By Junior Claire Walinga

“I knew how hard it was to not be in school in the spring, and I knew our district was going to do everything to get us back to school,” commented science teacher Jeff Huska. Many Windom staff members interviewed had the same reply, but none of them quite knew school was going to look like this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Staff expectations for the school year, extra responsibilities taken on, and the differences in school now will be highlighted as we learn a little more about how the school year is going thus far.  

The first topic we asked staff about was what expectations they had coming into the school year.  After closing the 2019-2020 school year in distance learning, beginning a new year in-person brought a wide variety of reactions. For the most part, many thought that school was going to go back to normal. While we are back in session for school across all grade levels, this year is anything but normal. For our new activities director and football coach, Jeremy O’Donnell, switching from having a season in the fall, then to March, and then back to October was a shock. O’Donnell stated, “the coaching staff had their lifting schedule set up for off-season and had the players working on offense and defense while it was still nice enough to have practices outside.” While talking about the football team’s first game O’Donnell said, “we had to flip the entire script and prepare to play Redwood Valley in just seven days of practice.” Expectations for the new year soon gave way to the realization that if we were to have any sense of “normalcy” everyone was going to have to play new and unplanned roles.

School staff is used to preparing the buildings for learning, monitoring student achievement, and work completion while planning engaging lessons. In a pandemic, the responsibilities do not become less. Sanitizing tables, chairs, and computers, monitoring student masks, social distancing and engaging with students who may be out for a couple weeks all add to the necessary responsibilities. Julie Deimer, MSHS librarian, has taken on a heaping handful of responsibilities. In addition to the normal responsibilities of the position, Julie’s new tasks include delivering books to classrooms after a student has emailed her a request, putting the books into quarantine for 24 hours after a book is returned, as well as supervising an eighth-grade classroom for lunch. During the summer, Nurse Amy McNamara was helping administration and leadership to provide some guidance as they started to make decisions on how we could possibly have in-person learning. As the year has unfolded, Nurse Amy has taken on the role of a main COVID contact for the district. Another very important person that makes it possible for us to be in person is Will Riley, the head custodian at MSHS. Will mentioned, “not only do we have to get accustomed to sanitizing more than previous years, we had to move furniture around so everything was six feet away.” Sitting six feet away from each other is another new requirement to have in-person learning and while people already know this, they may not know that administration had to calculate every square foot of usable space in the school to ensure students and staff could return safely and maintain social distance.

Is it harder to do your job this year compared to previous years? Both Jim Axford and Jeff Huska said, “it is draining” and pointed out that they have found it difficult to teach kids who are in quarantine while simultaneously teaching the kids in-person. Mr. Huska added, “Sometimes I don’t even have time to go to the bathroom between classes.” As for Mrs. Deimer and Coach O’Donnell, the difficulty of what is being asked has forced an adaptation to the new requirements. In all, everybody interviewed had one thing in common, they would do the extra sanitizing, delivering books to classrooms, supervising a bus, and wearing a mask on the sidelines, all to keep the students in person.

“Everyone who remembers their own education remembers staff members, not the methods and techniques. The staff members are the heart of the educational system,” said American philosopher Sidney Hook. Although this may not be the school year staff members were expecting, they are doing everything in their power to normalize the new for all students.