Photo courtesy The Steward School
There is a child standing alone on the playground, looking uncertain as others play around her; this is the first time she has been around other kids in months. A teacher looks shell-shocked after teaching behind a mask to masked students, while simultaneously including a group of kids online, with no break during the day. Parents who have never been allowed to set foot on campus wave from the carpool line, representing the best that they have to give.
This is what our campus looked like in August 2020 as we reopened school, and it illustrates the imperative under which we operated. As a school community, we believe that students — children — need to be surrounded by teachers, coaches, mentors and peers who will love, guide, push and connect with them. Our abiding goal was deceptively simple: to open school in person, safely.
The Steward School is a coed, independent JK-12 secular college-prep school of about 700 students in Richmond’s West End. Like many of our peers, we completely reimagined school in 2020. Many of our changes were directly related to the health of our community, and they included distancing, sanitizing, masking and ventilation.
These operational changes led to many other program constraints, and we are proud of our responses. We worked hard to keep up community spirit through pep parades and outdoor events; held athletic practices for every sport when we couldn’t compete and then developed protocols so that we could compete; sang and played instruments outside and held small live theater events; created virtual arts productions, assemblies and social events; prioritized mindfulness as well as diversity, equity and inclusion work; and kept academics rigorous but also responsive to the stressful conditions.
As we prepare for this next school year, we — and, I believe, our colleagues throughout Virginia — are affirmed in our belief that brick-and-mortar school communities, with countless opportunities for learning and connection, are more important than ever. Thus, our abiding goal for this coming year is to build and rebuild community.
Because of the pandemic, our schools have many students who have not experienced the full breadth of our communities. At Steward, we define community as culture with intent, and it includes what we know about ourselves, what we believe about ourselves and the world, what we teach and do, and an ethic — a means of knowing what is right and how to make those decisions. Any group of people will form a culture; a community is a culture with expressed values and beliefs.
Students new to our communities will need help in building identities as they emerge from isolation, resuming prosocial agency as they interact in the wider community, building faith in their learning competency instead of focusing on their gaps from the prior 18 months and, importantly, marking connections. At The Steward School, examples of how we will accomplish this include hiring a new school counselor, creating The Center for Engagement (which combines our work in health and wellness; diversity, equity and inclusion; community service; and socioemotional learning), and embracing a schoolwide theme of play, led by the Bryan Innovation Lab.
We are who we are only because we live in community; community is not only our purpose, it is our definition. We are reliant on others in our understanding both of the world and our place in that world. This is perhaps the most important lesson of the pandemic.
Dan Frank is the head of school at The Steward School.
