March 13 marks the one year anniversary since the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) announced its plan to completely transition to an online platform. A year ago students expected to come back to in-person classes but little did they know that the country would still be in a global pandemic, today.
Cal State Long Beach (CSULB) and Long Beach City College (LBCC) made similar decisions during March of 2020 and as we look back on the unraveling of these events a year later, it’s out of one’s mind to observe the speed at which it all happened.
It began on Monday, March 9, 2020, when Long Beach was struck with its first three cases of COVID-19. At the time, the city did not recommend the need for any school closures.
By Wednesday, March 11, 2020, as a fourth case was confirmed, LBCC and CSULB announced that they would be temporarily shifting to online learning.
LBCC assured that most classes would be online but the campuses would not be closed. They had planned to begin remote lessons by March 18, 2020, and anticipated a return by April 13, 2020.
CSULB went in the same direction and even cancelled the rest of classes for that same week, in order to give professors time to prepare for the transition. Similarly, the school claimed that they would be back by April 20th.
Gary Metzker, a journalism professor at CSULB, recalls being surprised by the university’s claim regarding a return.
“I thought that was overly optimistic on the administration’s part, that this crisis we were in was going to take care of itself in a month,” Metzker said. “There was absolutely no way.”
At the end of the week by Friday, March 13, 2020, LBUSD was the last to declare its temporary switch to remote learning. At the time, this decision had been relatively anticipated given that Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) had recently announced the same protocol.
Justin Lim was a junior at Long Beach Polytechnic High School when he first heard the news over the school intercom. But what he remembers most vividly from that day was saying goodbyes.
“It actually felt normal, because it was sort of part of the daily processes to say goodbye to friends. But I didn’t really register the fact that I wasn’t going to be seeing these people for a month and then that month turned into a year,” Lim said.
Within the span of five days, Long Beach went from confirming its first three cases of COVID to having over 127,000 students in the process of transitioning to online education.
Mike Muñoz was the VP of Student Services at LBCC while these rapid changes were occuring.
Transferring LBCC to an online curriculum in such a short amount of time was a large task, but Muñoz says that the school relied upon data in order to get feedback on how well students were taking to online.
“We established dashboards so that if a student hadn’t logged into Canvas for seven days, we were like OK, we might be losing them,” said Muñoz.
However, what’s often overlooked is that school faculty had limited time to adapt to this learning curve as well. They had to learn their way around the likes of Zoom and Canvas to the point where they could be equipped enough to teach it to students.
Metzker remembers this initial adjustment and how unprepared a lot of his fellow colleagues were for the quick turnaround.
“It really caught a lot of professors not ready to make the immediate transition they had to be making,” Metzker said. “Educators at every level were caught unaware of how to embrace this technology.”
As the month went on, all Long Beach campuses officially closed to the public and continued to stay closed for the remainder of the school year, despite initial predictions of a return.
Today, the campuses are just as empty as when they were left. Students and faculty have spent a year online and while it still isn’t necessarily normal, it’s not quite as overwhelming as it all seemed last year.