Barlow In Redding Reopens In 'Weird' Times, Without A Glitch

REDDING, CT — With neighboring districts forced to delay openings following local coronavirus spikes, and others backpedaling through problematic connectivity issues, you might forgive Assistant Superintendent and Head of School at Joel Barlow High School Gina-Marie Pin her butterflies leading up to Labor Day.

But when the First Day of School Switch was finally thrown on Sept. 8, there was no crashing, no burning, nor any regrets.

"It's about as glitch-free as we could possibly have imagined," is how Pin described the experience.

Barlow reopened using the now-famous "hybrid" attendance model (half the students in school while half are home learning online), but Pin said that decision was not "driven by COVID." Instead, the school's reopening team wanted to "start slower and get the students and the parents and the teachers used to all of these new protocols, really focus on those connections re-establishing relationships," she said. "And we met those objectives."

Most of the decisions about how to handle the reopening were made, be necessity, without input from the students, and Pin said she is grateful that the kids are back and can be looped into the conversations.

In Barlow's model, Cohorts A and B are each in school two days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays, or Thursday and Fridays, while the other learns remotely. On Wednesdays, all students are distance learning. The platform is a combination of now-ubiquitous web conferencing software Zoom and Google Classroom.

"As a teacher you are juggling the students on the screen that you will see the next day, versus the students that are in front of you, versus the students on the screen that you are not going to meet in person," she told Patch.

Pin refers to the students who have elected to learn remotely one hundred percent of the time as Cohort C, and they number 50 students out of the school's population of 828. That number can change as families have the option for their children to join one of the hybrid cohorts, once they give the school enough time to prepare transportation and classroom space.

Some students who thought they might want to spend the semester at home have already decided to come back into the fold, while others quickly concluded that wearing a mask all day was not their cup of chocolate milk, and have decided to learn remotely full time.

Some area schools' remote learning schemes have been criticized for being little more than study at home exercises, but there's a synchronous element to every academic class at Barlow, Pin said. Distance learning students must log into Zoom at the start of class to get credit for the class, and stay as long as the teacher requires.

For Wellness classes — or "Phys Ed," as parents are more likely to remember it — students must log in at the beginning and engage in wellness activities in their home while the teacher takes class outside. Barlow is one of the few area schools which require four years of Wellness.

The "New Normal" has so far not been kind to after school activities, however. Barlow's many service organizations, as well as the debate team, have been in full, albeit, virtual, swing, but most post-bell clubs have been sidelined by the pandemic.

The most important lessons at Barlow this semester have nothing to do with Calculus or AP European History, according to Pin, and they're being learned by everyone, not just the students

"The biggest key to resilience — the biggest key to joy and satisfaction in life — is: 'Can you take these horrible things that have happened and turn them into amazing learning opportunities?'"

One of the "fantastic takeaways" from the pandemic mess, according to the assistant superintendent, is the new focus schools have developed for students' social and emotional well-being.

"I'm the principal of a high school — academics are incredibly important — but if our students are unable to be emotionally present, if the teachers aren't emotionally able to establish those relationships, you can have the best content and the best instruction and it's just going to fall on deaf ears."

She credits the COVID-19 crisis for enabling (forcing?) everyone in the community to "slow down and refocus our energies on social and emotional learning and relationship building." That's always been one of the school's most important and fundamental goals, Pin said, and "to see it come to fruition is wonderful."

Another great takeaway is the technology — the Barlow head of school was not certain the school would have embraced web teleconferencing if the pandemic hadn't forced her hand. But having taken the plunge and mastered the platform, Barlow is now throttling the new medium by holding its first virtual open house this week.

All of this online-this and tele-that furrow's Pin's brow a little bit, however, because "there's a lot we gain when we are all physically together in the same room." That said, she acknowledges it's been much easier to schedule parent conferences lately, as parents don't need to leave work for the meeting.

Pin deflected any credit due her leadership in Barlow's successful reopening, emphasizing instead how all the planning and preparation had given her a renewed appreciation for the roles custodians, bus drivers, support staff and school nurses play in the overall process of education.

"So I couldn't be more proud and more grateful to our communities pulling together and opening Barlow in such a strong fashion, in what I call 'weird high school,' because it is a very unusual time."