Posted Date: 03/02/2021
By Lori Blake
KASB President
I wasn’t going to write about COVID this month, but I had an experience last week that rocked me to the core. For 135 days, my son has driven to school, while I ride along in the passenger seat, so he can log time toward getting his restricted driver’s license. After he gets out, I drive to work. However, last week, I needed to get a couple of seatbacks from the Booster Club storage, so I entered the building for the first time during school hours in a year. The halls were barren, absent from students, staff and parents. School was in session, but there is no lingering, no co-mingling, no energy. Kids walk in one-way paths to their rooms. No visitors are allowed, not even parents. I have grieved the loss of being together as a community at student activities to compete, celebrate and perform, but I hadn’t thought of the impact of daily learning and how much our communities interact with students normally.
On a trip that would usually take no more than 15 minutes, I spent an hour with staff hungry for interaction with people from the “outside” world. While our students have had the luxury of learning in classrooms with their peers since August, their experience has been anything but normal. Across the state, you have all led teams to make decisions best for your communities’ needs while following the recommendations of KSDE’s Reopening plan. As I walked out of the school, I left thinking about the incredible opportunity we are all faced with now. How will we reintegrate community partners back into the routines of daily learning? How will we use this opportunity to make education better in the future?
With the vaccine being administered across the country, I am filled with hope for the return of normalcy. But what will that return bring for our schools? Kansas Education Commissioner Dr. Randy Watson has convened a team through KSDE to design a guide for the next phase of reopening. But we have work to do before its release. We all should be having these conversations in our home districts, too. We can’t afford to wait. Ask your students, staff and parents now for their perspectives about what worked well and what could have been done better. Ask yourselves now how are we going to welcome our community back into our buildings. They are what have been missing. They bring the real world application for our students to test how they learn.
As we ask these questions, we also need to ask another important one: What happened to you in the last year? We need time to reconnect and recognize the loss together. Grief is not something we can do in isolation, yet that is exactly what we’ve all been forced to do for 12 months. Live in physical isolation, when humans are made for connection.
That connection is the one of the things that makes KASB a model for learning. All of the professional development opportunities bring together local leaders to learn how to use best practices in education. Whether the subject is advocacy, school law or board development, we have access to incredible learning and along with that, each session has the added benefit to learn from each other. Because that is where our strength lies. When we form connections through learning at home, across our state and country, we expand our thoughts and ideas beyond our own district’s boundaries. We bond through that common experience.
Our entire world now has a common experience that can either unite us or divide us. As we plan for the welcome back phase (whenever that may be), let’s connect with each other and learn about how this experience has changed us all. Do it safely. Mask up. Use technology. But we must ask the questions to get better. And do it with the end in mind. How do we truly prepare students for their success in a global economy living in our communities? That is our charge … together.
In addition to serving as KASB President, Lori Blake serves on the Southeast of Saline USD 306 school board.