22
Caribbean Life, Mar. 31-Apr. 6, 2022
Charter School
Charter school leaders look back on two years of COVID
By Isabel Song Beer
March 15 marked the two-year anniversary
of when the New York City public
school system shut down due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, school as
we know it has completely changed with
leaders implementing remote learning as
well as mask and vaccine mandates once
schools reopened.
As the anniversary drew near, charter
school leaders reflected on the herculean
struggles of maintaining functioning educational
centers that continued to challenge
and teach while still ensuring the
safety of students and faculty.
“We were the first New York City elementary
schools to reopen our doors in person,
full-time, five days a week in August
2020,” said Emily Kim, founder and CEO
of Zeta Charter Schools. “We ran our fulltime
in person school model as well as a
full-time remote model to accommodate
families who really needed us to open. So
that included children with special needs,
English Language Learners (ELL) and
Children are seen walking, on the fi rst day of lifting the indoor mask mandate for
DOE schools between K through 12, in Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S.,
March 7, 2022. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
children of essential workers.”
Schools had shifted to a remote learning
model on March 23, 2020 and it was important
to accommodate the needs of guardians
as well as students, Kim said, because
not everyone had the immediate availability
of safe, reliable and affordable childcare. It
was also important to ensure trust between
school administrators and families during
such a tumultuous time.
“All of us were just in a state of fear and
not fully understanding what was going
to happen and what the future held with
respect to COVID, and there were no vaccines
on the horizon at that time,” said
Kim. “We really had to spend a lot of time
deepening the relationships we had with
our families and also communicating at a
very high level with a lot of transparency
with our staff.”
However, by November of 2020 schools
were forced to shut down and adopt the
remote learning model once again after
just eight weeks of instruction due to a rise
of cases.
“There’s the lesson of obviously being
prepared for anything and being flexible
and I think it certainly showed the genius
of the charter model whereby these
groups could make decisions quickly and
act with great agility in the face of everchanging
circumstances,” said James Merriman,
CEO of the New York City Charter
Center. “Everyone learned that the schools
that had built strong relationships with
their communities – meaning parents and
students – were much more able to use that
trust to ensure that parents were ready to
help out with remote learning.”
Now two years down the road with
the mandatory mask mandate lifted in
New York schools, educational leaders have
a much better understanding of how to
quickly adapt and effectively educate their
students regardless of dire circumstances
like possible future variants or other emergencies.
“We have to be able to manage COVID,”
Kim said. “Schools are managing every
manner of illness every single day. I think
we’ve reached a point where we know how
to manage COVID. If there were an outbreak
we would certainly require masking,
and we can act very nimbly. There’s still
fear and trepidation, but I think also Omicron
taught us that we can deal with another
variant. We now know what to do.”
Two arts-rich public K-5 schools in
Manhattan
Afterschool Available
212-533-2743 212-964-3792
Go to www.CaribbeanLife.com
for the latest in Caribbean news
/www.CaribbeanLife.com
/www.CaribbeanLife.com
