RE Log - Fall 2020

10 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2020 hen we told our students to stay home on March 12 for a trial run of remote learning, our goal was to prepare for what we thought might be heading our way. We wanted to be ready. We had announced the at-home practice several days in advance, yet it never crossed our minds that our students would not return to campus for the rest of the semester. I will never forget the night before this practice run; I felt like I was watching the world shift. I sat reading the news in the wee hours of March 12. The World Health Organization had just declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic. The United States surpassed 1,000 cases. The NBA suspended its season. The NCAA basketball tournament barred fans. At 4:04 a.m., hours before the start of our students’ first day of remote learning, I sent this message to a colleague: “Everything has changed overnight.” We shifted to full-time virtual school that day. We had to invite our students back to campus that weekend to collect the belongings they had unsuspectingly left in their lockers. Our teachers, with two weeks of remote-school practice behind them, revamped their classrooms and approaches to accommodate the shift. No one rested until June. What they accomplished thanks to dedication, collaboration, indescribably hard work and their devotion to their students amazes me to this day. No one prepared us for this, but we were prepared. We started laying the groundwork for a possible disruption in February. On February 1, a former student of mine emailed a video of an eerily empty Nanjing Road in Shanghai – one of the busiest streets in a bustling city. I shared the video during an upper school assembly on February 4. In his email, my young friend warned me: “Mrs. Townsend, be careful. It’s coming. This is where we are in Shanghai. It’s inevitable that it’s going to affect the United States.” I was also closely watching what was happening in New York City, where my daughter Emily, her husband and two school-age children lived. I spent much of that month on edge. Once we began at-home learning, later dubbed REmote RE, we made the absolute best of a difficult situation. We had to, for the sake of our students and our community. Social distancing was something we hadn’t even really talked about. It was a new word in our lexicon, and we quickly learned what that meant. Many of us stayed on campus for the next week in something of a daze, but by the end of that week, March 20, both campuses were fully closed. The senior leadership team worked straight through spring break. We evaluated the daily schedule and made tweaks so kids would have less screen time. We did what we could to keep the spirits up in our community. I made a point of painting the cannon every week, and sharing personal messages in community emails. We strived to stay connected even though we could not get together physically. We brought in luminaries from Miami – several of whom were alumni – for virtual events that we called Paul Ransom Digital Podiums (see page 32). We will take those with us into the future. The global pandemic shut down our campuses. It didn’t deter our teachers. W No one prepared us for this, but we were prepared. The Learning Never Stopped The Learning Never Stopp By Penny Townsend, Head of School