With public school campuses in Arizona closed through the remainder of the semester, Fountain Hills Unified School District has undertaken the tremendous task of moving classes for the high school, middle school and elementary school online.

Online classes kicked off at Fountain Hills High School last week and started this week at Fountain Hill Middle School and McDowell Mountain Elementary School. While there are some similarities, not every grade level is using the exact same setup.

“(Online classes) will be somewhat different by grade level and content area,” Superintendent Dr. Robert Allen explained. “Many teachers from fourth grade and above will be using the Google Suite of applications for communication, sharing of assignments, documents, videos and plans. At MMES, they will primarily use an educational platform called Seesaw to interact with students.”

FHHS has converted its Campus of Champions website, which was previously used for athletics, to be an online launch site. On the website there are tabs for each subject with each teacher having their own page for students to utilize.

“Every teacher has daily office hours,” FHHS principal Dr. Cain Jagodzinski explained. “During that time students can talk with their teacher and get help on the weekly work that the teacher has posted.”

Teachers are still planning lessons like they normally would, but school is more than academics. Both teachers and administrators are trying to find ways to keep the social aspect of school present.

“Overall, each teacher is working with both their content team and grade level team to develop lessons that target the state standards,” Fountain Hills Middle School principal James Carrick said. “We are also attempting to meet the social needs of students with group chats, Zoom video conferences and various P.E., music, and art activities.”

Along with developing online classes, FHUSD administrators are making sure that they are looking after the students who do not have access to a computer at home.

“We are providing a Chromebook to each family that needs one based on an online survey that was sent out last Friday night,” Dr. Allen said. “The distribution of those devices has occurred at each school location on Thursday and Friday, March 26 and 27. We can extend that to [this[ week if needed. Families that have not responded to the survey are being contacted by phone by each school to determine what their online resources and needs are and we will be working on alternate ways to get them classroom resources.”

Of course, technology doesn’t come without its fair share of hiccups and, if any student experiences issues, Dr. Allen said they should report it to their teacher, who can quickly pass it along to principals and the technology department.

As local schools make the transition to online classes Dr. Allen and the three FHUSD principals encourage patience as they figure things out.

“While online instruction has been around for some time, that has been a choice for students and families,” Dr. Allen said. “It is critical to understand the challenge of transitioning so rapidly to a virtual or remote learning environment for all students despite the fact that all families are not digitally connected or have sufficient devices in their household to interact with the school this way.”