With car horns blaring and arms waving, Graniteville Elementary teachers drove through main streets, backstreets and alleyways – about 15 streets in all – Tuesday morning to let their students know they care.
Not even a little mist and fog could rain on their “teachers' parade” or dampen their enthusiasm and community spirit for a community school.
A caravan of about 20 cars and SUVs, many sporting signs with the message “We Love and Miss You” and decorated with blue and green balloons, the school's colors, traveled from one side of town to the other with the message they're thinking about their students, who will be out of school at least through the end of April because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And along the route, students and their families and friends, spaced at the appropriate social distance, responded with big smiles, loud cheers and waves of their own. Delivery trucks honked in support, and dogs barked their approval.
“We're going to visit as many students as we can throughout our neighborhoods and just honk at the kids, wave at them and let them know we miss them and we're thinking of them,” said Katie Craig, a fourth-grade teacher at Graniteville Elementary who helped coordinate the parade. “We don't want the kids to think we've forgotten about them. We would much rather be here at the school teaching them than seeing them from computer screens or video chats and texting them and on ClassDojo.”
Almost every teacher participated.
“This is a great faculty. We really miss the kids, and we really want to be at work,” Craig said.
Craig said distance learning is working “as well as can be expected” and, as a benefit, it allows students to share a little more of their lives outside the classroom.
“They want to talk,” she said. “I had 10 kids on with me this morning. When I asked, no one needed help with school work, but they wanted to talk and show me their rooms or their fossils. They said they like being home in their pajamas, and that's what I said, 'Me, too.'”
Principal Michelle Padgett said seeing their teachers might help students feel like their lives during the shutdown are just a little more normal.
“So many of their students are telling them they miss them or they wish they could come to school,” she said. “The teachers just wanted the kids to see their faces and to know that everything is OK, and they miss the kids, too.
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