After state testing on April 9, the halls of Grayslake Central and Grayslake North were significantly emptier that normal because of the new e-learning day that was piloted by District 127. 

On April 10, e-learning day allowed students who had not finished their testing yet to finish in a consistently quiet environment. 

Students not participating in testing were doing school work from home. A Google form was sent out in order to log attendance, failure to do this would result in said student being marked truant. Students were then assigned work to do at home by their teachers, once said work was completed, the student would be allowed to go about their day as needed. All work was due before April 15 to ensure that all students were able to complete the work.

Seeing that the e-learning day has come and gone, senior Alexander LeTendre and sophomore Noah Landau both provided feedback for the event. “I think a lot of teachers- since they knew it was being tested out gave us some pretty simple work to do as well. But all in all, I think it went pretty well,” said LeTendre.

While some students believe it went well, some students think otherwise.“For me personally, I felt it went awful. [..] Unless you have a solid deadline, and you have specific times that the students had to be in the e-learning classroom. I don’t think kids, especially myself, [had] the incentive to actually do their work,” said Landau.

Lori Mitchell, head of counseling at GCHS, has a more optimistic outlook on the event. “I think this is a nice way for students to still participate in learning every day, but in a different format. ” said Mitchell.

With anything, there’s always going to be some positives and areas to improve. “Pros: there’s a lot of people in schools that are anxious or stressed out, and it’s just kind of more comfortable to be working environment they’re comfortable with,” said Landau prior to the event. “A huge con, is that there’s no one [with you to] enforce [doing your work.] Yes, there is the fact that it’s worth a grade. But without having a teacher in the room to tell you to do your work, a majority of kids are not going to get it done,” said Landau.

According to Barbara Georges, the Associate Principal at GCHS, the event comes with many pros and cons most students wouldn’t think to consider. “So it’s two-fold. It is offering some real authentic 21st century skills for our students to practice and develop, while meeting the needs of not extending the school day of continuing learning and these kind of emergency situations, and just keeping our whole organization moving forward,” said Georges.

Overall, the responses from the e-learning day seem rather mixed. However, being that something like this has never been tried before, obviously, there are areas for improvement. “Technology being implemented into school has kind of been more new recently, but since it’s so new, we’re kind of the guinea pigs to it. So they don’t know what is going to be beneficial or what’s not going to be beneficial for us. That’s why they’re trying out with so many new things, so they can help the future generation with learning,” said Landau.