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JUNE 15, 2023
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Behavior analyst sees stressed schools Staff absences, student incidents at record highs BY JASON STARR Observer staff
Hardballers bring the hardware The CVU baseball team celebrates its third state championship in four years after beating Mount Anthony 6-0 on Saturday in Burlington. See story, Page 9. PHOTO BY PAUL LAMONTAGNE/VTSPORTSIMAGES.COM
Quantifying classroom screen time Administrators commit to studying school tech use
BY JASON STARR Observer staff Would you like to know how much time your kid spends online while at school? The Champlain Valley School District would, too. School administrators made a first attempt this year to create a screen time log across a sampling of K-8 classrooms. In kindergarten through fourth grade, teachers were asked to report total screen time during the day; in middle school classrooms, students were asked to
self-report. Screen time was defined to include when each student was using their own device and when a classroom used a digital tool together, like when a video was projected to the group or when a special guest Zoomed in by video-conference. Bonnie Birdsall, the district’s director of digital learning, said she is keeping the results private for now but offered that total time online “is actually less than we thought.” “It’s not really conclusive,” she said. “It’s something we are
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definitely committed to further exploring and are looking at other ways we can gather that data without putting it on people to self-assess.” Administrators hope to eventually have accurate screen time accounting across all grades. “An important element of this is … are (teachers) aware of what’s happening in each other’s classes to get a sense of, cumulatively, what does that look like during a day for a student,” said Birdsall. “Those are the kinds of questions we’re asking and try
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see TECH page 20
In his first year as the Champlain Valley School District’s director of behavior systems, Evan Sivo has gathered some sobering data about the current state of local schools. Sivo reported to the school board in May that absences among staff have hit an all-time high this school year with an average of about 1,100 a month. At the same time — likely both a cause and an effect of the staff absences — instances of problematic student behavior (physical aggression, for example) are also higher than ever. “We are in survival mode on a lot of days,” Sivo, the district’s first full-time director of behavior systems, told the board. “There are days where I look at the (staff) absences list and I’m like, ‘whoa. What are we going to do? How are we going to get through this day?’” Staff absences first skyrocketed last school year, reaching a total of 12,578, nearly double pre-pandemic levels. Through April of this year, staff absences total nearly 11,000. The absences have led to daily shifting of staff responsibilities and increased substitute teaching, and it is layered on existing unfilled para-educator positions. The inconsistencies are weighing on the school environment and af-
fecting student behavior, Sivo said. “When the people who are supposed to be running the system are stressed, how do our students respond,” he asked. “If the adults are not well and they can’t take care of themselves, how can they take care of our kids?” Incidents of problematic student behavior that rise to a certain level are “written up” in a report that goes to a school-wide information system (SWIS). The number of SWIS reports being filed is up about 22 percent from last school year, Sivo said. The most frequent category of problematic behavior in reported incidents is physical aggression, he added. According to his report to the board, there have been an average of 25 such incidents each day through the district’s five K-8 schools this year. The total number of K-8 incidents through April of this year (3,942) already surpasses last year’s total of 3,709. During the pre-pandemic year of 2018-2019, the number of incidents was 3,213. Sivo said teachers are reporting “behaviors they’ve never seen before.” About 27 percent of the total student population has been written up at least once, he added. “We are stuck in a reactive system where people are
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see STRESS page 20