[Typed into draft on March 14th…my how things have already changed.]

As many of you have been seeing, schools across the nation (and the world) have been closing due to the threat of Coronavirus. Some of these are individual district decisions and some are state mandates.

As a district, all teachers began prepping for potential closure a few weeks ago, starting by putting together and copying two weeks’ worth of work. At the time, there weren’t many confirmed cases in the US and none in Alaska. Our secret hope was that it would end up being something the students could take home over summer.

While all of this prep work was needing to be done, we were finalizing report cards, having parent/teacher conferences, and even had an early release due to a blizzard.

As the virus updates continued to grow and more knowledge about the situation was gathered, we had emergency meetings to discuss how distance learning would look for our schools when our time would come to close. In order to finish our fourth quarter on time, we needed to find a way to interact with students every day.

More plans were devised and yesterday, I wished my students a good spring break, to see them in a week.

Then shortly after, the governor of AK mandated all public schools close until March 30th.

Now, I’ll still have to return to work everyday, to an empty classroom and some sort of conference call time, scheduled for my grade level where students can call in and get help.

Students will still get fed lunch and breakfast which they can pick up at one of the school entrances.

Many more things are up in the air and will develop as the situation warrants.

At conferences, I was just bragging on how much math we had learned this year and that we were getting through more than just algebra. I’m so proud of everything the students have learned and the strides they are making in their first research report.

I can only hope the virus doesn’t keep us out for too long…and ideally that it doesn’t hit our region at all.