RE Log Spring 2021

SPRING 2020 Ransom Everglades LOG 15 Pete DiPace Assistant Head of the Middle School for Student Life In person My wife is a physician at Baptist. She’s been on the front lines of this since late spring. We have a four-year-old and an 18-month-old. In the beginning, we focused on keeping her isolated, with me taking on the role of taking care of the kids while working. It was tremendously difficult. We are so used to boundaries. Physical separation with our jobs. I come here and my kids are still causing trouble somewhere in the world, but I’m removed from it. Last spring, there were no boundaries. I would go from a meeting to making lunch, putting down a kid for a nap, to having a meeting, to grading a project. Despite the challenges at home, I was a very conservative voice in coming back. My vision – incorrect, thankfully – when we were coming back to school was that this was going to be ‘remote school from campus’: everyone was going to be six feet apart and look straight ahead and stare at their computer and not breathe on anybody, and that’s the only way we’re going to survive this. Fortunately, I was wrong. I should have been conservative, because there was so little we knew about the disease at the time, but now that we are back, we haven’t seen this huge outbreak of COVID-19; in fact, we don’t have any evidence there’s been community spread within our gates. We were smart to be ultra-cautious, but I think now that we’re here: We can do this. I’ve taken deep breaths working through really frustrating situations. You’re frustrated because you’re in a situation where it doesn’t seem like anyone can win. You’re frustrated by all of the ambiguities and complexities of the circumstances we were placed in. And now, I feel like we’ve been able to exhale finally. What I’m always doing as dean of students, dean of student life, is making sure that the students are safe, and keep the kids feeling like they’re safe. Now it’s not necessarily discipline and social-development issues, or struggles in a classroom with a teacher and a student; the bogeyman is COVID-19. The behavioral stuff has been way down. We haven’t had issues that we normally have in a school year. The physical distancing takes away from some of the issues. Our kids have been really good about buying into how to act in a classroom. That physical distancing and that apprehension that is surrounding all of us, it’s muted the normal exuberance these kids have that can get them into trouble. I do feel our kids are developing a sense of compassion and being more empathetic to what everyone is going through, which has probably helped them take it easy on each other. The most meaningful part of the day for these kids is that time in between classes when they can be around other kids and talk, laugh and joke and have that physical connection of being in each other’s presence. They feel that human aspect and connection to school, which is what makes the school great in the first place.”