To the staff of TISD and members of the board,

On Friday, October 9, the district released a statement that required every @Home learner to
return to school in-person. At that time, @Home learners were hit with a wave of emotions: panic,
frustration, anxiety, and fear. This fear was not only for ourselves but for the thousands of people within
the district that this statement affected.
In Smith County, in the span of one month (March to April), we experienced 120 Coronavirus
cases. However, in just two months (August to October), our county jumped from 2,800 cases to 5,400.
How did we go from a rate of 120 cases a month to 1,300 cases a month? Smith County cases grow at an
alarming rate each day. The reopening of our schools, the continuing of football games, and the allowance
of gaiters (which have been proven ineffective) have exacerbated the issue at hand. And according to the
Washington Post, the next wave of coronavirus cases is approaching as the US sees a rapid rise of
infected patients due to the fall and winter seasons approaching many states. Now isn't the right time to
pack classrooms and have the online learners return.
Out of decency for our hardworking healthcare workers, many students and their parents filed for
@Home learning for the first and second six weeks. All those listed below are in our respective classes'
upper percentages, some in the top 1%. Though @Home students experienced issues initially while
adjusting to the new format, and some grades may not be as high as what was desired, they were willing
to stay home and sacrifice their education to slow the spread of the virus and ensure the safety of
ourselves and others.
We applaud ourselves for following a new routine in a strange environment and handing over a
large portion of our upperclassman years. We are proud of giving up our would-be spot in the classroom
for a person who couldn't afford to stay home; we are proud of reducing the number of students in school
so that a teacher can spread out the desks by even a few inches; we are proud to have made all A's in
every one of our classes during the first grading cycle online, where we frequently had to teach ourselves
how to find the derivative of a function or how to name chemical compounds. We will continue to do this
because we care for our teachers, though some only achieve 4 hours of sleep a night as they have to carry
the burden of doubling their workload. We care for the staff in our district, some of which work 12-hour
days disinfecting surfaces; we care for our classmates we haven't even met face-to-face. We understand
the risks, and we have seen the virus at its worst in friends, neighbors, and even family.
According to TISD's aforementioned statement, some students could not acclimate as quickly to
the learning environment as those listed below. To that, we recommend adopting ways to improve online
learning that has worked for programs across the nation. During the summer, as events were canceled,
postponed, or even moved online, these programs could adapt. Concerts are continuously held online,
business meetings are held over Zoom, debate tournaments are done through online platforms, national
programs (such as those held by the ACLU, college campuses, or institutes) have found an effective way
to continue online, and a musical was successfully performed over Skype!
Additionally, schools across the nation (and even the world) have adopted methods during the
transition to online learning to keep up student engagement. An international school in Turkey takes
attendance for the day by requiring students to check-in via video call before the start of the school day,
where students can also ask the teacher questions and interact with their classmates. If the student missed
the video call, their absence is reported to attendance, and the parents are emailed. A public high school in
the California Bay Area that enrolls over 3,000 students has also managed to find success. Over the
summer, it was declared that every public school in California must operate fully online for the first
semester of the academic year. Like the Turkish international school, students checked in by being present
at the beginning of the day via Zoom call and followed their regular schedule throughout the day. Instead
of entering classrooms, they joined the Zoom waiting room. And finally, schools across Texas have
adopted an online learning system that was the closest to ours, they had a portion of kids stay home, and a
portion of kids attend school. However, attendance was marked in the same way as the Bay Area schools,
and online learners must attend each Zoom class of the day.
Let's now focus on our district's problems and possible reasons as to why we haven't been so
successful with @Home learning. TISD left the decision to hold online live classes to the teacher, and the
majority of them don't implement it primarily because they don't know how to. Our teachers were never
prepared with adequate resources or proper training. This has led to the hectic first week of school where
teachers were scrambling to learn how to use several digital tools. We do know that training has been held
on how to use Canvas or Microsoft Teams; however, they were so brief and vague that coming out of the
training, teachers only knew how to create assignments and their class section. In order to figure out the
rest, they were told to “play around with it.” Once they finally figured out how to use these technologies,
they haven't been provided with the resources needed to help online learners specifically. The few
teachers of ours that provide live classes do so using their own personal devices. This means that some of
the teachers who couldn't afford to get a new tablet or invest in an Apple Pencil weren't able to make
online learning feasible for their @Home students.
We are merely students at Tyler Legacy High School, but we speak on behalf of the hundreds of
students that wish to continue online learning, so we ask that the board reconsider their statement for
those who have managed to find success in @Home learning. Before deciding to have every online
learner return to school, it would've been much appreciated for TISD to have re-evaluated current district
policies on online education and adopt any of the above methods for combating student disengagement.
There's a reason why some less motivated students couldn't adapt to the new @Home program, and we
believe that is because of poor planning and not because of online instruction. There doesn't have to be a
tradeoff between our health and our education if we can have both. If colleges and other school districts
have managed to keep up student engagement and academic performance, we do not see why our district
cannot do the same.

In solidarity,

Kawsar Yasin, Zoe Strain, Lila Katz, Sajid Bhuiyan, Arjun Rajesh, Hadeeqah Quazi, Lydia Schweizer,
Varun Verma, Eliot Lee, Tri Hoang, Alex Greene, Rushil Sajjan, Maria Leija, Marina Nance, and other
@Home Learners at Tyler Legacy High School