A few years on from district-wide remote learning spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, Principal Darren A. Cole-Ochoa has observed the students at Truan Junior High re-adapting to in-person schooling fall along a spectrum.
“When we got into the classroom, the students were shy. They didn’t want to work in groups. They had a wall,” Cole-Ochoa says of the students in the small town of Elsa, Texas. “[Now] some of them have blossomed, some of them have overcome that. But then we still have some that wanna be on their phone, they wanna be on their Chromebook here at school, so they isolate themselves.”
