’re having right now.

Warehaus:

Hey, I love that. And I got to tell you – as we discussed – I have three kids and my youngest is a freshman at Kings College and, of course, they’ve been doing everything virtually. I’m curious – which is a whole different podcast – to see how this impacts undergraduate degree programs too. So yeah, I love it. I think – I’m man enough to admit it – I think, looking back at my teenage years, I probably would’ve had a lot of hooky going on if I had an online Friday day of school.

Dr. Tim Williams:

Well, of course, it would depend on how everything is structured for that online day.

Warehaus:

Yeah, correct. Yeah. No question. So, anything else maybe that we didn’t cover, or I didn’t ask you? Any other theme or something you’d like to leave with our audience before we depart here?

Dr. Tim Williams:

No, other that this whole thing started on Friday the 13th, which you know, is typically a day that people like to try to avoid. This past Friday the 13th, there was no avoiding what transpired. And what I like, was not only the collaboration within the school district, but also, on Friday the 13th, the superintendents in York County collaborated in ways that we had never collaborated before. And that collaboration continues pretty much on a daily basis. York County superintendents decided they were going to shut schools down for two weeks on that Friday the 13^th, and a couple of other counties followed suit after we did that. Eventually, the Pennsylvania department of education decided they were going to close all the schools in the state. So, I’m really appreciative for the collaboration that I have with the other superintendents in York County to do the right thing for kids, and for our staff members. There’s not just collaboration within districts, there’s also collaboration going on among districts, which is always a good thing.

Warehaus:

Yeah, that’s great! And we’re very fortunate in our area here in South Central Pennsylvania. We have some great, school districts, and good people like yourself in charge of them, which is awesome. Do you want to leave.… You have some great resources that your team has been proactive in posting on your website. Would you like to give your link to your school district, Tim. We’re going to push this out to some other educators, and maybe you’re doing something that they have not thought of or have questions on. And you know, you have some really good resources there.

Dr. Tim Williams:

Sure. No, problem at all. Our main URL is yssd.org for York Suburban school district. We have two main pages related to this pandemic. One is, is COVID-19 specific, and the other page is specific to what we’re calling Forward Learning. We don’t want to call it online learning. We’re calling it Forward Learning because we don’t believe online learning is the best way to educate kids. So it’s going to transform into some kind of hybrid approach to schooling. So, we’re calling it forward learning for right now. We have a Forward learning page and a COVID-19 page that has a lot of information based on what we have been doing, and what we are doing for our students.

Warehaus:

Okay! Well, that’s awesome! Listen, I can’t thank you enough. Really appreciate your time Tim, and certainly look forward to having lunch again with you at Rotary and attending our Rotary meetings real time versus virtually. But love what you had to say. Awesome resource and thank you so much!

Dr. Tim Williams:

You’re quite welcome. My pleasure.