Teachers take a positive approach to COVID precautions

With the return to school less than a month away for students, teachers already are heading back for training and getting prepared for a new year amid a national pandemic.

New teachers with Poplar Bluff R-I sat through training this week at Central Office about district policy/procedures and the Capturing Kids Hearts program.

Hanna Barton, who will teach second grade at Oak Grove Elementary this year, comes from a family of teachers and said she “swore up and down” it wasn’t for her until going on a mission trip in Chicago a few years back.

“I had a kid tell me that their teacher told them they were ‘crap,’ that they were low and had all these siblings,” she said. “I felt like why on earth would somebody who’s supposed to be so important in their life and encouraging and uplifting do that?

“It felt like that was a, ‘you need to be that teacher; you need to be that for somebody that makes sure nobody in your class feels that way.’”

Meanwhile, incoming kindergarten teacher Rhonda Heaton said, she used to be a cosmetologist, but her sister is a teacher and spending time in the classroom with her triggered an interest in changing career paths.

“I really liked it (cosmetology),” she said. “I started realizing that I really, really liked (the classroom).

“I enjoyed interacting with the kids and seeing that ‘aha’ moment when they finally caught something. So, I was like, ‘I think I’m going to try that thing called college even though I’m late in the career for that.’ I made it.”

Charmayne Edington, who teaches third grade at O’Neal Elementary School, will return for a second year at the school.

Like the others, she’s excited to get into her classroom and with the students.

Barton said she is nervous to come back to school, even though she’s ready to get back to normal.

Where she taught before, she explained, had a lot of low-income families, who couldn’t afford to take off work if somebody in the family contracted coronavirus.

“What about when those kids go home? What if there’s nobody there to take care of them?” she said. “It’s not necessarily fun. I’m not just like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s go face a pandemic.’ But, we also do active shooter drills.

“We’re a high-risk profession. We’ve always been a high-risk profession. I just think we just have to be as safe as we can be and still try to do what we can for them while we can, you know.”

Heaton discussed a concern many had during school closures across the country — students of all ages need the social interaction and normalcy they get from being at school.

“If I can help them get that, I’m willing to take that risk,” she said.

All three said they feel confident the district is doing what it can with the information available.

Last month, all three Butler County school districts released Return to Learn plans, which include three different education options based on cases in the area.

R-I is on Plan A, which is school as normal, with some additional precautions, but considering some elements of Plan B, such as no large assemblies in the initial return.

“I feel like they’ve got this pretty well covered,” Heaton said. “They have all this planned out, and they’ve got our backs so whatever happens, I think we’ll be fine.”

While things have been tough for teachers since mid-March when COVID concern really hit Southeast Missouri, Barton said, it’s been harder for administrators because they need to think about all the students and teachers relying on them.

“It’s hard on them to figure out a plan, but I think what they’ve done for before school starts and contingency plans after are the very best that they can do,” she said.

Edington said things happened so suddenly last school year, and she had never been trained on the online programs the district used such as Google Meets, everyone did the best they could.

However, this time around, if the district does need to close buildings again, she feels more prepared because there are so many plans in place.

Barton said the district hired her before the pandemic hit, and she could sit in on meetings during it where teachers discussed how to address the gap in covered curriculum.

She said they met with the first-grade teachers to learn where students were at and what topics weren’t covered, which the second-grade teachers would now need to cover. She also sat in on a meeting with the third-grade teachers, where her fellow second-grade teachers provided the same information.

All three said they plan to work with students on social distancing and proper safety precautions, but in some ways, those aren’t always realistic.

“That’s one of the things that I think is really challenging in this situation is explaining to kindergartners, why you can’t go hug your friend and that sort of thing,” Heaton said. “That’s going to be difficult, but I think we can make it through it with a little bit of encouraging words and staying positive and learning how to interact in different ways.”