More than any year, summer break was just that a break.
In previous years Summer break was the time between the end of the school year and the beginning of the next year. Yes, there was planning that I did in the spring for the upcoming fall, but there seemed to be a clean break, a sense of finality. That feeling wasn't there. Maybe it was because all of our closing events like graduation were a shadow of themselves on Zoom, or because I never got to say goodbye to most of my students. More than anything else, the uncertainty of fall is what never allowed me to feel like I could truly be done as summer break began.
We ended school, not knowing what fall was going to be like. No one knew if we would be in-person, remote, or some hybrid of in-person and remote.
There was a flurry of conversation and debate about schools opening in the late spring, and once that idea got quashed down, we just rode the school year out to the end, and no one seemed to be talking about the fall. There was very much sense of let's not worry about this until later, because someone else is going to figure it out.
The problem is that we didn't have time. Schools needed every single second from the end of school until the school's opening in the fall to figure out what to do. No help came.
There was no massive influx of funds, no meaningful guidance from the federal government, and people behaved with complete ignorance of how their choices in spreading the pandemic further would affect schools' possibilities of opening in person.
I needed to feel like I was doing something to help. I couldn't just sit back and not have a voice, so I volunteered to be on my school's Return to Campus Coordinating Committee. We met on the week of 6/14 a couple of times and talked about ideas and opening in the fall.
This was followed by a couple of announcements that mirrored the messaging in the spring of how our school closed in the uncertainty.
June 15th
Our administration explained that they were looking into different possibilities for the fall. No specifics were given at this time. Working on the committee at the time, I felt hopeful that we could find a better way to do remote learning, and I was intrigued by the idea of being in-person.
June 26th
We received another email saying that plans were in development. At this point, I was convinced that there was no way we would be in-person in the fall, except for maybe the younger grades. It didn't seem right, and it felt far too dangerous.
July 10th
Our administration proudly announcements that all students JK-12 were going to return to campus. I was shocked by this email. It felt like the school was making this promise to differentiate itself from other schools, which at this point were already making announcements that school would not be in person. My more cynical part of my brain thought this was just about money, though part of me understood how, especially for our younger students, we had to make in-person happen.
July 31st
With August coming quickly, the school announced that is Illinois was in stage 4, the 9-12 grade students would be remote, and JK-8 would be in-person. So much of what we were doing was hinging on these stages the governor set, and it was hard knowing that other people would so influence my job in the fall. At this point, I had a full on "freak-out" about being in person. I could not see how this was going to work.
August 6th
I was excited to have this meeting with all of the faculty and a leading expert in infectious diseases.
I initially left this meeting, not feeling very good about teaching in person because her advice went to go against my fears. When she talked about how unlikely it would be for us to get COVID-19 with certain precautions, I didn't believe her. Later, most of what she said proved to be right, but at the time, I wanted to believe the worst of the possibilities of teaching in-person. I was resentful of not being treated well as a teacher, and it like by extenuated the worst-case scenario. I wanted to be a victim at that time. The problem was that my viewpoint wasn't right, and it didn't reflect the science.
August 12th
The administration announced that the 9-12 graders were going to be remote. In a way, this was a relief. It meant that getting the JK-8 students in the building would be more feasible. I was happy that my high school teacher colleagues didn't have to be in the building while I was still not feeling good about teaching in-person.
Plans started slowly coming together at this point. We found out that students had the option to be remote, but teaches did not. Schedules less than a month before school was to open were still not solidified. I didn't know until the week before school started my schedule and what grades I would teach. While not having a teaching schedule and teaching assignment earlier was stressful and felt unreasonable at the time.
In retrospect, the actual negative effects of this uncertainty were not that big a deal. No matter what, I was going to have to plan week by week. Knowing my schedule earlier wouldn't have really changed that.
I was proud that I focused my frustration on helping out. I spent hours in the evening and one Saturday morning on the beach, working out schedule issues. While my children played in the Lake Michigan water, I was furiously writing out emails on my phone, trying to make pieces fit.
At that point, I had moved on to the mindset of making things work. I gave up thinking about whether or not we should be in-person and instead focused on doing all that I could to make in-person work. People I trusted in the school felt like we could make this happen. In 12 years, they had the school had never let me down. Once again, I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
While the chaos in my brain settled down and I began to focus on what I needed to do to make this work, the opening days of school would bring to light a new tension, one I did not expect and that felt like it could to pull apart our school community.
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