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Student tells Massena school board that distance learning impacted her peers in different ways

Posted 6/26/20

BY ANDY GARDNER North Country This Week MASSENA -- A student ex officio member of the Board of Education told trustees that distance learning due to the pandemic was harder on some than others. …

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Student tells Massena school board that distance learning impacted her peers in different ways

Posted

BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

MASSENA -- A student ex officio member of the Board of Education told trustees that distance learning due to the pandemic was harder on some than others.

Ieronhenehtha Lazore, the board’s non-voting student member, spoke during a June 18 Board of Education meeting held online via Zoom and broadcast over YouTube. It was her final participation in a board meeting, as she will graduate this year.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered all New York state schools closed in March. It was initially supposed to be for a month, but later was extended through the rest of the 2019-20 school year.

“I found a lot of people I talked to, they were struggling through the pandemic, especially with trying to do school work. It was really hard for people to focus,” said Lazore. “I’m upset my year didn’t end how I wanted it to. I know in the long run it is what it is. We’re honestly doing the best we can. Everyone’s trying really hard.”

Lazore said she and her classmates are aware that the recent months have been historical, with the nationwide social uprisings that spread worldwide.

“In the recent months, with all the deals with the protests and everything that deals with Black Lives Matter … it’s been so chaotic for teenagers,” she said.

Board of Education President Pat Bronchetti said his sympathies are with the Class of 2020 for having to deal with the drastic changes in everyday life, on top of finishing school.

“I really feel for you and the rest of the seniors, for their high school career to end like that. Twenty years from now you’ll have a great story,” Bronchetti said.

“We didn’t get to have the prom we wanted to have … or the exact graduation we wanted to have. Hey, we’re living through history right now. This is big stuff,” Lazore said. “I really like to look at the best things out of it, rather than the negatives.”

Superintendent Pat Brady asked Lazore about her perceptions of remote learning. Lazore said she personally didn’t have a lot of problems, but believes many other students did.

“It wasn’t really too difficult because a majority of my classes used Google Classroom,” Lazore said. “The thing I liked about remote learning was that I could do my work throughout the day. So I kind of dispersed it.”

She said on average she had about “two hours of homework per day. I didn’t have a huge workload, so it wasn’t too bad for me.”

Brady also asked Lazore what the district can do to improve remote learning in the future.

She said her teachers were “pretty lenient.”

“A lot of my friends talked about how their teachers were still really strict even though we were going through remote learning and a bunch of chaotic events that were happening around us, and they just felt they were kind of pressured a little bit,” she said.

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