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(Pexels)
In the hills of West Austin, bordered by the Colorado River and Barton Creek, Eanes ISD schools ease back into the school year with a stockpile of student laptops and tablets and a bevy of teachers at ease with virtual learning tools.
Across town, on the more economically diverse East side, Del Valle ISD has less experience with online learning, having to start from scratch: First make sure all students have WiFi and get them laptops, then teach the teachers how to run virtual classrooms.
As the school year gets underway in the Austin area, local schools all face the same challenge: Educating kids during a pandemic. How they address them depends on their resources and the priorities of the families in the district. Aside from some guiding principles, the state has largely allowed each district to work within the needs of their communities.
A look at two Austin districts that are economically and demographically different from each other provides a glimpse into what some of those differences are, and how schools are approaching a struggle they all share.
(According to 2018-2019 data)
On Wednesday, Eanes ISD welcomed its 8,000 students back for online learning. Eanes Superintendent Tom Leonard said after three weeks the district will transition to in-person instruction for students with the most needs, up to 25% capacity.
"We're going to have to be agile and flexible and have to adapt to different governing agencies, whether it be TEA, the governor, the county or the city," Leonard said. "If conditions and stages get better, we'll bring in more kids. If conditions and stages get worse, we've got a plan to go back the other way."
In a district survey taken earlier this month, 61% of Eanes parents said they want their children to return to in-person learning as soon as the option is available to them. The other 39% of Eanes parents opted for continued virtual learning, although some parents are considering forming learning pods of students on their own. However, that practice can be expensive, and usually considered a solution only for more well-off families, with some exceptions.
In the event that in-person classes are shut down, the students will be able to transition fairly easily because, as Leonard said, his district is "blessed" to have had virtual learning for a long time and students supplied with laptops and tablets for a decade.
"Our kids all have devices," Leonard said. "Our teachers have always been using different software and different online materials, so it is not as big of a leap for us to function in a remote setting as it has been for some other school districts."
That would include Del Valle ISD, which spent the summer scrambling to get technology to students, training its teachers and prioritizing school-based resources for students in need, said Ana Rush, Del Valle ISD's executive director of academics and accountability.
"We want to make sure that the lessons themselves are rigorous and engaging and that we're closing the gaps … that the students may have," Rush said. "We want to make sure they're still progressing academically."
The district is staying online for the first eight weeks of school, which started last Monday. Some 15% of the district's nearly 11,000 families did not have reliable internet access at home. To remedy that, the district surveyed several companies to provide hotspots for everyone.
"Right now we're ... at 99.9% connectivity through WiFi and through the hotspots, which we did not have in the spring," Rush said. "And that's something we were able to solve to make sure that we started the school year with all the students being able to connect."
A sizeable percentage of their students also use lunch programs and counseling services, so district officials spent much of their prep time arranging for students to have access to those resources, Rush said.
On the in-person vs. online choice, Del Valle parents are split right down the middle. Half want to send their kids back to school at the earliest opportunity, many because they are essential workers, Rush said.
But the other half fear exposure to a family member if their child goes to school. Eighty-five percent of Del Valle ISD's students are Hispanic, a demographic that has been hit especially hard by COVID-19 in Texas and nationwide.
Naila Martinez, 36, said her kids received their devices from the school, which helped her in her decision to keep her 5th grader and high schooler, both asthmatic, at home for online school.
"With flu season, their asthma flares up already, especially the fifth grader, and just imagine in the middle of this pandemic with these symptoms of COVID and the regular flu overlapping—it's just going to be mayhem if any one of them goes to school," Martinez said. "I'm always going to have that fear hanging over me, like what if they get COVID?"
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Bruce McCandless II's untethered spacewalk made history in 1984. The red stripes above his knees were the only way that NASA could determine which astronaut was Bruce and which was his fellow spacewalker, Bob Stewart. (NASA)
'Wonders All Around' is a new book by Austinite Bruce McCandless III about his dad, the astronaut Bruce McCandless II. (Bruce McCandless III)
I met McCandless III, who lives in Austin with his wife Pati, for a coffee a few months ago, thanks to the introduction from a mutual friend. As we talked about losing our dads, being writers and parents and living in Austin while still dealing with COVID, his dad's famous flight didn't come up, but the process of writing such an epic biography of a complex, only recently passed man was something worth unpacking over coffee.
I hadn't read the book yet, but over the next few weeks, I got to know the McCandless family in such a sweet way that I wanted to write a little about the book here to perhaps inspire you to seek out a copy of "Wonders All Around."
As much as this is a book about space, it's also a book about grief. And persistence. And stoicism. And masculinity and maternality.
The elder McCandless died in 2017, just a few years after losing his wife, Bernice, to cancer.
This passing of the torch from father to son left the younger McCandless inspired to take on this decades-long narrative. McCandless III sets the tone for the book with a memory of the family sitting around the dinner table at their home outside Johnson Space Center near Houston in the mid 1970s, when his dad, who joined NASA in 1966 at the age of 28, wasn't sure he'd ever actually make it to space.
"Our dinners were somber affairs. We ate around a rectangular Formica table in the breakfast nook. Tracy and I sat on benches padded with orange vinyl cushions. Mom and Dad occupied faux-Spanish style chairs with green felt upholstery. Despite the informal, Howard Johnson's-at-the-airport feel of the furnishings, there was a tension in the air that set in right around the time the frozen string beans started steaming. I had the feeling that my sister and I had forgotten to do something important, though I couldn't figure out what it was, or that judgment had been rendered on us and we'd been found guilty of … something — again, it was unclear what. Horseplay was prohibited. The TV and all sources of music or other frivolity were turned off, and singing was strictly forbidden. The only sound came from the aquarium pump. My father had a 100-gallon tank along the wall behind his chair. Sometimes the big plecostomus would attach itself by its mouth to the glass facing us, and I imagined it sucking all the oxygen out of the room."
Imagining what it must have been like to require oxygen to survive, not in outer space but in the living room with your family, sets up the story of the McCandless ancestors, including a guy who was killed by Wild Bill Hickok and the author's grandfather, who was an admiral in the U.S. Navy.
No pressure, Bruce.
It was fascinating to read about the 18 years that Bruce McCandless II worked for NASA before he finally had his first flight, which debuted the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a jet-fueled backpack that he and Ed Whitsett Jr. spent so many years developing. (That's the joystick-controlled machine he's wearing in that mind-bending poster that hung on millions of Americans' walls over the following decade.)
The author McCandless has the unenviable task of trying to put into words what that flight must have felt like. His dad flew 150 feet away from the shuttle Challenger, which would, of course, break into a million little pieces just a few years later.
When President Reagan called the shuttle to congratulate the astronauts that day in 1984, the command center set up a demonstration space walk to give the president a live view of McCandless through the shuttle window.
Bruce McCandless II, trains with Kathy Sullivan, right, in preparation to launch the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
The only problem was, there wasn't much fuel left. McCandless went out anyway, trying to stay within 10-15 feet of the spacecraft. He got into position and turned off the unit to preserve propellant. After the president said a few words and the video switched off, McCandless turned on the unit and "looked for the closest piece of the orbiter, pointed at it, put the hand controller in +X (and) got a sort of sighing noise as it accelerated in that direction." He ran out of fuel just as he grabbed onto a rail on the orbiter. Hand over hand, he brought himself back to the donning station.
It's that kind of suspense that made this book so thrilling to read.
There's space tension like when McCandless is operating as CAPCOM, the only person talking to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin while they are walking on the surface of the moon, and his commander wants him to break protocol and call them back early, even though there are no signs of distress.
The book is also so touching. I cried while reading about the declining health of Bernice, who survived so many astronaut wife struggles over the years and at the end of her life remained a loving partner and mother.
Bruce McCandless was a Navy pilot who was picked to join NASA in 1966. His first space flight wasn't until 1984. (NASA)
It's easy to forget that McCandless II had an entirely other memorable historic moment—launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990—and this one seems to have struck an even deeper chord with McCandless III.
The Hubble launch was McCandless' second and final flight. He was 52 and had worked at NASA for 24 years.
McCandless II spends the last chapters of the book making a compelling case that his dad's work to fix and update the Hubble are among the greatest achievements to science. He continued to work on Hubble for another two decades after retiring from NASA through his work at Lockheed Martin.
Bruce McCandless, left, and the flight crew that launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. He was 52 years old. (NASA)
He was the "nuts, bolts, screws, and wires guy," the auto mechanic rather than the scientist, who kept the telescope going 340 miles above Earth for more than twice its life expectancy. The Hubble has been cited in more than 18,000 scientific papers and has revealed countless secrets and unsolved mysteries from around the universe and beyond.
"The size, shape, and sheer spectral weirdness of the images boggle the imagination and make prophets and dreamers of us all," McCandless writes toward the end of "Wonders All Around. "Some of us pay therapists to tell us we're important and unique. Then we check in with Hubble so the satellite can inform us just how galactically marginal we all are. The truth is somewhere in the middle."
What a beautiful reminder.
