'The community came together': a look at how Brockton schools survived the pandemic

BROCKTON ― During the pandemic, as Brockton was hit hard by COVID, Brockton Public Schools spent over a year in remote learning before returning to the city's school buildings for in-person classes.

During that year, the roles of teachers, support staff and parents drastically changed as the school district adapted to pandemic-era education, said BPS Superintendent Mike Thomas, who is currently on administrative leave following the announcement in August 2023 of the district’s ongoing financial crisis.

In an interview with The Enterprise in early April, Thomas said the biggest priority during the period of remote learning was the students’ social and emotional wellbeing.

“That was something we spent a lot of time and money on, keeping kids safe,” he said.

Now that BPS has been fully in person for three school years, students and faculty are dealing with a new set of challenges that have made national headlines recently, including violence and chaos in the hallways and a massive budget deficit.

But looking back, how did the district make it through such an unprecedented year?

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Schools close in mid-March 2020

When the pandemic first hit the district in March 2020, Thomas said schools didn’t have any webcam software set up like Zoom or Google Classroom and many students didn’t have access to a computer or internet connection.

So, for the first pandemic semester from March 2020 to June 2020, classes operated asynchronously.

BPS continued serving breakfast and lunch to students, and families would drive by their schools to pick up meals and packets of schoolwork for students to complete and turn in when they came the next day.

Using stimulus money, the district bought roughly 15,000 laptops and over 4,000 Wi-Fi routers “just to get people online,” Thomas said.

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School becomes remote in September 2020

Once the 2020-2021 school year started in September, classrooms became synchronous as they moved online.

Teachers taught in virtual classrooms on Zoom or Microsoft Teams with each student logging on from their homes. Assignments were submitted via the online learning program Schoolology.

As student attendance began to drop, school adjustment councilors made home visits to check on students and families and see what support they needed.

“For what we had to do and what we had to undertake, we did a pretty good job,” said Thomas.

Meanwhile, parents became tutors. Many parents would sit with their kids during their online classes to help them in real time. Schools hosted outdoor workshops for parents to help them navigate the new technology and school environment.

According to Thomas, virtual parent-teacher conferences were well attended. It was easier for some parents to quickly join remotely rather than make the trip out to the school building.

“Parent engagement went through the roof,” Thomas said.

Members of the larger Brockton community brought food and supplies to schools, and many community organizations got involved to help students and families.

“The community came together really well,” Thomas said.

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Back to in-person classes in 2021

When students returned from February vacation in 2021, the district moved to a hybrid system where half the students would come into the building while the other half would stay home and continue learning virtually.

But that hybrid period was short lived. Amid major pressure for schools to go back in person, Brockton fully returned to school buildings in April 2021.

“No one was ready to come back. No one knew what it was going to be like," Thomas said.

Mental health concerns, social media use and violence began rapidly rising. Although these issues existed before the pandemic, Thomas said, they exploded once the schools came back.

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“The year we came back fully in person was harder than the year we went virtual," said Thomas. “We did everything we could to stop things."

Using cash from the pandemic-era ESSER funds, the district hired more adjustment councilors and bolstered its social and emotional learning department.

Thomas added that many staff, faculty and administrators took off work or resigned due to their own mental health concerns.

BPS leaders are still grappling with many of these issues three years later as the district continues to adapt to a post-pandemic academic environment.

As Thomas said, schools after the pandemic were “a whole different world.”

This article originally appeared on The Enterprise: Brockton Superintendent opens up on virtual education, school in Covid