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Dawson ISD’s response to COVID-19 demonstrates educator dedication and the importance of communication tools

Like most, we didn’t have a pandemic response plan in place at Dawson ISD when schools started shutting down in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Fortunately, our district, which serves 565 students in a rural area of Central Texas, had the pieces in place—primarily our website and a strong community—that allowed us to respond quickly, both as a school system and as a hub for community response.

Here are the actions we’ve taken since we announced school closures Friday, March 13.

Training teachers to be webmasters

Our teachers didn’t use our website often—not because they didn’t want to, but because, like most teachers, they focused on standards and testing and all the other hard work of teaching young people. In less than a week, they had to get up to speed on running their teacher pages, and now, they’re all online teachers.

Our content management system provider, Edlio, has a great help center with documents on creating classes and updating teacher pages, for example. As the technology director, social media manager and webmaster, I sent everyone a single document from the help center explaining how to set up class pages, and only a couple of people on my staff needed help after that.

Now, they’re all reaching out to me saying, “Wow, why haven’t we been using this the whole time?” And I say, “Well, I’ve been trying to get you to!”

There’s no way around it now. Those teacher pages are where students are getting their assignments. I can’t say that anything about the last few weeks has been seamless, but setting up those pages, and making sure students could access them, went as smoothly as possible given the circumstances.

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