Since March of 2020, our school community has been managing a global pandemic that none of us was prepared for. Our Mt. Vernon faculty and staff worked tirelessly in providing the best learning opportunities for our in-person, virtual and over 1,500 temporarily quarantined students and staff. As we began the 2020-21 school year, we realized that we had to significantly change our methods to manage our schools and to teach our students.
To put this into perspective, imagine that you’ve just learned you will now have to do your job completely differently than you were trained, for a prolonged period of time, with no end in sight. Not only that, you will now have to use some delivery methods and techniques that you know will be much less effective for a majority of your clients. Additionally, you will be given relatively little notice or time to plan and prepare.
This is the exact scenario that teachers have been facing for over a year, and they have been an inspiration to us all during this protracted and difficult time. Parents didn’t have it much easier, especially those elementary parents who had to provide an enormous amount of educational support to their children when they were home learning virtually or in quarantine due to a close contact investigation.
Our support staff met with unprecedented challenges as well. From our cooks and custodians to our maintenance and transportation staff, all have significantly changed the course of their work to accommodate the new needs brought to us by the pandemic. Our administrators also deserve a huge thanks. They essentially recreated the school management wheel all while supporting their staff who were recreating the teaching and learning wheel. Finally, I can’t say enough about how our nursing and clinic staff went above and beyond this year. All of Mt. Vernon’s staff have simply been amazing and deserve much needed respite over the 6½-week summer break.
The 4,400 hundred students and the 535 staff members of the Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation have been champions in this unprecedented event as we have navigated the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. We developed plans, communicated to the masses, and made decisions that we believed would be best for everyone. In all of our decisions, we applied principles of grace and understanding, always focusing on mental health and knowing that we were not going to be able to cover the breadth of learning in a typical year. While we can find many good things that came out of this pandemic, there wasn’t one day without significant hardship.
Mt. Vernon Schools directly impacts well over 10,000 people in our community. And, it was the community that rose to the challenge in supporting one another during this unprecedented time. We came together. The support we received from our entire community has been simply amazing. While there are too many people and organizations to thank, I do want to recognize Hancock Health, NineStar, the Hancock County Health Department, Mt. Comfort United Methodist Church, and the Mt. Vernon Education Foundation. These organizations, along with many other local groups that provided supplies or a much needed pick-me-up for our staff, have helped us immeasurably. For our amazingly supportive community, we are sincerely grateful.
I have great pride in being a part of the Mt Vernon Community School Corporation. Hard times, like this pandemic, have opened our eyes to many things; but it has also let us see how strong the bonds among us really are. Our community is poised to come out of this pandemic better and stronger than ever. We’ve sacrificed, and while some learning was certainly left on the table, we are prepared to accelerate our efforts and double down on meeting the needs of our students now and in the future.
Jack Parker is the superintendent of the Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation
