Summer session serves as ‘dress rehearsal for fall.’
Sunrise principal says summer session a ‘dress rehearsal for the fall’
SAN JOSE >> In single file, with everyone trying to stay at least 6 feet apart, a dozen students walked out of a Sunrise Middle School classroom on June 22 wearing masks.
They walked quietly down an empty courtyard into a dark cafeteria to thoroughly wash their hands in its large kitchen sinks. But instead of sitting next to each other inside the cafeteria, they returned to their classroom, where a teaching assistant rolled in a small cart filled with a boxed lunch of sandwich, grapes and a small salad for each one.
That’s a routine they and about 50 other students at the San Jose campus will have to get used to during summer school in the age of COVID-19. And in the fall, when all 270 or so students return, it’ll be the same story.
Sunrise on June 22 became one of the Bay Area’s first schools to reopen classroom doors since stayat-home orders issued in mid-March to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic forced campuses to close down and adopt distance learning.
The reopening comes nearly a month after the state released draft guidelines for reopening schools — guidelines that have been criticized by educators as logistical nightmares.
Parents had expected that Sunrise would remain closed until the fall after receiving a letter from the school saying students should plan to continue online schooling. But after Principal Teresa Robinson heard in mid-May that schools could reopen with safety guidelines, she said she immediately started drawing up plans for the summer.
Robinson called it a “dress rehearsal for the fall” as many eyes elsewhere turn to Sunrise for possible do’s and don’ts once the new school year starts in August.
Having gone through the first few hours of school Monday and dispensed with mandatory temperature checks, hand-washing, mask checks and questions about family health, Robinson remained cautiously optimistic as she walked around the central courtyard peeking inside classrooms occupied by no more than a dozen students each.
“I just want to make sure that we get the fun in the first day so the kids loosen up a little because right now it looks kind of sad,” Robinson said. “We want to give them education to prevent the summer slide but also to give them some kind of fun.”
Normally classrooms would be filled to the brim with students patiently doing schoolwork and awaiting the Sunrise summer experience: field trips, pool parties, lunches in the courtyard and long hours out in the sun.
But with COVID-19 guidelines now firmly in place, field trips have been canceled, and students can expect to spend most of the day in the classroom, although the school is trying to figure out how to at least have a pool day every week and rotating artistic activities during the afternoon.
“It’s the first day, it’s a little serious,” Robinson said. “This year is not going to be as fun as it usually is. I was looking at the video from this past year, and I just started crying because most of these things we won’t be able to do. We usually have a field trip to Mount Shasta in a big cabin. We can’t do that, obviously.”
Kids won’t be allowed to play games as they did last year, and sports facilities currently being built on campus won’t be used anytime soon.
As lunch was brought into his classroom, physical education teacher Omar Reynoso, who is helping to teach math this summer, scrolled through a playlist of YouTube videos he made of himself cooking healthy meals and doing workouts and other activities he shared with students to give them some way of keeping fit while stuck at home.
“We wanted to keep the kids engaged,” said Reynoso, who has taught summer school at Sunrise for 10 years.
“Every year we had a class full of students, 25 to 30 students,” Reynoso said. “Now it’s 12 students. It’s sad but I have to stay focused. I’m happy that they’re able to come to school rather than be home because a lot of them were bored. It’s exciting to see them back, but I just wish we had bigger classes because not everyone got a chance to go to summer school.”
Students weren’t the only ones who did not return to school. Robinson said several teachers, scared of potential exposure to the virus, decided to stay home instead of teaching summer school.
But English director Jessica DeAnda said she wasn’t scared to return and was happy to be back inside the classroom, despite the changes.
“It’s different and the same,” DeAnda said. “I would say the different part is the social distancing, the hand-washing, the sanitizing and the health and safety. But our reason that we’re here, our goal, our mission hasn’t changed at all. That distance learning was a struggle, and as soon as we’re able to have that contact time with the kids, that’s what really matters.”
Eleven-year-old Kayla Torres said she doesn’t mind the little changes. She said it’s good to see other people for once.
“It’s hard to interact with people and not be, like, socially awkward,” she said. “You’re just inside all the time. If you go back to school, since they’re also keeping you healthy and making sure you’re clean, that’s really good so that we can still do things we like but be safe.”
For Torres, distance learning was hard because sometimes she couldn’t find a good place to work at home. And on top of that, it’s just plain difficult to do schoolwork through Zoom.
She said isolation was also a problem.
“I was kind of alone and lonely because I had no one to really hang out with besides family,” she said. “It was just weird to be separated from the people who I’m usually with. Now being here, it does kind of feel like when you go to a new school — all these mixed emotions — and then also kind of strange to see people. I don’t know why, but it seems strange to see people.”