I’ve done lunch duty, I’ve done recess duty, and I’ve also done dismissal duty, but it wasn’t until this year that I did arrival duty.
With new safety regulations and procedures, we needed as much help as possible to make arrival work. Two entry points wasn’t going to be enough for students to enter in smaller groups and social distance, so we needed to utilize more entrances to the school. This combined with the need to temperature checks made it clear that many more of us than usual had to jump in to make arrival work.
I was more than willing to chip-in when I saw my name listed as doing arrival duty, but I was not looking forward to it. Nothing about it seemed appealing. Being outside, early in the morning, directing children into building, it didn’t sound like fun. On the first day of school, it was looking like it would be miserable.
It wasn’t cold, but it was rainy and windy. It was the kind of windy that was hard enough to blow your umbrella inside out, so you just give up and let the sideways rain spray your face. On that day, my job was to help junior kindergarten and senior kindergarten students to their classrooms. They were let in from a door in the fence of our field. It greeted them and walked them across the field and help them find their classroom.
These four and five-year-olds were struggling. Some of them could tell us their teacher, while others couldn’t. I asked them their names trying to make a connection, but their masks and the wind, made it difficult to understand what they were saying. So I made small talk about what they were wearing, how nice their teachers were going to be, and how much fun they were going to have. This process would eventually take less than half an hour, that first day it took almost an hour. Afterwards, I was tired, and wet but I also felt fulfilled and happy. It was a wonderful challenge full of purpose to greet these children and be a positive part of their day.
I shifted spots a couple days later to doing temperature checks with 2nd graders and eventually settled in doing temperature checks with middle school students. I stood outside and as they came up to the door, they were assigned and I took them temperatures with a touch-less thermometer. After the third day of doing this, I brought out a Bluetooth speakers to play music. That first day with music pumping out “9 to 5” as I took temperatures was one of the highlights of my year.
Every day I prepare a mix of music to dance around to while I greet the students and take their temperatures. I can do two at a time now, one thermometer in each hand. I greet the students enthusiastically, and more often than not, they greet me kindly. Many say “thank you,” after I’m done taking their temperature, and some even dance as they approach excited about the music that I’m playing. I don’t make a connection with every student, but through comments and jokes, I can get a positive reaction out of most of them, and that feels pretty good.
After we get to the other side of this, I might just volunteer for arrival duty. There isn’t really a better way to start a school day than bringing a little love and positivity to students with a simple "good morning."
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