Members of Bow Elementary School’s special education team were all smiles behind their masks Monday morning, as they stood outside the building greeting students who emerged from school buses and family cars on their first day of the 2021-2022 school year.
“It’s an exciting day,” said Miranda Belmont, a kindergarten paraprofessional as she moved to greet a new wave of students emerging from a nearby school bus.
For principal Lori Krueger, the challenges that come with leading a school during a pandemic are not over, but a year’s worth of experience has made it a little easier to tackle.
“We realize that we’re still in it, but it’s different,” Kreuger said. “We know how to do a lot of things now that we didn’t. We are very excited that we’re fully in school and we’re back.”
For many school districts, the first day of school Monday looked a lot different than last year. One year ago, Weare Middle School was starting out in a hybrid model with students alternating attendance two days per week and learning remotely the rest of the time. This year, they’re back to in-person learning five days a week, and masks are even optional.
Shawne Hilliard is principal at Weare Middle School and Center Woods Upper Elementary, which serve grades 4 to 8. Hilliard said she gave a lot of tours Monday to fourth graders – and even some fifth graders – who had never been inside the school building before.
“They were so excited to see each other at lunches and breaks,” Hilliard said. “It was a very energetic, but positively energetic day today.”
Many schools are emphasizing social and emotional learning as the new school year begins, to help students who may have struggled during the pandemic with lack of social engagement. Hilliard said Weare Middle brought back the small group check-in advisory period which had been paused during the 2020-2021 school year, and that the school is using resources from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) to instate a monthly theme like goal-setting, resiliency or relationship-building that teachers, counselors and administrators will all emphasize to students.
“I think being able to have the opportunity to have them in the building five days a week with a traditional schedule, that in itself is going to help some of the students who felt isolated last year,” Hilliard said. “The fact that I have a fifth grader who had never set foot in this building just speaks volumes about how important its going to be to have that consistency, and so to make those strong connections with their peers on a regular basis but also with our teachers and our support staff in the building.”
To address social and emotional needs of students at Bow High School, principal Brian O’Connell said the school is holding a “Challenge Day” program for students in September to work with high schoolers on what O’Connell describes as a “culture of care.” The school got a grant to bring in facilitators from the Challenge Day non-profit to do exercises with students to address topics like inclusivity, stereotypes, cliques, bullying and pressures of teenage life.
“It gets intense in the sense of people sharing their emotions, sharing their feelings, but at the end the kids feel more connected to each other and can identify that they share some of the same anxieties, whatever that may be,” said O’Connell said. “We will start that off as kind of our big SEL push this year, as we get everyone integrated back into normal school.”
Bow High School has also brought back its morning flex period, 45 minutes of social time in common spaces like the library and gymnasium, which was on hiatus during the 2020-2021 pandemic year, to give students the opportunity to socialize freely.
O’Connell said Monday that having all the high school students back in the building for the first day is making the 2021 school year seem more normal already in Bow, chaotic cafeteria lunch lines and all.
“It’s great, we’re pretty close to normal at this point in terms of how it was pre-pandemic,” O’Connell said. “It’s nice having the energy and the positive excitement of a normal first day of school.”