Even the clouds that seem the darkest can have a silver lining if you look for it hard enough.
Getting ready for school with pandemic conditions still evident was “extremely tough,” South Pike Junior High School Principal Warren Eyster said. But, “it made us have to work together as a team. I couldn’t do it on my own.
“It made us closer than we were already. If we hadn’t been so close, we wouldn’t have been as prepared as we were.”
That’s not to say that Eyster or any other school leader in Pike County was really prepared for COVID-19 and the precautions that would be required.
“We don’t have any formal training in things like that as school leaders,” Eyster said. “We just have to use our life experience and our abilities as problem-solvers to do what we can.”
So, Eyster and his fellow principals worked jointly and on their own to figure out such things as scheduling classes, distancing students, serving lunch and cleaning buildings.
Even with a hybrid, A-B scheduling scheme that only brings half of the students not taking online instruction to school each day, Eyster said configuring classrooms to keep students distanced properly was “one of our biggest challenges.
“In our space, we had to eliminate desks. The (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) says you have to have so much space between people, and we had nowhere to put the desks. We finally found somewhere to put them so we could get them out.”
That turned out to be a combination of maintenance space off campus and the commons area near the school's entrance.
Several aspects of scheduling had to be examined, starting with the hybrid schedule the school board adopted for the junior high and high schools, while opting for a traditional five-day-a-week schedule for elementary schools.
With school days also shortened almost two hours, dismissing students at 1:15 p.m. instead of after 3, “I started at 1:15 and worked back from there,” Eyster said.
“It took a lot of planning to get everything where it would be the most beneficial for the teachers and the students. We did our best to maximize the instructional time in each class.”
Eyster said students would likely start returning to school on Fridays after progress reports are issued.
In-person attendance started after Labor Day with no students going on Fridays, but the A-day and B-day students will start alternating Fridays at school.
He said seventh grade at the junior high, with an average of 14 students per class, could probably be brought back to school on a five-day attendance schedule because the students would still be able to be adequately distanced.
Eighth grade would be more difficult to bring back five days a week, he said, because those classes average 20 students.
“We’d need to plan how to do that for the eighth-grade hall,” Eyster said.
Scheduling deliberations and safety considerations resulted in a move to a common Japanese educational practice, with teachers taking carts with their teaching materials to classrooms. Students stay in the same room almost all day, rather than changing classrooms for different subjects.
“Having the teacher transitions has really helped a lot,” Eyster said.
Even the school librarian, Nancy Cantrelle, takes books from classroom to classroom on a cart, delivering them to students based on their requests or interests.
Some of the teachers had to do some transitioning of their own, as South Pike has a significant number of students enrolled in online instruction rather than in-person.
Many of the faculty had little or no experience trying to teach virtually, and had to conquer their own learning curve before reaching students via computer instead of face to face.
“As with anything, we needed buy-in for this to work, but it’s all about the kids,” Eyster said. “Some teachers might not really want to do virtual learning, but that’s the arena we’re in now.”
He said two teacher-leaders on each of the school’s halls were skilled in computers and worked to master the programs the faculty would need to provide online instruction.
Those teachers then led professional development sessions on those computer applications for the rest of the staff.
“We were able to get more buy-in that way, because our teachers were learning from their own colleagues,” Eyster said.
Providing for online instruction presented other difficulties, as well. The district has boosted access to wireless internet connectivity on the school campuses, but still has service issues.
“There are a lot of problems with download speeds,” Eyster said. “Having more devices logged on has slowed down the system sometimes, and we didn’t account for that.”
Otherwise, Eyster and his teachers have supplemented cleaning and sanitizing supplies, with some bringing their own sprayers for their rooms and stockpiling cleaning chemicals just in case.
“Maintenance got us enough supplies. We just wanted to have extra,” he said. “The community has helped us out, as well. Our students are as safe as they can be in the schoolhouse at this time.”
What the school has in place with all the teachers working together has the school in a good place, he said.
“We’re happy with where we are. We’re ‘one team, one heartbeat,’ ” Eyster said. “I stole that from a coach last year (LSU’s Ed Orgeron) who won a national championship.
“That’s our motto this year, and I including it our announcements everyday.”
