As teachers across the country adjust to a virtual classroom reality, some are getting creative with finding ways to see their students.
First grade teacher Tami Williams, who works at Bruce Elementary School in Santa Maria, is no exception. With the help of fellow teacher Jillian Smith, Williams planned a car parade through their students’ neighborhoods last week. On April 3, more than 20 cars filled with teachers, duty aids, physical education instructors, and even the school’s assistant principal weaved through the streets to say hello to their students at a safe, social distance.
“I kept seeing different teacher groups [on Facebook] posting that they were doing a teacher parade, and I hadn’t seen very many around here until about the same week we did ours,” Williams told the Sun. “That’s what inspired me.”
Within a week, Williams had pulled together enough interested teachers, staff, and a couple of families to make a strong parade lineup. She even managed to win over an initially skeptical police sergeant, who at first told Williams that she would need a permit to have a parade.
But after showing him a few videos of other teacher parades across the country, “he thought it was such a great community outreach and such a spirit raiser that it was definitely something positive for our community, and he was excited for us to do it,” Williams said.
Williams said that Bruce Elementary is a walking school, meaning most of the kids who attend live within the bounds of a few nearby streets—all they had to do was open their doors or wave through the window, ensuring that the parade didn’t break any social-distancing rules.
A phone call went out the evening before the parade to let parents know about the event. Despite short notice, the students hopped on the opportunity to see their teachers’ faces, even if from afar.
“We had some great big signs: These two little girls, their mom said that they stayed up late making a big sign for us,” Williams said. “One of the teachers, Keri Schmidt, was brought to tears when she saw her student. The smiles on their faces, oh my goodness.”
The parade came just two days after Santa Maria-Bonita School District announced that schools would remain closed indefinitely, thus extending the initial decision to close schools until the end of March. While the closure extension was anticipated, Williams said it was difficult for some families and students to hear that things weren’t going back to normal yet.
While most students have successfully logged on to the district’s new digital learning platforms, Williams said that a few students’ circumstances make it difficult to succeed in the new learning environment.
“A lot of our families are essential workers: They’re either in the fields or in the medical field, and the kids that aren’t getting online are the ones that are going to babysitters, or have older siblings taking care of younger siblings,” Williams said. “We want to have high expectations, but also have to have realistic expectations. The area that they’re working in is not set up for homeschool.”
Williams emphasized that the district is working hard to make sure every child has internet access so that they can continue to learn outside the classroom.
“The district had pushed out information on how to gain access to free Wi-Fi,” she said. “The majority are able to get online, but when we find out that there’s some in my class that haven’t gotten it, I can email the district and they have a team of IT that are calling—in the parents’ language—to help them get through the process of applying for the Wi-Fi.”
Williams said that the district is working with local internet providers to help get every child online. As far as getting used to the technology, Williams said the kids already have a knack for it.
“We had a lot of online learning going on already, so it was just a matter of the kids learning how to use the Chromebook,” she said. “A lot of them have older brothers and sisters who help them a lot at home.”
Williams said that giving the students a chance to see their teachers in the parade was a fun and safe way to bring some normalcy back in an otherwise uncertain and unstable time.
“For them to see us out there and know that we’re OK, and they’re OK, it made them feel better about the situation that’s going on,” she said.
This article appears in Apr 9-16, 2020.
