The Journal presents my weekly reflections on being a private, Catholic school principal during what promises to be a year filled with energy, excitement, challenges and possibilities…
As educators, part of our responsibility going forward will be to document this history. To memorialize it. To learn from it.
The calendar is moving towards what promises to be a momentous anniversary: the day that our school made the decision to have to move to Emergency Remote Learning as the realities of the pandemic began to take hold across the country, across our city and across our community. Over the past few weeks, the wonderful group of administrators with whom I serve and I have begun to look back into our meeting minutes from last year, delve into our emails and flip back into our calendars to examine what we were talking about during these weeks twelve months ago. In some cases, in early February 2020, there were the barest instances of what was to come. In most cases, we were blissfully unaware.
Almost a year into our pandemic posture, we can all say without possibility of contradiction that we have been living through history. Of course, we are always living through history, but these last months with the events we’ve experienced, the struggles we’ve endured, the challenges we still face have had the flavor of crack-open-a-textbook history. As educators, part of our responsibility going forward will be to document this history. To memorialize it. To learn from it.
I commit myself to this idea as it relates to our school, our students and our faculty and staff. The community I serve has done some remarkable and heroic things in these months. We’ve faced some awesome and terrible realities. We’ve responded well. We’ve responded poorly. We’ve done good work. We’ve struggled. We’ve lived through – and continue to live through – a history that must inform us as we look for the light on the edge of the horizon, the door out of these days.
History is happening to us right now. As we react to it, let’s also be certain we recognize it.
Last week, I mentioned we might face a new positive case in our community on the weekly, and so we have. New quarantine rules have helped us limit those we’ve had to send away from school, which is terrific, but the pandemic continues. Its effects remain powerful and real.