Palmer Trinity School

OV ER T HE L A S T FE W S CHOOL Y E A R S, words like "quarantine" and "pivot" were thrown around as we navigated life during the pandemic. Now, this year, as the "COVID Fog" (another new phrase) lifted, we started school with a strong message of "RESET." This was a message about getting back to school life as it should be. Our focus was either to get back to school life before COVID or at least get school to a place post COVID where learning and being on campus was not going to be disrupted by the pandemic. It was about learning to live in a new norm where COVID was not completely gone - we were just doing a much better job navigating school. During last year's 8 th Grade Closing Ceremony, I compared the idea of "reset" to the movie, "Back to the Future" where in order to get to the future, we have to go back to the past as the main character, Marty McFly, did in the movie trilogy. If you think back over the last four school years, we were coasting right along until the spring of 2020 when I, along with the entire Leadership Team, made the decision to shut campus down and go online. I recall being in that meeting telling my colleagues, "I'll see you in two weeks." Boy, was I wrong. Then over the next two school years, we made improvements having gone from a very disrupted academic experience to a smoother one. We had begun to learn to live with COVID - either that or we were not as afraid as we once were. For me personally, the 2021-2022 academic year was also a little eye opening in a way that I was not expecting. We were teaching bell to bell and our expectations were intact but I did not fully grasp the negative effects COVID had on our students. They lacked academic resilience, academic foundation, and the ability to understand social cues and facial expressions. As a result, we began the 2022- 2023 academic year with the "RESET" mantra as a way for all of us to rethink how we do schooling. As a school, we thought about how we can support our students in the classroom and how can we help them navigate socially. We knew we couldn't do this alone so we enlisted the help of many of the parents. The School even went as far as to hire a second School Counselor to help our students deal with the social-emotional aspect of school. It has been noted in many studies that COVID has had a negative impact on students which, in turn, has lead to an increase in mental health issues for our students. Stress and anxiety have manifested themselves a little bit more in this year and our Student Services Team has done a great job working with our students. To help the entire student body our School Counselors have led student presentations in this area. Additionally, we made a big push to ban cell phone use and emphasized our academic expectations. W R I T T E N B Y P E T E T OL M A C H , H E A D O F M I D D L E S C H O O L THE YE AR TO Res 23

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