The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Some normalcy returning, principal says
At Powers Elementary School, some normalcy is making its way back into on-campus learning.
Principal Brian Teppner reported some changes at the school during a Jan. 19 Amherst Exempted Village Schools Board of Education meeting, where he detailed staff changes and new features to learning being implemented.
For the second half of the school year, the elementary school transitioned a kindergarten and first-grade teacher from online learning to in-person learning, as well as hired another kindergarten teacher to work on campus, Teppner said.
This is in part due to the growing number of younger students returning to oncampus learning. The elementary school is at the highest percentage in the district for in-person learning at 79 percent.
“The trend will be that more younger students came back than our secondand third-grade students, so I think there’s some natural reason there where it turns out that it’s harder to teach kindergarten and first grade, especially at home,” Teppner said.
Also, enrollment for the district’s preschool started recently, with next year’s slots filling up within five minutes.
“That probably tells us that there’s a whole bunch of other families who would like to take advantage of that,” Teppner said.
Enrollment will stay open for a while longer to formulate a waiting list for the preschool.
Additionally, subjects like library, art and music no longer are being taught in the students’ designated classrooms, but are being taught out of their respective classrooms.
Powers Elementary also
figured out a way to check out books safely through its library, with each book quarantined for three days after it’s checked in and put on a rotating system for checkout.
Lunches now are served in the school’s cafeteria instead of in classrooms, with 550 lunches served in the
cafeteria Jan. 14 alone.
As for the curriculum, Teppner said the school is finding difficulty in tracking which students take daily assessments, while test-taking remains straight-forward.
The district’s youngest students also took part in an election activity for a
new display in the building, the results of which were announced virtually by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
LaRose encouraged the elementary students to talk to the adults in their lives about voting by taking a trip to the polls.
He said in a video to the school, that the election exercise plays an important role in young students learning about democracy, with not everyone hearing the results they wanted to.
“What that means is that for some of those that voted for something else, they may feel a little disappointed,” LaRose said, “but understand that this is the way that democracy works.”
As for other activities at the school, Teppner said the district’s Parent Teacher Organization is working to put together classroom baggies with goodies like PlayDoh to entertain children while the building’s playground is undergoing repairs.
Through it all, it’s been important to keep morale up for teachers and staff, he said.
“It’s so easy, just as we’re charging through everything, to forget that we are teaching in the middle of an international pandemic,” Teppner said.