Throughout the High Plains students from kindergarten to college will be headed back to a familiar a brick and mortar setting as the 2020-21 school year is upon us.
How the rest of the year will go is anything but certain. Yet a sense of normalcy in a year defined by the phrase “unprecedented challenge” should be welcomed news. In Kansas and many other High Plains states the traditional 2019-20 school year ended in early spring as health officials were grappling with COVID-19. This virus did not take a break and remains in our mindset.
As the students and families begin the preparation for a school year that in many locations will open this month, it will be a collective responsibility to take a healthy leadership-by-example approach to help our students become caring and responsible people. It will be incumbent upon all of us to work together and be supportive of local elected officials and administrators who have one of the toughest tasks of trying to steer the education ship through a minefield of uncertainty.
These will be intertwined with the extracurricular activities of football and volleyball, FFA judging experiences and band concerts, which are fall examples that require onsite, human interaction. Those experiences are valuable for students at all levels. A missed opportunity means stunting enrichment and growth.
All of us are going to have to pull together if we are going to have success. We will need to have patience because there will be flare-ups; however, to defeat the coronavirus means we need to avoid the temper flare-ups that only cause unease. Listening is a critical skill and we should recognize others who have a different approach to solving this virus also have to be heard and not dismissed. After all, many experts thought the virus would go into remission this summer and obviously it has not done so as it has found a path into rural areas.
The test of our resolve is going to be a journey and not a sprint and in that case everyone from parents to children to teachers and administrators are going to face difficulty and yet 2020-21 school year, at all levels, should be viewed as a challenge but hopefully not an insurmountable mountain.
Urge your kids to follow protocol and be wise with their interactions. Restraint does not mean learning has to be put aside. Some parents will keep their children at home out of health concerns. It is a teaching moment about having compassion for others.
We all have a vested interest in seeing children get back to normalcy so they can continue to grow and learn. The quicker we restore that confidence in our systems and those who govern us the faster we return to the normalcy we likely took for granted at the beginning of the year.
Dave Bergmeier can be reached at 620-227-1822 or [email protected].
