Truly appreciating the staff at Shelburne Community School

This past week was something that happens every year at Shelburne Community School, but this was the first year, come hell or high water, I was determined to participate.

It was staff appreciation week.

In the past, an email has been sent out from the PTO saying that there will be a staff breakfast and that they are looking for families to make or buy food for the breakfast. I’ve dropped off store-bought muffins before and some years, I hate to say it, but it just slipped my mind to participate.

But this year, this year was totally different, and it might remain different for the remainder of my kids’ years at good ole SCS.

This year, when an email was sent out saying that staff appreciation week had come back around again and families were being asked to make signs to decorate the road leading up to school, I found myself standing at Lowe’s the night before, holding sign-making material, knowing full well I was going to keep my kids up past their bedtime to make signs.

I was then going to take shipping tape to put over the top of the signs so that they were moderately weatherproof, and I was going to haul my butt to the school with a hammer, looking like a total creeper at eight o’clock at night, to hammer them into the path along with a slew of others. This year, we would participate, with gusto.

Why was this year so different?

Well, aside from feeling like the world was ending alongside my friends and neighbors, I, through remote learning, had actually gotten to see and hear my kids’ teachers … teach.

We get to see our kids’ teachers at parent/teacher conferences or at open houses. But that’s not seeing them in their natural environment.

And although the classroom looks amazing on open house night and the teacher is usually really prepared for their parent/teacher conference, I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that you aren’t seeing them at their best. Their best is interacting with our child on a daily basis.

I got to hear my kids’ teachers have immense patience when dealing with technical difficulties, of which there were many.

They had immense patience when dealing with kids dealing with technical difficulties.

I got to hear how they get our kids motivated, get them engage, learn about them and cultivate opportunities for growth during a time when we were all just treading water each day.

On top of all of that, my daughter’s kindergarten teacher started her teaching career like this. This was her first year teaching! Something tells me this wasn’t something they taught her in college.

“So now that we’ve covered literacy and language development. We are now going to cover the protocol for what to do if the world implodes in on itself like the house at the end of ‘Poltergiest.’”

Nope.

I guarantee it was never covered, but you would never know it listening to Georgia Morris.

From where I was, braless in my kitchen drinking gallon after gallon of coffee, she was rock for my daughter and made this year incredible for her and her classmates despite social distanced recesses and plexiglass dividers in the classroom.

No easy feat.

This past year has been incredibly rough, it goes without saying. But I can’t imagine how much rougher it would be without the help our glorious teachers and school staff that has had to pivot greatly to provide our children with a safe and sustainable learning environment.

Thank you so much SCS staff. Thank you to those helping to facilitate the complete at home learning and the hybrid model. And thank you to any Shelburne citizen who saw me last Sunday with my hammer and didn’t call the cops, right now I just have a lot of school pride.