Back to school 2021: Birmingham students ‘excited’ for first day as Alabama schools consider masks
Birmingham #Birmingham
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Jamese and Casey Lowe gripped their father’s hands as they approached the front steps of Phillips Academy in Birmingham Monday morning.
“I’m nervous,” said Jamese, who would be seeing her classmates in person for the first time in more than a year. She glanced timidly at her younger sister, Casey, a second-grader whose light grey mask matched the sequined unicorn sewn onto her first-day outfit.
Birmingham is the first district in Alabama to go back to school, and remains one of few to require masks, though Homewood, also in Jefferson County, and Arab City added mandates Monday. Birmingham likely will be an example for others still weighing their options after the Alabama Department of Public Health released a toolkit recommending, but not requiring, masks for indoor school activities.
Read more: Here’s where to find your school’s COVID-19 reopening, mask plans.
The early August return comes during another coronavirus surge in Alabama, where more children were hospitalized with the virus last week than at any other point since the pandemic began. Thirty-two admissions outpaced child hospitalizations seen at previous peaks.
As fourth and second graders, Jamese and Casey aren’t yet eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, but their father, Roderick Lowe, was quick to chime in about his own first-day nerves.
“As for me, I’m kind of on the ropes,” said Roderick Lowe, who works multiple jobs that require him to be around people. “I’m fully vaccinated and I always wear masks, but I have them and I don’t want to bring anything home.”
Read more: Alabama doctors recommend COVID-19 vaccinations for children as school starts.
According to a recent district-wide survey, 60% of parents of students 12 and older in the Birmingham City Schools system had no plans to get themselves or their children vaccinated. Phillips’ Principal Emeka Nzeocha strongly urged parents and eligible students to get the vaccine, noting that the school is one student away from having to quarantine dozens of others.
At the school, volunteers directed traffic while Jamese and Casey helped each other up the steps, where Nzeocha greeted a line of students with a fist bump.
“I know I see a smile in there somewhere,” he said to one masked student before greeting latecomers with a peppy, “Don’t be tardy to the party!”
Meanwhile, music teacher Rosalind Crawford donned a sparkling royal blue jacket and belted Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” while a spirit squad danced to the beat. The performance was a little out of Crawford’s element, but she said a year of teaching virtually allowed her to rethink ways to engage her students.
“I can get excited about it again,” she said of in-person classes. “I didn’t appreciate it before.”
In the final minutes before the first bell, Nzeocha lingered on the school’s front steps to answer parents’ questions about breakfast and registration — only stopping once to find a lost second grader.
“First day of school jitters,” he said calmly.
Shortly after 8 a.m., Nzeoka, dressed in Phillips Academy red from shoulder to toe, started his rounds. After stopping for photo ops with older students, or to straighten out the carpeted runner lining the school’s historic hardwood floors, he eventually made his way to the second-grade wing. There, he greeted veteran teacher Regina Windham, who had her own plan for calming the first-day jitters that afternoon.
Casey Lowe — carrying a pink pencil case to match her bow and T-shirt — and 15 other second-graders filed into desks spaced four floor tiles apart. After a “Happy Dance” subsided, Windham addressed the room, telling them that it was very important to keep their masks on — and that they’ll be taking lots of “brain breaks” today.
The 31-year veteran made her way to the back of the room, where a stash of bright-colored beanbags were stacked in a corner. She noted that on a typical day, she might take a moment to sit in one of those bags while students work in pods.
“I just don’t feel like myself,” she said. “I don’t know about getting used to this, because we’ve got to stay guarded.”
Even as a veteran, she said it took a while to get back in her groove in the classroom space. She asked her students to pat themselves on the back for waiting so patiently.
“It’s just a lot to do,” she told her students, who quietly creased sheets of neon construction paper. “It’s almost like moving into a new house, isn’t it?”
Last year, as cases surged throughout the fall and winter months, Phillips Academy shifted between all-virtual and hybrid classes. Windham said she and fellow teachers stayed up until midnight on some Sundays to prepare for virtual schooling and was constantly looking for new ways to keep students engaged.
Read more Alabama Education Lab stories about schools and students in the state here.
“Our virtual instruction was no joke,” Windham said, noting that sometimes administrators would pop into Zooms unexpectedly. “I refused to let it be a bad experience for the children, for the parents or myself.”
Even with dedicated teachers doing their best, Birmingham instructors were worried about the impact of virtual learning.
Windham taught a summer literacy course to help prepare her soon-to-be third graders for new state reading expectations. Her class saw a 10-point improvement in their benchmarks last year, which was on-par with all students performing on or above grade level in the school last year, according to i-Ready data provided by the Nzeocha.
In math, students above grade level saw a 21-point improvement by the end of last school year. Phillips Academy’s Tier 3 students, meaning those who need more intensive instruction, lost seven percentage points in both subjects over the course of last year.
“We still have a lot of ground to catch up,” Nzeoka said, noting the school will start testing as soon as next week — about a month early — to see where students are with math and reading.
Nzeoka also has encouraged teachers to consider building in ways to address their students’ mental health and encourage wellbeing.
“We have to make sure we have our kids in the mind frame to be back,” he said. “How did some of them deal with the grief of maybe losing a family member or a family friend? We don’t know how our scholars processed all of that.”
Even with the best-laid plans, teachers still struggled with the reality of pandemic learning.
Windham’s class was supposed to do a “First-Day Jitters” activity right after lunch, but she found herself bogged down with tasks, such as cleaning up spills from in-class meals, tracking down five absent students and logging after-school plans. Normally, she’d be able to tag-team those tasks with teachers down the hall, but social distancing prevented that.
During her planning period, she phoned other teachers to ask how they’re communicating with parents of missing students. She read a note from a parent who felt uncomfortable sending their child to in-person classes.
“What do you do?” she said. “How do you address that?”
At 60 years old, Windham said she would have felt safer returning to a hybrid classroom, where the in-person class size is typically much smaller.
“I still so love it, but this is a lot to contend with,” Windham said. “We’ve always had to shoulder a lot, but this is a lot, a lot.”
At about 2 p.m., Windham took a breath and started the song. It was time, finally, for the “First-Day Jitters.” Students wrote down their feelings on sticky notes. “Happy, excited, good,” they read. A few said “scared.”
Windham drew a Charlie Brown-style squiggle face to her own note and added it to the board.
“Here’s mine,” she said. “I was nervous. Can you imagine that? I’m a grown-up and we’re supposed to have it all together. I don’t. I was nervous. I was really excited to see y’all, but I was nervous. And that’s OK.”