From Where I Stand — School’s out for summer. School’s out forever. School’s been blown to pieces.
-Alice Cooper
School ended this year on a whimper.
Normally, the last few days of school are filled with finals, field days, locker clean-ups, and graduation parties. Wound-up kids count down the final moments before they burst out of the school doors to freedom, glorious freedom. Yearbooks are signed. Tearful hugs are given. Kids promise to stay in touch. The next three months are all about free time, lazy summer jobs, air conditioning, and having no particular place to go. This year begged the question, “Can school be out if it was never really in?” For any parent forced into “e-learning” this year, it was normal to have five family meltdowns even before breakfast. On its face, e-learning seemed simple enough. I have a 2nd grade son and a 5th grade daughter. We were not talking about advanced physics and trigonometry. My son had simple spelling sheets and multiplication tables, my daughter had social studies and basic geometry. No problem. In my mind, the kids would plow through their assignments while I banged away at my computer in my non-essential home office. We’d all meet for lunch and they’d fill me in on the educational journey they went on that morning. Yeah, that never happened. If you were lucky, it would only take 45 minutes to get past the “E” in e-learning. My kids’ assignments were buried in a patchwork of 3rd party apps, many of which I am convinced have already stolen my kids identities. A friend posted a meme after another brutal day of e-learning. It showed a frustrated parent with the instructions from the teacher, “Just log into Zablezoot, scroll down to the Zorki app and have the kids work through the assignments sent through Kracklezam or check the link posted in Drumblekick.” That was every morning. My son would helplessly hand me his tablet and I’d spend 40 minutes screaming at the screen like I was trying to diffuse a time bomb. E-learning combined all the fun of school with the joy of remembering log-ins and passwords. I just wanted to touch a physical text book again. Feel its weight and riffle its pages. I wanted to see pages and pages of charts and graphs and horrible stock photos from the 1970s where every math problem seemed to involve dividing up a pizza. The morning Zoom calls with our kids’ teachers turned into full scale parental mutinies. You’d hear parents off-screen trying to whisper to their kids, “Ask her how you print assignments from DoobleBob” and the kid would translate, “My Mommy wants to know how you squint at breath mints in BobbleDoop.” The first month was an unmitigated disaster. My goals for my kids dropped from “use technology to excel in a flexible home school environment” to “hold the line” to “knowing the alphabet is overrated, anyway.” Lo and behold, we eventually got through it. My son’s teacher gave up and finally mailed everyone a paper packet. My daughter was sharp enough to figure out her apps just like she teaches Grammy how to use the Comcast remote when she comes over to babysit. We eventually built daily schedules and didn’t hide the fact we were total-
ly googling how to figure out corresponding angles of a trapezoid. Almost every school across the entire country pivoted to an e-learning curriculum. Was it ideal? No. Was it perfect? No. Was it frustrating and maddening at times? Yes. Does my kid know how to determine corresponding angles of a trapezoid without Googling? Yes, well, maybe. The State of Illinois has an extremely science and data-based, methodical 5-Phase plan to reopen Illinois called Restore Illinois. As I write this, we are currently in phase 3 and inching closer and closer to Phase 4. Then, there is a big jump to Phase 5 where basically life returns to normal. COVID-19 may not be entirely gone, but we either have a vaccine, effective treatment that decreases its lethality, or have case counts near zero with adequate testing and contact tracing to stamp out hotspots. Most of ILCA’s most popular education and networking events lie in Phase 5. For us, it cannot come fast enough. Yet, the first 3 months of COVID-19 showed us that ILCA is not just the producer of education and networking events. We kept this industry working with our advocacy. We kept our industry well-funded with our immediate embrace of the PPP. We kept our industry safe through passing along safety guidelines, testing information, and training modules. Like so many primary and secondary schools, we didn’t just wave goodbye and say, “See ya in Phase 5!” We spent hours on webinars and reading dense CDC guidelines and federal regulations so we could extract the small nuggets that would be valuable to busy landscape professionals. We became information brokers and gatekeepers knowing our members could only handle so much at a time. As weeks bled off the calendar, ILCA braced itself for what will be a wild year. ILCA staff attended a number of webinars on virtual event strategies and platforms. One of the best told us that immediately researching platforms was the absolute worst way to proceed. You will simply recreate the e-learning nightmare of Zablezoot, Zorki, Kracklezam, Drumblkick, and Doodlebob. We will get lost in the “how” and never ask ourselves the “who” or the “why.” Instead, the advice was for smart organizations to do a self-assessment on what its members want and need from virtual events before ever considering a platform. We knew this exercise would add weeks to our RFP process, but it would leverage ILCA’s greatest asset - our organizational structure. ILCA has over 20 standing committees that are overseen by a Board of Directors. Further, a special subcommittee called the Professional Oversight Committee performs a metric-based process to determine if our committees are hitting their objectives. This bottomup structure is why ILCA succeeds. It relies on 200+ volunteers a year, but is the reason this association can do so much with a staff of 5 and a reasonable budget. The Board authorized the staff to work with our committees to determine each of their audiences’ needs and if meeting those needs would work in a virtual environment. All had to complete a detailed questionnaire and that data was fed into an RFP spearheaded by staff. For some events, it was a no-brainer. Clearly, the Golf Outing is not going to work in a virtual environment and is being rescheduled for next spring. Other committees have programs where their audience is used to online learning and will transition more readily. Further, they have had speakers they have not been able to attract
Virtual Reality
The Landscape Contractor July 2020
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