One Year Later

One year ago on March 11th, my family sat at Pizza Villa celebrating my oldest daughter's birthday. We had just left a track meet and we were trying to cheer Rylee up for her birthday after she wasn't too happy with her performance at the meet. Food always changes her mood. I started receiving a flurry of texts about a two-week school shutdown that disrupted the rest of the evening and the next 12 months that followed. 

Last week I wrote about resilience and the many ways that it has shown up this school year. It's been a long year and we have all certainly had many highs and many lows. We have drawn closer to certain friends and family members and been separated from others. We have lost loved ones or know people that have. We have defended or argued against policies put in place that impacted our lives. We developed opinions and changed our minds. But we are still here.

This week our Governor and General Assembly announced that schools would be reopened. I had a parent ask me what I thought about it and I reminded them that we have been open since August 17th. We have been open to in-person learning, virtual learning, late-night Remind messages, phone calls and texts from parents, policy changes, and demands. We have been open to changing how and what we teach. We adjusted to some of it well and for others, it has been a bumpy road. Now, as we look to finishing out the school year with more students in front of us than we have seen in a year, we face one more hurdle. Like all of the other challenges, we will be anxious and we may question motives, but we will still be here. 

I know that this isn't Teacher Appreciation Week, but maybe it should be. Thank you to each of you that have continued to show up over the past year. Thank you for trying when your students haven't. Thank you for adjusting when you might not have agreed. Each of you stands like a lighthouse in a storm and together we will get them through the end of this disruption and get back to the business of school. 

One year later....thank you.