Apple Classroom on Macbook

I have a classroom that uses Macbook Airs for 1:1 device usage for students. The teacher wishes to use Classroom to monitor activity during the day and use the other features it provides.

Here's my issue - In other rooms which use IPads, I just had the teachers create their own class and manually added each IPad in, as even though we have an MDM system that uses ASM and managed Apple IDs, we'd prefer the students to not log into the devices with them. On Mac however, the classroom option doesn't even appear unless the students log in, and while we have classes auto created and populated in our system, the teacher is unable to control student devices as it says they are offline, and on the student end it says the teacher is "Not Connected" in the class window, despite being in the class.

All devices in question are running Big Sur, have bluetooth enabled, and are on the same WiFi network. I couldn't find really any documentation surrounding classroom on Mac so I figured I'd post here. Any fixes for this?