By Ralph Mayo
It has been 50 years since I graduated from Greenwich High School. I have worked in the district for 44 years, the majority of those years were spent at GHS. However, this school year was unlike any other that I have experienced at this great high school. We as a school and school district had to overcome many obstacles and be flexible so our students, the children we are responsible for, could get the finest education possible.
We learned new technologies and presented our lessons with students in our classrooms and to those that were remote learners. We changed the way we passed from class to class and where and how we ate lunch. We continued our mitigation strategies throughout the year so that we could remain open. We discovered new ways to conduct choral and band classes and the majority of our teams had full athletic seasons. We stayed open in November, December, January and February as members of our community asked us to go full remote.
Our students won a great many awards for their academic work and through their club activities because we stayed open so they could work closely with their teachers and receive feedback on their work. There were many days in a row when another local newspaper would print how many active cases we had in our schools and instead of praising the staff that came to work each day (my heroes) discussed how they were failing our students. Yet we stayed open and with each passing day became better teachers because we didn’t want to let our students down.
We brought our students back to school by grade rather than all at once, which was a very smart move by our Superintendent. This gave us all (student, parents and staff) time to adjust to the additional number of students that would be on campus each day. We learned more about what was needed after each grade level returned to school. This helped us to understand how to remain open. We are now fully reopened and our staff and students are so happy to be back so they could see their friends and engage with their teachers. We are about to hold a Junior and Senior prom and our graduation will be outdoors with all our students together with their families for one last moment in the sun at GHS.
Many didn’t believe this would happen, any of it, they thought we wouldn’t make it past September. We are a resilient community at GHS who refused to close our doors even as we quarantined many students and staff in those dark winter months. We spent a great deal of time in the classroom tending to the social emotional needs of our students who needed this support as they were highly anxious and stressed out because of the health crisis we were all experiencing. We learned how to be better students and teachers not by choice, but because we had to do it or we would fail.
The Greenwich Public Schools, and Greenwich High school led the way through this crisis and served as an example for surrounding communities on how to stay open and at the same time deliver both a rigorous curriculum and intense social emotional learning. As I stated at the beginning of this piece, I have never witnessed anything close to this in the half-century in which I attended or worked for this school district. My teachers, my essential workers, came to work, disregarding their own health because they understood that our students needed to be in school so we had to stay the course. It wasn’t just the certified staff that kept us open and running. It was the leadership team at GHS and the central office; it was our administrative assistants, custodial staff, professional assistants, security staff, members of the IT staff and our Food Service workers who made it all happen so we could remain open. Everyone stepped up this year to engage with our students so they could have as many “normal” experiences as possible. What happened here at this school and across the district was nothing short of heroic.
