The coronavirus pandemic has delayed at least one facet of every person’s life. College students have been faced with a decision to either continue on their degree path with limited opportunities for real-world professional experience and ultimately feel ill-equipped for their professional careers – or hit pause on their education and fall behind their peers.

Maggie Smith, 21, is a junior at Western Kentucky University studying towards a degree in Interdisciplinary Early Childhood Education (IECE). Smith intends to teach preschool in a classroom with both medically fragile and typically developing children. An IECE degree will certify Smith to teach birth to kindergarten-aged children with and without special needs.

“I’ve always been drawn to individuals with disabilities,” Smith said, her mom contends that Smith just always knew that everyone was a little different and never saw a point in changing how she treated people based on those differences.

“I just want to teach kids that and instill that in them right when they get into my classroom, so that they go into the world and eventually if every teacher acts like that, the stigma surrounding disabilities and the disabled community will be completely different,” Smith said, “That’s my goal.”

Traditionally, WKU’s IECE students are required to complete hundreds of hours of observations in classrooms. Due to the pandemic, Smith now observes classrooms via pre-recorded videos, which she feels are inadequate preparation for the real world.

“As an early childhood education major, I am supposed to clock in hundreds of hours per semester of observation and fieldwork,” Smith said, “I’m supposed to be going into schools and observing actual children at play, actual teachers interacting with them and I’m supposed to take notes on that… I haven’t been in a school observing since freshman year.”

Smith’s traditional assignments range from filling out practice ITERS-R score sheets based on classroom observations, a tool frequently used in her career field, to working directly with families with children with disabilities. Coronavirus precautions inhibited her from benefiting from either assignment.

“A lot of the ITERS-R requires that you ask teachers questions… It will ask, exactly how many racially diverse books are there? Exactly how many dolls of different skin colors are there? If you do not see any cots in the room, where are they stored?” Smith said, “Things that I cannot gain from an hour long video following a teacher around a classroom from 2005.” Smith said she doesn’t feel confident in using the ITERS-R, a tool she will need to be familiar with for the rest of her career.

This semester, Smith has been working on another project intended to get students out in the field, though it has been virtually impossible under coronavirus guidelines.

“I’m supposed to be going into the home of a child with a disability and practicing developmental intervention, literally like asking the mother and the family, ‘What do you need help with and how can I help you?’” Smith said, “I was so excited for it, and now I’m doing it with a family that I’ve known for years and there’s nobody with special needs in their house.”

“It’s really sad because I’m not gaining what I could out of this project, I’m not actually learning how to support families with children with disabilities, I’m learning how to talk to a woman I’ve known for three years,” Smith said.

Smith feels like she is “half-assing” all of her work, but with the nature of 2020, she doesn’t know what she could do to make the work feel fully done, she said.

“I missed out on all of it, I got to do a very rudimentary version of it, I was not able to fully complete the task, and that’s just one example,” Smith said, “multiplied by every single class I’ve taken since sophomore year, I’ve missed out on so much. An astronomical amount.”

Smith knows that her education for the past year has suffered because of the pandemic, and she is worried that it will be evident once she is teaching full time.

“COVID has definitely hindered this experience a lot and it makes me really sad because I know that not only does that affect me, but it’s going to affect the families that I teach,” Smith said, “When I get out of college and go into my career, there’s going to be a learning curve… because I was not able to observe.”