Eddie Peasant worked for the Gulfport School District in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The district returned to school a few days later, he said.
“We started working, and we didn’t think about anything else except work, and getting our students back in school and getting our buildings going and opening our community up,” Peasant told the Starkville Rotary Club at its virtual meeting on Monday. “We went full speed ahead, and about three to four months after doing that, we hit a brick wall. And it was very challenging for us emotionally and physically. Our mental health suffered a lot because of that approach.”
As the superintendent of the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, Peasant said he has made it his mission to ensure SOCSD did not end up in the same boat as GSD while dealing with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. He regularly tells district faculty to pace themselves and reminds them that they are learning as they go, he said.
“In leadership, there’s no handbook, guidebook or any kind of guidance for dealing with a situation like this,” Peasant said. “It’s about using good common sense, using experience and just making decisions based on what’s best for people, which involves using your heart a lot of the time.”
The district set two goals since the pandemic forced schools to close, and the first and more important one is “protecting the physical and emotional health of our students, employees and families,” Peasant said.
The first week that schools were closed in mid-March, SOCSD started delivering meals to students every day via its regular bus routes and also had them available for pickup at three schools. After two weeks, the district was distributing an average of about 2,200 lunches per day and the same amount of breakfasts for the next day, since both meals were packaged together.
Daily distribution “was very labor-intensive” and became unsustainable as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tightened its recommended restrictions on person-to-person contact as the pandemic escalated, Peasant said.
The district cut down its distribution days to Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the end of March and now distributes only on Mondays and Wednesdays but provides two days’ worth of lunches and breakfasts in each package, he said.
Donors from Starkville SEW Strong, a group that sews face masks and other personal protective equipment for health care workers in Oktibbeha County, donated masks to SOCSD for its transportation and food service employees. So far no one who works for SOCSD has tested positive for COVID-19, Peasant said.
SOCSD’s second goal has been to maintain a “flexible” online learning system and the relationships between students and teachers, and the district aims to do so equitably without overwhelming anyone, Peasant said.
“There’s a wide range (of needs) in our community, from one end of the spectrum to the other, so it’s been a challenge for us to make sure we’re addressing all of them,” he said.
Access to technology and high-speed internet varies countywide, and the district has provided paper packets with learning materials for students with less access. Even so, no amount of distance learning can replace the in-person classroom setting, Peasant said, and both teachers and students have been “missing that human connection they’ve cultivated in their classrooms.”
Some teachers are implementing lessons for younger students that their parents can be involved with, such as guided book studies, show-and-tell, scavenger hunts and writing letters, so “students are learning without even realizing they’re learning because they’re doing fun things around the house,” Peasant said.
Teachers are required to set aside a two-hour block of time three days a week when students and families can contact them, but most are available more often than that, he said.
Meanwhile, construction of the Partnership School at Mississippi State University resumed Thursday after it was briefly halted due to the pandemic. Peasant said construction crews are adhering to social distancing guidelines and hope to be finished in four to five weeks. Opening the campus for grades 6-7 in August as planned is “still up in the air,” he said.
The district hopes to start the 2020-21 school year on Aug. 1 if there is “some kind of control of this virus” by then, Peasant said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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