Education Week - March 30, 2022 - 19

Freshman Saanvi Suresh, center,
and three classmates from Scotch
Plains-Fanwood High School
designed a science experiment
that will be tested on a suborbital
rocket as part of NASA's TechRise
Student Challenge.
reflection essay for the project.
Finally, with 10 days left in 8th
grade, she worked up the courage
to step foot back inside Park Middle
with her teachers. Saanvi said she'd
never seen their legs before.
Just before the school year ended,
NASA announced it would run a
student competition called TechRise.
Winners would get to design
experiments to be tested on a rocket
launched into suborbital spaceflight.
After 14 months of exploring her own
expansive internal world, Saanvi
thought the idea of doing science in
outer space made a strange kind of
sense.
Applicants needed a sponsor from
their school, but she wasn't too worried.
Even from afar, her teachers
had never stopped investing in her.
" What made it amazing, " she said,
" was that they were all so kind. "
Battered and bruised, schools
struggle back to their feet
As the 2021-22 school year approached,
the full scope of the academic
damage caused by the pandemic
started to become evident.
More than 100,000 American children
had lost a parent or caregiver to
COVID-19.
Research studies also showed
math and reading scores had plummeted
dramatically since the onset
of the pandemic. The declines were
largest in schools serving a high
number of low-income students.
Millions of children had been disconnected
from school or suffered major
disruptions as they learned to read or
speak English or master their multiplication
tables.
Scotch Plains and Fanwood, where
fewer than 1 percent of families live
below the poverty line and all of
the school district's employees survived
the pandemic, absorbed the
blows better than most. Overall,
the district's students continued to
make progress and score above the
national average on a widely used
benchmark assessment called MAP
Growth.
With two parents who kept their
jobs and no one in her family lost to
COVID-19, Saanvi Suresh was especially
lucky.
The good fortune continued when
she received her 9th grade class
schedule. Just like her older brother,
Saanvi got DeNicola for biology. Her
mother was thrilled.
" Just don't ask her on the first day
and scare her, " Rema Suresh advised
when her daughter asked if the
teacher might be a good sponsor for
her NASA project.
Mindful of the advice, Saanvi
waited until day three. She was still
learning her way around the high
school. But after a single hour watching
DeNicola interact with in-person
students, she was confident she
would say yes.
" Even through her mask, I could
see she was smiling, " the now-14year-old
said.
She and the friends she'd recruited
to the project dubbed themselves the
Space Gals. Then they set to work
figuring out what astronauts need to
grow plants in zero gravity. Less than
a week before the November 3 application
deadline, they had a breakthrough
on how to prototype a new
system that might someday support
commercial farming on Mars.
" NASA is already trying to figure
out how to use hydroponics, " their
final proposal read. " Our plan is different.
We have designed an irrigation
system for outer space. "
DeNicola was blown away.
By that point, it seemed like
Scotch Plains-Fanwood schools
were returning to some semblance
of normalcy. The number of positive
COVID-19 cases in the district
dwindled to nine, then seven.
Even after the highly contagious
omicron variant began sweeping
the nation, the district was able
to avoid another shutdown. With
nearly all Scotch Plains-Fanwood
students back to full-time in-person
learning, the lawsuit filed a year
earlier was dismissed just before
Christmas.
" Everyone in the district wanted
the same things those parents
wanted, " said Mast. " If you sue for
the sun to rise, eventually you will
prevail. "
All over the country, public schools
seemed to be slowly climbing back to
their feet, even though the virus was
still adapting and infecting hundreds
of thousands of people per day.
Ongoing surveys administered
by the EdWeek Research Center
showed they still faced huge challenges.
More then 40 percent of
administrators said that principals
or the superintendent in their district
had been physically or verbally
threatened over their COVID-19 responses.
Finding substitute teachers,
bus drivers, and paraprofessionals
was often impossible. Two-thirds of
respondents said student misbehavior
was worse than it had been prepandemic.
Student absentee rates
remained high.
But educators also saw signs of
healing in the little things.
" When you see the kids smelling
the French fries, it's just pure joy, "
Mast said when hot lunch lines returned
to the local middle school.
14% of survey respondents said
their district had limited or shut
down in-person instruction
during the 2021-22 school year.
EdWeek Research Center Survey, Dec. 2021
By that point, it was 2022. NASA
was preparing to announce the
winners of its TechRise challenge.
DeNicola invited the Space Gals to
watch the livestream with her thirdperiod
AP Biology students. When
the words " Scotch Plains-Fanwood
High School " appeared on the
screen, everyone jumped from their
seats and cheered wildly for Saanvi
and her teammates.
Then, in mid-February, it was time
for DeNicola to run the Waterville
simulation for a third time.
The trauma of the past two years
was still fresh. Every time the teacher's
phone buzzed, she felt a flash
of panic that her kids' school was
announcing another shutdown or
quarantine.
But DeNicola had also found a few
silver linings. Along with the simulation's
designers, she'd tweaked
the exercise to have students focus
more on considering the competing
perspectives of the different
stakeholders in the fictional town.
She also wanted to emphasize a set
of broad scientific practices-how
to develop theories, how to gather
data, how to decide what's true-that
seemed more important than ever.
And DeNicola especially wanted her
classes to grapple with the reality
that many real-world dilemmas don't
have a single " right " answer.
" It's not about playing school, " she
said. " It's about how we can solve
problems and make the best decisions
possible with the information
we have. "
On a chilly Wednesday afternoon,
DeNicola's freshmen sauntered past
the new Medify Airx 2500 air purifier
at the front of her room and found
their seats. No one was in quarantine.
Saanvi tugged at the sleeves of
her grey NASA hoodie and pulled out
her laptop.
As the class got to work, the lessons
of the past two years appeared
in small moments. Now at ease with
a raft of new online tools, DeNicola
showed the students how to pool
their data and analyze it collaboratively
in a shared Google Sheet. Then
she offered the class a hard-earned
new perspective.
" If one component changes, that
can have an impact across the rest
of the system, " she said. " But sometimes,
even when there's a change to
an individual, that doesn't mean the
whole system is going to fail. "
Saanvi was part of the group tasked
with modeling what would happen
if Waterville allowed its farmers to
cultivate all the land they wanted
for themselves. When she hit 'run'
to start the simulation, no giant blue
fish took over her iPad. But as the
virtual days in Waterville's digital
ecosystem flashed by, algae slowly
began to overrun the pond, causing
the minnow population to dwindle
from more than 100 down to two,
then one, then die out entirely.
When it was time for the students
to make sense of what they'd observed,
DeNicola was ready.
" What can we learn from this? " the
teacher asked.
" It was really helpful in learning
how to make a decision for a community, "
Saanvi said later, referring
to both the lesson and the incredible
disruptions that forced the country
and its public schools to rethink their
priorities over the past two years.
" Sometimes, you have to be more
creative in the way you do things. "
Librarian and Data Specialist Maya
Riser-Kositsky contributed to this
article. Data analysis for this article
was provided by the EdWeek Research
Center.
Coverage of leadership, summer
learning, social and emotional
learning, arts learning, and afterschool
is supported in part by a grant from
The Wallace Foundation, at www.
wallacefoundation.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
EDUCATION WEEK | March 30, 2022 | www.edweek.org | 19
Saanvi Suresh was among those
who elected to keep learning
from home. From her bedroom,
she helped convince the Scotch
Plains-Fanwood STEAM Club
to restart its Junior Solar Sprint program.
Eric Sucar for Education Week
http://www.wallacefoundation.org http://www.wallacefoundation.org http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - March 30, 2022

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