The Hypothesis Protect the Pack Productions

In this Season Two finale, we take stock of the moment at our school, for schools across the state and perhaps what we have on the horizon. Joining Chris is special guest, New Mexico Secretary of Education, Dr. Kurt Steinhaus for a look at the upcoming legislative session and what it promises for students and teachers, as well as what the future of education in the state might hold. We discuss the sometimes tricky balance between local and state control as well as his position on kids in school during COVID.

Thanks for joining us again this season; we hope that these episodes help to shed light on schools in this unprecedented era.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

From TikTok trends to the fine line between the world of social media and in-person interaction, our students are facing a variety of challenges they never have before.

In this episode, we'll delve a bit into some of the student behaviors we're seeing and consider overall trends and how our approach this year is different from how we've done things in the past. You'll meet our school counselors/social workers, Sean DeBuck and DeAnnette Roybal, who will bring you into their thinking just a bit more.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

In this episode, we take you closer to the impact of the teacher shortage by examining our own school. You'll meet one of our instructional coaches, Mary Ellen Dannenberg, to bring the educator perspective into the conversation, and a look at a way forward.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

Last year, we gathered our school community every full moon to update them on our plans and engage them in critical conversations. We're the Coyotes. We'd even all howl at the end of the meeting. At our gathering last March, I asked how many families were interested in keeping their students online in the upcoming school year. This year. I presented a possibility for a school within a school, nearly entirely online, with a dedicated faculty and staff. We would serve students in grades 5-8, where we believed the need would be greatest. Within the next 36 hours, the families of 101 students were signed up as interested. Of course, we knew that the conditions around the pandemic would change in ways we couldn't predict between March and August, but we decided to develop the project anyway. We gave it a name that captured the moment. We call it "The Academy of Extraordinary Circumstance". This year, we are asking a lot of questions of it as the future of The Academy is unclear. It was designed to address a community need in a very particular moment in time, but its usefulness may not yet be totally clear.

In this episode, we'll explore the still open question of the effectiveness of online learning - specifically two questions:

1) Can online learning be as effective or even more effective than in-person learning?
2) Has the pandemic changed the way we think about the actual purpose of education for students in grades 5-8?

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Should we be comparing the safety of our school against hospitals or against the outdoors? In this episode, we meet Chelsea, a mother of two TTCS students and a medical professional here in Santa Fe. Very new to the area, Chelsea spent all of last year treating COVID patients in New York, where she practiced medicine for 13 years.

In this episode, we explore what the outdoors and outdoor learning might have in store for our outlook on safety and education.

Brought to you by Protect the Pack Productions at Turquoise Trail Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.