From teachers to custodians, meet the educators who saved a pandemic school year
ducators and staff in the K-12 school system attend to children well beyond the bell, forming a safety net that’s both critical and fragile. When COVID-19 closed schools in 2020, time-tested systems fell apart. But educators swung into action, modeling resourcefulness and resilience for their students.
“As a Black woman in America, growing up in American education, these issues weren’t addressed in school,” says Damon, but she believes that such conversations are necessary for the world to change and that they must start with young people. “I wanted them to feel empowered and know that they can make change now.”Melito Ramirez still remembers the high school English teacher who showed up at his house and helped him go back to school after he’d dropped out to work and support his family.
Weiss persuaded the Juneau city government to let the district close all schools for a few days so administrators could devise a long-term remote-teaching plan in case of future shutdowns. The Juneau school district quickly trained teachers to lead virtual classes, provided Chromebooks to its 4,600 students and ensured they hadFor those living in areas without Internet service, the district set up wi-fi hotspots in churches and other community centers.
But during the pandemic, Dueño’s biggest challenge became getting books into the hands of children who couldn’t come into the cheerful Terraset Elementary School library anymore. So she started delivering books to them, loading up her car and visiting as many as 50 houses every Monday with a curated stack of books for each student. “It just sort of snowballed, but in a good way,” Dueño says.
From August 2020 until April 2021, Darby worked at Walmart three days a week, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., then punched out and arrived at school by 7:45 a.m. “I basically slept on the weekends,” says Darby, who is also a member of the Charleston County Council.—Henry Darby When schools shut their doors in March 2020, leaving students with no option but remote learning, about 40% of families in the Lockhart independent school district lacked home Internet access. Many lived in dead zones in their rural area. “Even if their families could afford it, it doesn’t exist. If you give them a hotspot, they’re just paperweights out there,” says Mark Estrada, the district’s superintendent.
Some call them “a modern-day Pony Express.” Others call them “rock stars.” To students throughout New Mexico’s Cuba independent school district, they’re school-bus drivers who were a lifeline during months of“We were their links to school for a while. Other than seeing the teacher on Zoom, they would see us in person,” says Ubaldo Kelly Maestas, 50. “Really the only contact they had with school was us, the bus drivers.
“They were really able to put the whole entire school district on their back and make remote learning possible,” says Victoria Dominguez, 31, a district social worker. “Although they had all these tasks, they never batted an eye.” “I thought, We’re not going to learn this way. We’re going to be like this for a year?” says Williams, a woodshop teacher at Christopher High School, about 80 miles south of San Francisco. “I’ve got to help out and do something.”
And when she realized her students at Overbrook Educational Center in Philadelphia would begin first grade virtually in the fall of 2020, Phelan volunteered to move up a grade to give the children a bit of consistency. But as Clark, a physical-education teacher, took up biking on his own during the pandemic, he began to think it might be fun for his students too—an opportunity for them to see one another and different parts of Washington, D.C.; to stay active; and to get out of the house.
Through YouTube, he has not only reached his own students, but has also found students from all over the country who would ask questions via comments, and he’s found teachers who are new to the AP course. As of August, the channel had nearly 4,000 subscribers. Some videos have received nearly 30,000 views. “It’s been, honestly, kind of unbelievable to share [this content] with people,” he says.
Kids pick up whatever you put down. If you make it positive, you make it fun, it will be fun and positive for them.“Kids pick up whatever you put down. If you make it positive, you make it fun, it will be fun and positive for them,” Pretlow tells TIME. “But if we make it a negative situation, then that’s what they’re going to gravitate to.” And he didn’t stay all-virtual.
“My students, although they attended, sometimes they would get kind of shut down and not want to work or not want to be on camera and walk away or put their head down and cry. It just wasn’t working,” Fisher says of her early attempts to teach virtually. “They weren’t engaged like I want them to be, and they weren’t learning.”
By April, both teachers had returned to their classrooms with students whose parents were comfortable resuming in-person instruction. Their district is offering full-time in-person learning this fall. really had to be leaders throughout this pandemic. Nurses in the hospital are not doing the contact tracing or quarantining kids from school and managing that health care. The school nurses are.”Pedro Dones isn’t your typical math teacher. A professional wrestler in his spare time who jokes that he’s the “prince of positivity,” Dones transformed into his wrestling alter ego, the Big Action, to make virtual lessons more entertaining for his seventh-grade students.
She says the pandemic, and the social issues it stirred, has highlighted how learning history can help people become better citizens. “Our students learn citizenship is important,” Nakatsuka says. “We have to understand, ‘What does it mean to be American?’”The food banks around Detroit know Jacqueline Washington as a regular.
“You can’t start helping people and just stop when you know the need is there,” she says. “The need is not going to go away.”If you walked around St. Paul, Minn., long enough in the fall of 2020, you may have run into the so-called “Lit Ladies.” You might have spotted them camped out in a gazebo, or huddled next to a space heater in a park, or handing out hot cocoa by the Zoo. Regardless of where you found them, they’d be surrounded by books, running their LitMobile.
Because we had so many donations, we were able to help kids that weren’t in our school community. And that was really joyful.It was a hit. Some days 60 to 75 students showed up, Schupanitz estimates. The self-proclaimed Lit Ladies worked together, rotating who sat in the back and taught virtual classes via hotspots, and who interacted with the students and parents. Schupanitz had her graphic designer father make them a logo, and another had a baker friend make book-shaped cookies for the kids.
When reflecting on all she’s learned over the past year, Morrison says one of biggest takeaways has been “the importance of getting books into childrens’ hands.” His job took on added urgency during the pandemic, as keeping classrooms clean became an essential part of keeping children in school. When students returned to the building in March, after a year of virtual learning, Simpson cleaned every classroom and bathroom once during lunch and again at the end of the day, disinfected equipment for gym class, and reminded students to keep their masks on and stay a safe distance from one another.
The Bay Area Discovery Museum and California Academy of Sciences provided segments about natural science. The San Francisco Ballet and the Physical Education Office partnered to produce daily activities to get kids moving. The public library, school librarians and local authors helped tape read-alouds, and the local San Francisco government helped by filming academic segments in the district’s library.
Students learned in Spanish while people on the ground in Honduras explained the challenges of accessing clean water there. Breheny says the pandemic helped many of her students appreciate the severity of lacking clean water. “For them to learn that there are kids that go home and they can’t wash their hands during a pandemic, that just, I think, it really hit home with them,” she says.
“It was important that I hear their voice, their story, so that I could help them conquer some of those fears and be able to have a successful year,” says Moton. In poetry and prose, students described worries about losing family members and finding that “nothing will ever be the same again.” They also voiced hopes: for a COVID-19 cure, reunions with friends, and “a better and healthier world.”
Seabury, 63, who has been a social worker at Hogan for nine years, knows what the students are going through. He grew up in the area and experienced poverty and an unstable home life as a child, an experience that led him to social work. “I had a few people in my life that helped me through the times that I felt like giving up,” he says. “I knew that I could help people.”
The 2021-22 academic year will be a rough one, Seabury predicts. “Now that the pandemic has happened, behaviors have changed in some people,” he says. “So we have to get in and go back to work so that those kids don’t get away from us.” He already has begun to host workshops for other educators in the district to prepare them to support students who have experienced trauma.For Tiffany Jackson, the pandemic showed just how ill-equipped schools are to serve immigrant students.
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