While COVID-19 has upended much of our lives, it has reinforced the value and importance of public schooling. Teachers and school staff across this country continue their heroic efforts to make distance learning work and support their students—with many parents working valiantly to support them as well. This experience has made clear that there is no substitute for a safe and welcoming neighborhood school. (Source: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/covid19_reopen-america-schools.pdf)
Pikmykid is working hard to support the staff and schools prepare for the new normal with our expanded suite of products and features. And, we are honored to help you keep your students and staff safe.
The Pikmykid System is here to help with all areas of the school day:
- Socially Distant Drop off and Dismissal
- Tracking Carlines
- Multiple Walker Lines
- Staggered Bus Routes
- Dealing with Parent walkup in an Urban Setting
- Following CDC Guidelines
- Managing a Viral Outbreak in Your School
- Tracking Health Checks
- Parent Questionaire
- Safe School Operations
- Tracking the Capacity of a Campus
- Handling Dismissal and Drop off with a substitute teacher
- Keeping large groups of people apart
- Modifying the school week
- Safe classroom routines
- Harmless Recess
- Realistic Sporting activities
Dealing with Distance Learning
- Delivering learning materials to students and families
- Learning packet Distribution
- Managing Virtual Class attendance
- Tracking Completion of daily virtual assignments
- Virtual Learning Accountability
- Meal Distribution
Socially Distant Drop off and Dismissal
Physical distancing, social distancing, social isolation, and quarantine have become part of our daily vocabulary. Recently, there’s been lots of talk about how to reopen schools safely this fall. No one knows what the best way to do this is. But, Pikmykid is here to help. We’ve already made various changes to our software to help you manage various parts of a socially distant school day, starting with drop off and dismissal.
Digitally Managing Carlines
Schools have used car lines to manage the drop off and dismissal of students for decades. But the process hasn’t been improved much throughout the years. But, we live in the 21st century and digital software is at the tips of our fingers. We use it in every part of our lives, why don’t we always use it for car lines?
Pikmykid helps you manage every carline you can. That way, you know when each child gets there and you can limit the number of people who have to interact with each other. Our software has also been updated to facilitate socially distant drop-off and dismissal.
Multiple walker lines
The Pikmykid software easily manages lines of walkers coming and leaving the school during the drop-off. Our software allows parents to announce when they get on campus, alerting the school staff of which children are there at any time. This also alerts parents when their child is dropped off if someone else is dropping off for them.
Staggered bus routes
Pikmykid software also manages bus routes. Because of the pandemic, buses are going to need to run at a lower capacity. This means many buses will have to run staggered routes. We can help you create the best system to manage all of this
Dealing with Parent walkup in an urban setting
Schools in cities typically don’t have places for parents to drive up, park, and pick up their children.
Pikmykid can help with this by working with the school to create ‘zones’ around the school where kids can be picked up from. That way, there won’t be 500 parents in one area. These zones can also have staggered pickup times to turn them into 6 zones. Pikmykid is a very versatile platform and we’re always willing and ready to work with you to solve any problems that you have
Managing CDC and other Health code Guidelines
Managing a Viral Outbreak
The CDC talks about assessing the risks that are imposed by a child in a school becoming infected with COVID-19 or another highly contagious virus. These problems can be solved by a short return to distance education while the school is sterilized. Meanwhile, the sick child(ren) are required to be quarantined until they are no longer contagious. The severity of their case will determine whether or not they can continue distance learning during their quarantine.
Other children and/or staff who had significant contact with the sick person also might need to be quarantined for a while to minimize risk.
The Pikmykid system can be of great use during a situation like this. Because we have a high engagement rate with our parents, you can send out mass notifications to your entire school about sick children or staff. As well as being able to notify your parents about sudden closures, openings, and distance learning.
Tracking Health Checks
The Pikmykid app has been reconfigured to monitor health check-ups. No matter how your school decides to go about them. We can manage them, track them, and help you notify relevant people to prevent a viral outbreak.
Parent Questionnaire
One way to manage health checks is with a digital parent questionnaire. Our app provides this and it can be customized to the needs of any school!
Question examples:
- Does Your Child Have a Temperature?
- Has Your Child Been in Contact with Someone Sick?
- Is He/She Feeling Well?
Managing School Operations safely with Pikmykid
Tracking the capacity of a campus, restricting, and tracking who can access the campus
Managing early dismissals with Pikmykid enables you to know exactly when and which parents are going to be on your campus. Parents are required to notify the school ahead of time about early dismissals and they have to announce when they get on the campus. Your staff and the student’s teachers can be notified ahead of time so that an early dismissal doesn’t disrupt the class.
How will substitute teachers handle dismissal?
Pikmykid typically works with the Teachers who are on campus daily. But we all know that there come times when a teacher can’t be there for one reason or another. So, that leads us to the problem of substitute teachers handling dismissal with the Pikmykid system. Substitute teachers typically don’t have login credentials for Pikmykid because of safety concerns. This leaves the school with a couple of options. The front office can print out or forward a report of the daily dismissal changes. Or, they could have another teacher login with their credentials and let the substitute teacher use that.
Keeping Large Groups of People apart
A large part of social distancing is keeping large groups of people from interacting with each other. That’s why there are lanes in grocery stores and tape to keep us six feet apart.
But how would that translate to the school setting? When you’re dealing with hundreds if not thousands of students, staff, and parents. Pikmykid can be used in a variety of ways with these problems.
Our software can be used to track if students come to school with symptoms of sickness. It would allow you to contact the parents of the child with a push notification. It can also be used to track absentees. Letting you know which children are sick and for how long
In the classroom
Teachers and staff can use the messenger software to send important messages to parents and other staff members. This limits the amount of person to person interactions that happen each day. It also keeps parents in the loop of how everything is going
Manage dismissal classroom by classroom. Children can remain in their classroom and watch a display of the carline. Then, when they see their parents in the appropriate place in line, they can leave and go home with their parents. This system keeps kids from interacting in large groups and also simplifies the dismissal process.
Modifying the school week
Around the world, different schools are opening differently. Some have had success with sending younger children to class first and others with sending seniors to class. No one knows what system will work best for every school. But Pikmykid is willing and ready to work with you to create the perfect solution for your school.
A couple of ideas that have been thrown around to minimize the threat of a virus are rotating teachers instead of students, limiting the days and hours that children attend in-person classes, utilizing distance learning techniques, and more.
Rotating teachers instead of students
Many schools have had success for decades with rotating kids from one classroom to the next for each subject. But this has new risks. So many children interacting so often on a daily basis increases everyone’s risk of contracting or spreading a virus. Our messaging and alert system can be used to keep up with rotating teachers and the students that they are teaching at any point of the day.
Having children only attend on certain days or during certain weeks
The ‘Great Distance Learning Experiment’ of early 2020 taught us all a multitude of things. It also showed us what areas of distance education need to be improved for it to be a viable solution to various problems. Around the world, various schools are considering keeping distance learning at least part-time when they return to classes in the fall. This practice limits the number of people on campus and decreases the spread of a virus.
Pikmykid helps with this through our virtual check-in software and our messaging system. You can have parents or teachers mark the attendance of all kids who participate virtually. And you can send links and informational packets to parents through our messaging system.
During recess
We all know that recess is important for children. (The Crucial Role of Recess in School – America Academy of Pediatrics) It improves their social-emotional wellbeing as well as keeping them healthy. But recess poses new risks in a post-pandemic world. Is the equipment that children are using sanitized often enough? With multiple children running around each other, won’t that increase their risk of transmitting a virus to one another? No one really knows the answers to all these questions but we’re doing what we can to help ease your anxiety.
You can use Pikmykid’s check-in and out feature to manage which classrooms are using the outdoor equipment at each time. This can also be set up to notify the relevant staff when they need to rotate children and teachers around. It also helps you, the administrators, to know where each student is at any time, even if they’re outside.
Sporting activities
Sports provide a unique problem to schools in a post-pandemic world. Often, hundreds of parents, friends, and family members attend sporting events. But with a threat of a second viral wave looming over us, sports this year will be different.
That’s why we’ve reconfigured our software to help you. Using the parental announce feature, you can have an accurate number of people attending. And, limit who can come on campus. thus limiting the number of people in one area at a given time. Along those lines, our parent messenger can also be used to keep parents updated on any changes to their child’s sports schedule.
Distance Learning Management
Getting Learning Materials and technology to students who need it
The Pikmykid announce feature in the parent app can be used by parents or guardians who need to revisit the school to pick up learning materials for a student who can’t attend school for any reason.
The Pikmykid messenger feature can be used to inform parents when learning materials and technology are ready for pickup. And it can be used to send links to digital informational packets.
Those features can also be used in a format where parents need to set up an appointment to pick up the materials
The materials can then be delivered to the families’ curbside. Limiting the number of people going in and out of the building daily
Learning packet distribution with Pikmykid
Due to the absence of a COVID-19 vaccine for probably another year or so due to the limits of science, children will most likely need to continue distance learning at least part-time. During the 2020-2021 school year.
Different schools and grades will manage this process in their own way. Something that seemed to work pretty well during the throws of the pandemic was distributing learning packets to various children and families. These packets contained a variety of learning materials and information about how to use them.
The problem with these is that there needs to be a safe way to distribute them. Without risking the health of school staff or your students.
That’s where Pikmykid comes in, our software enables you to manage this process in the best way possible. Our messenger feature enables you to inform parents when packets are ready. It can also send them a link to a page where they can sign up for a certain time to come and pick up the materials. Then, using our software, they can announce when they arrive on campus, alerting you, and letting you know which packets to bring out and deliver and when.
Managing Virtual Class Attendance with Pikmykid
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools used our software to manage attendance. Whether by having teachers mark attendance using our software or by having parents do it.
Virtual Daily Requirement Completion
Teachers and/or parents can use our software and app to check-in students and notify the parents/teachers when the child has completed their coursework for the day.
Virtual Learning Accountability
In the Pikmykid portal, there is a reports tab that can be used to gather information about when and which students checked in to work on their coursework
Meal Distribution with Pikmykid
Our Announce feature, messaging feature, and overall data collection system can be used to manage and safely distribute meals to those who need them.
Learn more about our FREE Meals Pickup Express
Review and Conclusion
The 2020-2021 School year is going to have challenges and changes that no one could have saw coming. But we’ll get through this together. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help.
We’ve created a PDF that contains all the information you need to manage school and a virus according to CDC guidelines:
To review what we talked about in this post, school in a post-pandemic world will be different in a variety of ways:
- Socially Distant Drop off and Dismissal
- Steps to ensure that student drop off is safe
- Tracking Carlines
- Multiple Walker Lines
- Staggered Bus Routes
- Dealing with Parent walkup in an Urban Setting
- Steps to ensure that student drop off is safe
- Tracking Health Checks
- Following CDC guidelines
- Managing a Viral Outbreak in Your School
- Modifying the school week
- Safe School Operations
- Tracking the Capacity of a Campus
- Handling Dismissal and Drop off with a substitute teacher
- Keeping large groups of people apart
- In the classroom
- Recess
- Dismissal
- Sporting activities
- Dealing with Distance Learning
- Delivering learning materials to students and families
- Learning packet Distribution
- Managing Virtual Class attendance
- Tracking Completion of daily virtual assignments
- Virtual Learning Accountability
- Meal Distribution
- Delivering learning materials to students and families
Download an easy to use PDF checklist version of this post for free: MAKING A DIFFERENCE DURING COVID-19