Our journey in computer science hasn't been without some challenges. The Covid shutdown was a big barrier, and then coming back the next year in a hybrid setting where students attended in person half of the time and virtually the other half. We are very proud that our teachers led the charge to provide virtual computer science lessons and activities during this time. Other challenges included another failed bond referendum that would have brought all of our elementary together in one building, increasing our business partners, and changes in staff.

Failed bond referendum

• • • Unable to bring all district PK-3 students together.

    • Teachers in separate buildings struggled to collaborate effectively on core content integration strategies.

      • Solution

        • Using other funding sources, we were able to bring the cohort teachers together for regular meetings around computer science planning and implementation.

Pandemic

• Momentum around implementation in cohort classrooms that was building leading up to March 2020, suddenly halted as the need to plan online learning opportunities for students took precedence.

  • Solution

    • CSE cohort teachers were able to provide computer science learning opportunities in a virtual environment

Getting Business Partner Involvement

• Due to COVID district policies, visitors were not allowed in the buildings and all field trips were cancelled making interaction with business partners very challenging. Our business partners were also facing their own pandemic challenges.

  • Solution

    • Some of the business and community partners agreed to be in videos that we created and pushed out to the students for Computer Science Week.

Staff Turnover and Changes in Administration

• Coming back in the Fall of 2021, we had considerable staff movement and the addition of new teachers, or teachers moving to new grade levels. We also had a change in administrators.

  • Solution

    • New teachers for the Fall of 2021 were invited to the Summer 2021 Teacher Workshop with Samantha Dahlby to try to frontload them with computer science. We were able to find people to replace those that were no longer part of the CS cohort due to a job change.

    • We continue to work toward onboarding the new administrators into computer science, while respecting how full their plates are with running new buildings with new grade level content to learn.