One year ago today, just before the start of Spring Break, Dr. Thomas Ahart became the first superintendent in the state to announce his district’s buildings would close for a brief time as a new virus was spreading across the globe.
“This is an extraordinary step for our school district, but this is an extraordinary time for our community, our country and the world,” Dr. Ahart said then. “By taking this step, our goal is to implement preventive measures and give us more time to assess the spread of Coronavirus in Iowa and the impact it may have on our school district.”
The Coronavirus would spread, and the extended Spring Break that was supposed to end on March 30 stretched on as DMPS and every other district in Iowa eventually closed for the remainder of the school year. We would lose our first teacher to COVID-19 during the closure. She was not the first and would not be the last teacher in the state to succumb to COVID-19. In one year, Iowa families said goodbye to more than 5,500 loved ones — thousands of people who would still be at the kitchen table if not for the spread of COVID-19.
The world seemed to grind to a halt that day in March except for shoppers scrambling for sanitizer and toilet paper. But at DMPS, no one stopped working. Instead, everyone stepped up and worked harder because 32,000 students needed them.
A core leadership team was established and met daily to be updated on COVID-19, engage with the healthcare community for the latest guidance, and plan a system of supports for students, staff and families.
The district technology team began arranging for the distribution of 20,000+ laptops, loaded with virtual learning software, along with hot spots or internet access for thousands of students without an internet connection.
DMPS food and nutrition staff turned the menu on a dime and began providing free individual take-home breakfasts and lunches for every student in the district — totaling more than 18,000 meals per day through May and a million meals over the first several months.
Curriculum teams made decisions about what learning was essential, creating grade-level workbooks available in print and online. DMPS@Home also included links to online learning resources.
School leaders, teachers and staff volunteered to hand out laptops and workbooks, helped with meal distribution, and reached out to families to see if they needed help with anything from meals to mental health services, job assistance and more.
We all began taking care of one another in ways that seemed second-nature even as we were presented with a challenge unprecedented in scope.
Large gatherings were ‘super spreaders’ and graduation plans were taken apart and reassembled into once-in-a-lifetime personalized commencements. The Class of 2020 walked the red carpet in their caps and gowns, past familiar smiles, and across a stage at their high school to hear their names called in front of their small audience of one or two guests.
Over the summer, construction teams installed more than $2 million in HVAC upgrades to ensure air passed quickly through older school buildings. Nurses’ offices were upgraded to create quarantine space for ill students. Thousands of hand sanitizer dispensers and plexiglass shields were installed. Operations staff deep-cleaned schools and measured classrooms to determine how many students could fit in a classroom with social distancing. The math didn’t add up. There wouldn’t be enough room to fit every student in the school safely.
Through the summer, curriculum and instruction teams, along with teachers and staff from every school in the district, turned 100 years of education on its head and figured out how to deliver lessons to students who would return to learn, stressed and two months behind academically.
In making decisions about virtual, hybrid and in-person learning during the Fall, Des Moines school board members talked to medical experts, some with dire warnings about in-person classes because of the number of students and limited amount of space. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommended remote learning while state leaders pressed for in-person classes with masks optional. The White House COVID Task Force announced Iowa was incurring “many preventable deaths” in adults for failing to stop community spread. All of these weighed on district decision-makers as the pandemic raged, with little known about the long-term impact of a COVID-19 infection in adults and children.
Teachers and building staff delivered instruction, at first virtual only and later adding an in-person hybrid option, doing the best they could under the circumstances and feeling the weight of what they couldn’t do. We’ll never be able to count the tears, or all the smiles of encouragement given through Microsoft Teams and under COVID masks.
Parents and students navigated new virtual platforms while the world shifted under their feet personally and professionally. Many families also dealt with illness, the hospitalization of a loved one and even death in the family because of COVID-19.
Nurses served as information sources and guardians. Operations staff took care to create safe places to learn.
Through it all, our communications team worked to maintain a link to the community, creating hundreds of e-newsletters and web pages to share news and information of an ever-changing situation. They documented this entire time, too, making and sharing thousands of photographs (see below), some of which are iconic remembrances of this unique moment in history, a very local reflection of a global event.
Leaders will always wonder if they’ve made the right decisions to save the most lives with the least amount of harm. And in recent weeks, there have been plenty of Monday morning quarterbacks when it comes to COVID-19. But as one school leader noted early on in the pandemic: “We will never know if we overreacted, but everyone will know if we didn’t do enough.”
One year … those 525,600 minutes were the most revealing of our core beliefs and humanity. We found out that a “school district” isn’t a bunch of buildings, it’s all of us. Every person who worked from home, taught students from home, wore a mask and took additional risk to their families to serve others in a building, worried about their co-workers and students, handed out a meal, wiped down a desk, drove a bus, or simply said, “How are you doing?” or “How can I help?”
We’re arriving at this anniversary with good news. Our partners at MercyOne went to work almost immediately when school staff were eligible for the COVID vaccine and efficiently provided any staff member who needed a vaccine with at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine along with a return appointment. Many have had both shots and are on their way to being fully vaccinated. A light at the end of the pandemic tunnel is shining brighter.
We built this airplane as we were flying it during the past year. It wasn’t always pretty … but most of life was messy. It’s badge of honor to have made it this far, under these circumstances, and we will continue to rise every morning to meet the challenges ahead.
