2020 was a difficult year for local school districts and the communities they serve, with the pandemic causing a seismic shift in the school experience. While we’re not quite halfway through this academic year, local superintendents were asked to look ahead as the calendar changes from 2020 to 2021. We interviewed four superintendents.
Kingston Superintendent Paul Padalino said that his district had benefitted in 2020 from community support, ensuring at every opportunity that students weren’t going hungry. The district has operated a meal pickup and delivery service, but when a brief kitchen quarantine paused the process, help was a phone call away. “I called the Kingston Emergency Food Collaborative, and they stepped up and they fed our kids for those two days,” Padalino said.
Padalino hopes the community engagement developed in 2020 will continue in 2021. The number of viewers of remote online school-board meetings has been significantly higher than it was before the coronavirus hit the area last March.
“People don’t have to get in their car and then sit in a boardroom,” he said. “They can turn it on at home. I think we had 175 people watch our board meeting two weeks ago; I’ve never had 175 people at a board meeting in my 16 years as a superintendent…People are at home and they’re actually participating more in things that they wouldn’t have in the past.”
The superintendent said he hoped that the district would continue improving its technology in 2021, as technology has become even more vital to academic delivery than previously imagined.
“I think our teachers have learned more about technology in the last eight or nine months, I think, than they have been than they have in the last ten years,” Padalino said. “Yeah. Um, so now our teachers are getting better at using technology. I don’t want us to become fully remote school district [after Covid-19], but I don’t want teachers to look at this and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s over.’”
Kingson is hoping to be able in 2021 is bring more and more students back into the classroom. “I hear it every day, the social and emotional toll that this is taking on our kids,” Padalino said. “I just, I can’t even imagine what kids are doing right now. We used to talk about cutting screen time for kids for years. Right. And what do we do? We add six hours of screen time.”
Padalino said school officials hope to bring back everyone who wants to return to the classroom as soon as possible. “When the vaccine gets out there, the weather gets good, spring starts coming along, people [learning remotely] might come back to school,” he said. “We want to be able to bring them back, so we’re planning to try to gear ourselves up kind of slowly and be ready for that in April, May, June, when parents are saying, ‘Okay, it’s time.’”
What to look forward to throughout 2021? What lessons were learned during 2020?
“I know the governor likes to say re-imagine education, and he’s not all wrong in that,” Padalino said. “We’ve had some opportunities to learn and to see how we do certain things. I mean, there’s a whole new, whole new mindset around one-on-one devices for our kids, something that we had kind of at the five-year plan, which now is going to be basically rolling into like a one-year plan.”
Padalino looks forward to a return to school as usual. “I’m looking forward to actually entering a school and seeing kids, or going to a football game or a concert and seeing children,” he said.
Saugerties Superintendent Kirk Reinhardt is hoping the district will be able to inch its way back to normal in 2021, with more students returning to the classroom as the weather improves in spring. The district is hoping to apply some of the best practices established during a difficult time to the educational experience, Continually engaging with the community, Reinhardt said, will help.
“How do we take some of the negatives from this situation and improve the way we do business?” Reinhardt said. “We’ve been having [virtual] town halls once a month, and we’re getting over a hundred people every time. I’m going to keep those going. I like hearing from the community, I like hearing from the stakeholders. I think that’s a positive that we’re going to, we’re going to keep going even when we get through this.”
While 2021 may see light emerge after a year of darkness, Reinhardt said no one should expect it to happen overnight. “We don’t want that false sense that we’re gonna wake up in a new world January 1,” he said. “We have to be realistic. But it’s all about student learning, and that’s going to be my focus regardless of if it’s a pandemic or not.”
Reinhardt said he anticipates in-person learning to increase due to a variety of factors.
“I think if the vaccine starts to ramp up and a lot of people are feeling safer, I think when the change happens, it’s going to happen quickly,” he said. “People know the value of their students being in school. I think when the weather changes and you’re getting multiple positive factors simultaneously, and with the vaccine we can also have a large impact on the herd immunity, and there will be better weather. I think when we get through this, we’re going to have less emotional stress on people because we’re going to have so many positive things at once.”
New Paltz Superintendent Angela Urbina-Medina said that 2020 has provided ample opportunities for positive growth while being a very challenging year. “It’s been my experience that strength is forged through adversity,” she said. “Difficulty and adversity also have a way of shining a harsh light on areas of weakness. The pandemic has required a great deal more communication than has been customary here. New Paltz has stepped up its communication game during this period and although we still aspire to do much better, the district has tried to be much more responsive to the needs of the community in this way.”
Urbina-Medina said she hopes to see the darkness of 2020 left in the past.
“I’m sure I’m no different than anyone else in that I hope 2021 brings a close to this awful chapter in history,” said the superintendent. “So much pain was felt by so many in 2020. I hope that we are all able to feel more hopeful in 2021.”
Urbina-Medina said she hopes to see fewer virtual meetings in 2021. “As much as technology has saved the day in 2020, I would be okay if I never had another Google Meet or Zoom meeting,” she said. “I just miss being in the company of people.”
Members of the New Paltz community may have to wait a while before the district returns to pre-Covid education. “According to the experts, we might not get back to normal for some time,” Urbina-Medina said, “It seems that we will continue to operate in a less than traditional school model for a while longer. I am hoping that in the fall of 2021 we might be able to increase our student capacity, but so much is dependent on the virus and the guidance of the experts in the field. If we’ve learned anything this year we can plan all we want but at the end of the day, we have limited control over what is going to happen. School districts will have to continue to be flexible in this dynamic situation.”
Onteora Superintendent Victoria McLaren said the Onteora community has rallied around the district during trying times in 2020. “While 2020 has been very difficult, there has been an incredible sense of community within our district,” she said. “There has been an active partnering between the schools and families, with mutual support, kindness and respect. This situation has also highlighted the passion, dedication and excellence of our faculty, staff, and administrative team.”
In 2021, McLaren said she was optimistic about welcoming more and more students back to Onteora schools. “Without a doubt, I am most looking forward to seeing our students back in our buildings,” McLaren said. “I am proud of how our district has continued to serve our students, but this is not the version of school that anyone wants to continue. I am also looking forward to seeing how we can bring some of the things we have learned though this experience into the future. I think that everyone has grown and developed new skills and just because we can return to a version of normal that is familiar doesn’t mean we can’t make it a better version of what we consider normal.”
The superintendent hopes to see an increase in in-person communication after many months of connecting virtually. “I am most looking forward to leaving the virtual world behind to some degree and interacting with people on a more personal basis,” McLaren said. “Both adults and students.”
With the continually shifting pandemic landscape, McLaren said it was unclear when Onteora schools might be up and running as they used to, “I wish I could say how quickly we would be back to normal, but I have definitely learned that I cannot predict the future,” she said. “As soon as possible would definitely be my hope.”
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