Coronavirus: East Greenwich Meadowbrook Staff Engages In Fun

EAST GREENWICH, RI —The teachers and staff at the Meadowbrook Elementary School never got to say goodbye to their students in person — never mind try to prepare the preschoolers through second-graders for what was about to come during the new coronovirus health emergency.

The students left the school on March 12 before an in-service day was scheduled for the next day. That day, which was a Friday, Gov. Gina Raimondo announced the first week of schools closings that all indications are will be extended this week through the end of the school year.

"It was so abrupt," Meadowbrook principal Neil Marcaccio said. "The short of it is that (since then) I have been far more concerned with maintaining the kids' connections to their teachers and their classmates than educating. We are trying to maintain some sense of a school environment where they see people they had come to learn to see every day."

Marcaccio said his teachers have been tremendous in finding different ways to engage with students whose daily interactions may only have been with parents and siblings for the past six weeks.

"They have used myriad ways to maintain those connections," he said. "At their age, the learning is a lot more passive than you would have with students in middle and high school."

Marcaccio said he was looking for a way to enhance those connections when the school nurse told him about a video that she saw online where a school's staff did a fun montage video to show to students displaced from the school.

"We were both saying: 'Oh, we need to do this,'" Marcaccio said. "I didn't know if they would have the band width to think about it with all that is going on. But we immediately heard back from all 50 people on the staff."

Marcaccio said he compiled the mostly 10-second clips, did about 90 minutes of editing, and sent out the video that included the messages "School Is Important," "Family Is More Important" and "Your School Family Misses You" to Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop The Music."

"It brought me down memory lane because these are a lot of people I have known for almost 10 years and now I am not seeing them every day," said Marcaccio, who is in his eighth year at Meadowbrook, said of the staff clips.

Marcaccio said the school will look to other ways — including a virtual lunch with students and school staff — to maintain a connection with and between the school's 315 students ages 3 through 8.

"One of the things we are facing now is that we're trying to keep things exciting for them potentially through the middle part of June," Marcaccio said. "We are working on anything that closely resembles part of the natural school routine."

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