17 minute read
A Virtual VILLEage
By SEAN RAMSDEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLY WALTON
Sometimes, It Takes a Virtual VILLEage
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In a world reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lawrenceville community can always rely on itself to seek the best for all.
By now, as you read this, the threat of the novel coronavirus and the dynamics surrounding it have long since descended on us like a fog, settling heavily into every crack and crevice of our lives. It is difficult to imagine that only months have passed since its tidal wave of disruption forced Lawrenceville to grapple with what might have been unthinkable just a month before — pivoting to distance learning for the spring term.
By the waning days of February, it was clear that the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was no idle threat. After tracking its advance for a number of weeks and planning for a myriad of contingencies, Head of School
Stephen Murray H’54 ’55 ’65 ’16
P’16 ’21 and his assembled Executive COVID-19 Team (ECT) of key campus administrators began to make difficult decisions. School-sponsored international spring break trips were canceled on February 29, and spring break itself, which began on March 3, took on an air of cloudiness. What would the School be like when students returned? When would they return?
On Monday, March 9, spring athletics trips were dashed. By week’s end, the inevitable had arrived: Lawrenceville would implement distance learning when the spring term resumed. Athletics schedules were scuttled. For the first time in the 210-year history of the School, no classes would take place in person.
“In reaching this decision […] I am acutely aware of the impact on our close-knit community. Lawrenceville is built on caring relationships with devoted teachers and lifelong friendships nurtured on our historic campus. Engaging in debate around Harkness tables, striving together on teams, and bonding with Housemates are the lifeblood of this institution and sustain us,” Murray wrote in a March 13 email to the entire School community. “Even with this in mind, the urgency of outside conditions beyond our control moves me to take these measures. In the recent words of the World Health Organization’s Head of Emergencies, ‘Hope is not a strategy.’” “T hat all happened really fast, actually. Steve formed this executive coronavirus team even before we left from winter term,” says Chris Cunningham P’14 ’18, assistant head of school and dean of faculty, who also served on the ECT. “In that first week of March, we looked at the horizon, and we thought, ‘You know what? This is not going to get any better. It’s just going to get worse.’”
Cunningham says the decision to cancel spring term triggered a whirlwind of planning and faculty training to allow the School to make the unprecedented pivot to online instruction, but the ECT knew it was best for Lawrenceville to proceed pragmatically.
“A number of our peers had said, ‘Look, we’re going to be virtual the first two weeks of term, then we’ll come back in mid-April,’” he recalls. “We were looking at what was happening and we said, ‘That’s fantasy.’”
As grave as it was, those most immediately affected understood the facts that informed the choice.
“In the midst of it all, there was the deep understanding that what we were doing was for everybody’s health and safety,” says Dana Kooistra H’14 P’20, director of teaching, learning, and external partnerships. “I think that knowing that what you’re doing is for the best possible reason, to make sure for all the people that you know and love and yourself that you stay safe, also really helped everybody.”
Kooistra says that the conviction of Murray and the ECT in their decision to protect the community and successfully implement virtual learning became a rallying point for everyone involved.
“I was actually really, really proud of our institution for seeing the writing on the wall very early and saying this is not going to be possible, so we’re going to do the best work that we can in a distancelearning setting,” she says. “I think that that commitment carried over so beautifully not just to academics, but really to the whole community.”
Still, the clock was ticking. The spring term — which would be dubbed the “Virtual VILLEage” — would begin on March 30, leaving two weeks to re-create the Lawrenceville experience in the best way possible.
Even before the call to close campus, Cunningham and David Laws P’21 ’23, dean of academics, tasked Kooistra and Alison Easterling P’20, assistant dean of faculty, with designing a way to shift to a totally virtual spring term. They enrolled in the Global Online Academy, or GOA, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to empower students and educators to thrive in a globally networked society. Kooistra says the experience with GOA enabled her, Easterling, science department chair Ilana Saxe, and Spanish teacher Elizabeth Montes to incorporate many invaluable online teaching techniques with the established expertise the Lawrenceville faculty had already honed, specific to the School’s students.
“That’s why we made our own course, feeling like it would better to tailor it to our particular environment,” Kooistra says.
Creating a curriculum that could integrate students now dispersed across sixteen time zones was a high hurdle. Cunningham said that while there were no perfect scenarios for all students, a great deal of consideration went into scheduling time to “meet” synchronously in class, via the Zoom videoconferencing platform.
“If you go in the afternoon here, then it is four in the morning in Seoul. If you start at 9 a.m. here, it’s six in the morning in California, and so we played it with various scenarios and finally hit upon a three-hour block,” he says. “If we meet from nine to noon or ten to one, that’s a compromise. It’s not great for the West Coast and it’s not great for Asia, but it’s just on the edge of doable for both.”
Kooistra says that of all the planning that occurred following the pivot to distance learning, the schedule was likely the most timeconsuming.
“The thing we wrangled over the most was: Do we start at 9? Do we start at 10?” she recalls. “Dave Laws built a time-zone map of where everybody was and we literally counted — OK, we have 81 kids in Asia and 46 kids in the West Coast and, say, 43 kids in Europe — and went from there.”
One factor working in Lawrenceville’s favor is the recommended best practice that distance learning ought not to be all synchronous classes.
“The other piece we had to design was the asynchronous side, which is some preparation for class, but frankly is just learning in its own right,” Cunningham says. The ECT settled on two class meetings a week on alternating days: MondayTuesday, and Thursday-Friday.
“Asynchronous work is really the core of an online program,” Kooistra says. However, with House and Harkness being at the very heart of the School’s mission, that community aspect of student life could simply not be ignored.
“We set aside Wednesday as a community day when faculty could meet. That’s when School Meeting and House meetings could happen,” Cunningham says, adding that the midweek respites were known as VILLEage days. “We knew that for all those relationships, which are so much a part Lawrenceville, we had to plan space for those things to happen.”
The team then had to ensure that the entire faculty was ready to enter this brave new pedagogical world when the spring term commenced.
“Some departments use a lot of technology in their teaching already, Cunningham says, “but there are some departments that make very limited use of it, and so we knew there was going to be a range of faculty expertise and comfort with all this.”
Prior to spring break, a large assembly room such as the Heely Room in Woods Memorial Hall would have been ideal for a training seminar to acquaint faculty members with the new online format. But by March 16, it was out of the question. Professional staff whose roles allowed for it had been sent home to work, and if it was not safe for students to convene upon return, the same applied to their teachers.
“That wouldn’t be safe; it wouldn’t be socially distant,” Cunningham says, adding that Kooistra, Easterling, Saxe, and Montes had a brilliant solution: designing their own distance-learning course on how to do distance teaching.
The challenges involved more than learning to use Zoom, however, with faculty members having to feel their way through a labyrinth of logistical, curricular, and pedagogical challenges.
“You couldn’t simply just cut and paste from the old way of doing things,” Cunningham says. “If you were a science teacher and you’ve got labs, well, suddenly that has to be reimagined. How do you do that? The Visual Arts Department had to reimagine what it needs to do art instruction when you’re not in the same space with students.”
In such cases, teachers sent art supplies to all their students to ensure that they would be able to do their artwork from home. Students still made art and later gathered on Zoom to show their works, followed by critiques. In science classes, students weren’t able to do handson work like their own titrations or mixing, but they could still perform their pre-lab preparations, watch labs on video, and then analyze and do statistical calculations afterward. In the end, the classroom experiences were remarkably translatable to distance learning.
“I think the only course we actually didn’t run was ceramics,” Cunningham says. “We just could not figure it out. There was no way for students to throw pots.”
The beginning of spring term would have been eagerly anticipated under any circumstances. But adding an extra week to the break after being plunged into the world of the pandemic had students and their teachers gladder than usual to reconnect, albeit remotely.
“I was so happy to see my students — I almost cried from relief! I had one student call in from South Korea, where it was 1 a.m. and another from Vietnam, where it was 11 p.m.,” Easterling said during the first week of the term about her history class. “Everyone was ready to work and above all ready to reconnect. When I finished class, my spirits felt truly lifted and I felt better than I have in three weeks.”
Students greeted the challenges and disappointments of having their spring turned upside-down with grace and optimism.
“Classes went pretty well!” said Makayla Boxley ’20. “In most of my classes, we spent the beginning of our time together getting a sense of where everyone is geographically and how they’ve been feeling about the transition to virtual learning and interaction this spring. It felt very different, of course, but it still felt like Lawrenceville.”
Part of feeling like Lawrenceville, of course, is the sense of community driven by the House System, gathering as a school once a week at School Meeting, and a sense of investment in each other.
“The Dean of Students office — Blake [Eldridge ’96 H’12, dean of students] and I — wanted to make sure that as we moved into the term, which would be new for everyone, that we could retain as much normalcy as possible,” says Emilie Kosoff H’88 ’96 ’00 ’18 P’19, associate dean of students.
Typically, School Meeting is a central part of the school week. Everyone pauses at 10 a.m. every
In science classes, students weren’t able to do hands-on work like their own titrations or mixing, but they could still perform their pre-lab preparations, watch labs on video, and then analyze and do statistical calculations afterward. In the end, the classroom experiences were remarkably translatable to distance learning.
This past spring also saw Lawrenceville hold its firstever virtual debate between candidates for School president when Soleil Saint-Cyr ’21 and Kylan Tatum ’21 faced questions from representatives of The Lawrence and L10. SaintCyr won what surely was one of the very few worldwide elections for any academic office, anywhere.
Thursday to fill the Kirby Arts Center where students hype upcoming athletic events, tout House fundraising events, share musical or vocal talents, listen to studentsponsored speakers, compete in House-driven games, and promote numerous other events that dot the extracurricular calendars of students. It’s important, but it could have easily fallen by the wayside in a distancelearning environment. Kosoff says that among many individual and group efforts, “Student Council in particular was instrumental this spring in putting countless hours and a lot of energy into making things happen.”
The initial two School Meetings were recorded in advance and shown at a set time, but, as Kosoff notes, “that took a really, really long time to put together. So, as we all got adjusted to using Zoom a bit more and using the [live] webinar format, we switched and that actually was, I think, a good format.”
This past spring also saw Lawrenceville hold its first-ever virtual debate between candidates for School president when Soleil SaintCyr ’21 and Kylan Tatum ’21 faced questions from representatives of The Lawrence and L10. Saint-Cyr won what surely was one of the very few worldwide elections for any academic office, anywhere.
“Overwhelmingly, they were in support of electing the whole Student Council this spring,” Kosoff says. “In terms of the work that started once they were elected, it’s a great thing because they really are invested in the experience and want to make it the best that they can.”
A host of other virtual programming filled the spring term, from coffeehouses with live performances to weekly teambuilding practices for athletics squads to a master class in baking. The Spring Dance Concert became a YouTube exclusive, and student art and photography were impressively displayed along the walls of a realistic three-dimensional rendering of the School’s Hutchins Galleries, while various student publications carried forth with digital or PDF issues of their latest editions and video programming like L10 and the comedy sketch-driven SNLville continued to release new episodes.
“I think it was a big question mark how the community piece would go. Would kids keep showing up for Lawrenceville events when they’re at home?” Cunningham says. “The fact that they chose to throw themselves into it to this extent says a lot about them, but also, the people who are keeping their heads in it for them, working to keep them involved, is a testament to what they’ve done, too.”
Kosoff, who helped created an environment that would encourage that sort of schoolwide participation, says the community successes were, appropriately, a community effort.
“It took a village,” she says. “We can help make things happen, and you want to be able to have a few little highlights outside of the classroom in the spring like this.”
No one had ever lived through a “spring like this,” but for much of the spring, it seemed as if Lawrenceville — and the country — might just make it through intact and hope for better come the fall. But a season of unprecedented disruption was about to be underscored by a phenomenon that seems always to be at our side. “T he scenes coming out of the cities were so horrible that we just felt that it was really important to have time for community, to sustain those ties that kids had built, to create really robust space for that,” Kooistra says of the days following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, the Black man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police was ruled a homicide in the official autopsy report. Floyd’s death and the delay to charge the officers involved lit the fuse for protests against police brutality and for racial justice in cities and towns from coast to coast in the days and weeks that followed. Along with several other violent episodes involving clear racial bias, those events also threw open the door for current and past Lawrenceville students, as well as members of the faculty, to bring to light their own painful experiences with racism at the School [see Page 14 for more].
Diplomas were conferred upon the Class of 2020 in a virtual Commencement on May 31, but as unrest grew nationwide, it dominated the conversation during the last week of school for the remaining Second, Third, and Fourth Forms, too. The fluency that students and their teachers had developed in distance learning helped provide a forum for them to share their feelings about what was happening.
“I think many miss that ability to be with each other at a time that is tense and worrisome,” Kosoff says. “Over that weekend we heard from more and more students about their not being all right, not being OK, and needing to meet and talk, whether they be club meetings or House meetings. There were a number of student gatherings in that last week of classes that I think were important.” Kosoff mentioned several schoolwide events, such as a vigil that Tuesday to an emotional end-of-year meeting in which several students and administrators of color bared their emotions around the systemic racism that directly affects their lives.
“To hear student and faculty voices was quite powerful,” she says of what will remain an ongoing conversation at Lawrenceville.
Life amid the COVID-19 pandemic means even the most careful plans are drawn in the sand, but Lawrenceville is carefully navigating Virtual VILLEage 2.0 this fall. Students returned in September for a version of the familiar campus experience, but the fall term will be neither like this past spring nor like the typical autumn. Prior to their arrival, students, parents, faculty, and staff signed a “Best for All” social compact that affirms their commitment to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, including maskwearing, social distancing, handwashing, and other healthy practices.
“A prudent reopening strategy, coupled with cooperation from all members of our community, will not only support the viability of the upcoming academic year, but also the continued vitality of the School,” Murray wrote in the fall reopening guide for the community.
Student leaders arrived on September 10, followed the next two days by international students and those traveling from states identified in the New Jersey travel advisory as having a significant spread of COVID-19 to allow for appropriate quarantine terms. On September 25 and 26, day students and those coming from states not included in the advisory returned.
The first two weeks of classes, which began September 14, were conducted via Zoom, much as the spring term was, but students on campus began in-person classes on October 1. Hybrid classes are capped at twelve students, which accounts for a socially distanced eight learners in the room, with four others attending virtually. Classrooms have been fitted with 360-degree cameras so that teachers and students present through Zoom can, as much as possible, what is happening around the table.
“A number of us are going to teach extra sections in order to accommodate the smaller classes,” says Kooistra, who teaches history. “We didn’t want the students to not have their choices. We still wanted them to be able to have the electives, the things that they had been looking forward to.”
Social distancing in common spaces outside the classroom is also vital, so in order to reduce living density in the Houses, the School has contracted with the nearby Hilton Garden Inn to provide more than one hundred rooms to Fifth Formers. The mixed-gender residence will have students and members of the Lawrenceville faculty living on all three floors, with a Duty Team assigned to the Hilton.
On campus, a multitude of stateof-the-art hygiene enhancements were adapted for health and safety, including High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter air units in classrooms, bathrooms, offices, and other spaces; MERV 13 filters in all building mechanical air-handling systems; and touchless bathroom toilets and sinks, among many other accommodations. Interscholastic athletics have been canceled for the fall season, but every effort is being made to preserve performing arts, community service, and club activities.
“I think it will be steep for everyone as we get used to what being on campus during COVID means,” Kosoff says. “But again, if the spring showed us anything, it’s that we can adjust, and we are resilient.”
Circumstances around the pandemic may necessitate another pivot to all distance learning prior to the Thanksgiving break, but after the esprit de corps she witnessed in the spring, Kosoff believes Lawrenceville will adapt to what will come.
“I would say,” she maintains, “that we can make almost any idea a reality.”
