Mystery Photos

Before the Christine Slayden Tibbott Center for the Visual Arts, much of the visual arts program at 2000 Edgehill took place in a temporary building on the far edge of school property off 19th Avenue South. We want to know about the lessons and camaraderie that took place inside and other fond memories of the visual arts program at PDS/USN. Did you help paint one of the school’s iconic murals with art teachers or visiting artists? Were you part of this class making papier-mâché volcanos or hats? Sew or draw a quilt that hung in the Auditorium? Send recollections to jtraughber@usn.org.

Mystery Solved

When we picked the black-and-white photos for the Winter 2020 edition, we had no idea technology would become so essential for K-12 remote learning just days after we sent the magazine to press. Here is a look at the first computers at USN.

“I remember going to Peabody campus with [High School Coordinator John] Mason’s class to use a computer lab. I remember my small lab group being equally confused leaving the lab at the completion of the lesson as we were at the beginning,” wrote Betsy Lukens Mikes ’82. “My sister, Rachel Lukens Barden ’80, and I think we recognize most students in the lower right photo and that it was taken during the 1979-1980 school year.” They recognized Barry Schulman ’81, Francie Goldner Niederman ’81, Jonathan Miller ’80, Kim Albridge ’81, Howard Masuoka ’81, Steve Ghertner ’82, Robert Aulsebrook ’81, and Rick Ewing ’83. “And although Kim looks ready to take over, it’s no surprise that Jonathan is at the keys; per the ’80 yearbook he was fluid in two computer languages,” she added.

Recognizing himself peering down at the work on the terminal, Rick thinks the photo is “from the 1980 Winterim computer class, the first of its kind at USN, which ended up launching my career in technology,” he wrote. “The line printer everyone is crouched over is a Digital Equipment Corporation line printer that was used to interact with a large timesharing or mainframe computer when you didn’t have a monitor screen. They were likely connected to the DEC-10 mainframe over on Vanderbilt’s campus, which ran all of school operations and was the primary teaching vehicle for the computer science and math departments back then.”

Jim Parker ‘81 placed the gathering around the terminal as an early meeting of the computer club “in the storeroom area of the science labs on the third floor in 1980,” which served as a makeshift computer lab, he wrote. Jim agreed about the terminal being connected to Vanderbilt University’s “mainframe by a modem at 300 baud” and identified many classmates mentioned above in addition to Jim Oates ’82.

During this time at USN, there were only two Apple II computers, which were located in the old chemistry closet between the chemistry and biology classrooms on the top floor, Rick recollected. Because of this, he believes the photo of students using a row of Apple computers in the Payne Library Room is from the mid-1980s or later. Today each High School student brings a laptop to school; USN provides sixth, seventh, and eighth graders with a MacBook for the academic year; and, fifth graders and Lower Schoolers take home school-owned iPads during remote learning.

“I’m sure those big, bulky computers were pretty fancy for their time – but don’t compare to the speed and memory of our smartphones today,” wrote Laurie Straus Aronoff ’87 who identified herself in the bottom right of the Payne Library Room with Doc Robert Shuffett in the background and Nina Turner Harris ’87 on the typewriter. nn

The Great Disruption: Learning Through a Pandemic

By Juanita I.C. Traughber, Communications Director

Everything changed, seemingly overnight. As weather warmed and blooms began to bud, the novel coronavirus — thought of as oceans away — crept to the United States of America and a period of hibernation began. The World Health Organization declared the new virus a pandemic, and normalcy became a longing of the past. Although there was no active case of COVID-19 in University School of Nashville’s community, the school cut to Spring Break a day earlier than planned and tagged on two in-service days. Instead of idle or restful days under the sun, school administrators and faculty spent the next 12 days planning how to reconfigure the day-to-day operations of a K-12 traditional school to fit the confines of a city-wide stay-at-home order.

On March 25, 2020, USN resumed classes from dining rooms, kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, and backyards across Middle Tennessee. Concurrently, faculty and students mastered the art and etiquette of video conferencing, discerned terms like “social distancing” and “flatten the curve,” and learned how to create face coverings from fabric and properly wear them. Save for construction crews working outside and Vanderbilt University Police Department officers patrolling school grounds, USN sat empty for months.

PDS/USN closes doors again, relies on medical experts

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first time 2000 Edgehill shuttered its doors. Fall 1918 brought the influenza pandemic. The Nashville Banner and Nashville Tennessean reported in early October that as City Hospital reached capacity and began turning away the sick, the Davidson Co. Board of Education ordered all county schools closed, citing long distances physicians were required to travel between patients. Tennessee Board of Health Executive Officer Olin West issued a statewide request to close “places of amusement” and schools. Nashville Health Officer W. E. Hibbett gave instructions to education officials to close city schools the following day. Peabody Demonstration School Principal James S. Tibbitt obliged, and students cried.

“From all we have heard, the ‘flu’ is no jest,” students wrote in the October and November 1918 issues of The Peabody Volunteer, the PDS monthly literary magazine published by students, mentioning at least six students and two teachers who missed school for up to a month before the closure. “The Spanish Influenza, or the ‘Flu’ as it is called, has certainly taken more than its quota from the ranks of P. D. S., and we are anxious for the day when it will cease to go the rounds among the pupils and teachers and we shall no longer hear the groans of aching people and violent sneezes.”

Influenza spread slowed enough for schools to reopen by early November, according to the Influenza Pandemic Encyclopedia, produced by the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine and Michigan Publishing. Within days students were celebrating not only their return to Edgehill but also the end of World War I.

“Peabody went wild,” wrote News Editor Mary Allen Tippett of the Class of 1920, “or at least as wild as dignified Peabody could.”

PDS football games went on, the new student-run cafeteria continued serving “from a large paste-board box mounted on two chairs,” and the Dem School unveiled new curriculum, including a beginning French class.

“There were many who were, as usual, sorry to come back, but there were perhaps even more who were glad to return because of the ban on amusements of every sort and their inability to do anything but stay at home and count the pictures on the wall,” Tippett continued recounting the monthly news. She noted in the magazine the spread of misinformation about influenza and even jokes among students that long absences from school made some classmates appear more attractive upon their return. Yet pandemics are no laughing matter. Nashville officials reported to the U.S. Public Health Service that the city experienced 40,000 influenza cases and 875 deaths related to the influenza pandemic between September 1918 and February 1919. In comparison, Nashville’s COVID-19 numbers between March 2020 and January 2021 eclipsed 74,900 cases and caused 731 deaths, according to the Tennessee Department of Health. The city has sat in Phase 3 of the Roadmap for Reopening for four months with public and private gatherings restricted to eight people and restaurants and retailers limited to 50% and 75% capacity, respectively.

Eighty-nine USN students, faculty, and staff tested positive for the virus between September 2020 and January 2021, with the overwhelming majority of transmission happening outside of USN walls. Other than children of health care professionals catching COVID-19 from their parents working on the front lines, many of the cases were preventable — traced back to social gatherings and travel & club sports teams. At some point during the five months since in-person classes resumed on Edgehill Avenue, more than 600 members of the USN community had close contact with someone with the virus. They quarantined, creating a revolving door of students and faculty in and out of remote learning and at times forcing entire grades and classrooms to transition home.

“I was interested in how things were going to be handled at USN, and it has been a huge learning experience in contact tracing and COVID testing,” said Margee Brennan, a parent of alumni and former obstetrician-gynecologist with the U.S. Air Force and in private practice. She began working in the USN Health Room in 2013 and assumed the role of Health Team Director in summer 2020 to lead the school’s increased on-campus medical presence in response to COVID-19. She and her team can spend up to 10 hours looking at seating charts, interviewing the people who test positive, and even walking around classrooms with measuring sticks to assess distances.

“We are able to fine-tune more than the health department would be able to. My goals are: one, to keep the community safe; and two, to keep kids learning in person if possible. Right now, masks and plastic dividers don’t have the research to show they decrease risk, but our experience is that they are working,” Brennan said. “By taking a little caution and staying home when experiencing symptoms of any kind, you might save 20 or 30 students from being quarantined for 10 days in the event someone tests positive. We all know in-person learning is so much more effective.”

Naomi Asfaw ’30 washes her hands in a mobile sink on the May Plaza as Rose Doyle ’30 holds the door open for her friend. Everyone must wash or sanitize their hands before entering campus.

USN added additional staff, growing its on-campus medical team to include three medical doctors, two nurse practitioners, and two registered nurses working in shifts. Together they form the renamed Health Team and man the third-floor long standing Health Room to tend to minor injuries, non-infectious complaints, and dispense prescriptions as well as the newly formed Waiting Room — the USNA Office retooled — to serve as the hub for COVID-19 contact tracing, case management, and an area for those exhibiting symptoms to be evaluated and wait for rides home.

As part of a pilot program for public and private schools across the state, the Tennessee Department of Health has provided USN with BinaxNOW rapid COVID-19 tests, allowing the Health Team to confirm a likely positive case within minutes in the Waiting Room. The school also has worked with Vanderbilt University researchers on a pooled saliva study able to yield results within a few hours and with more than 100 faculty and staff and 120 High School students opting to participate. The Health Team is tracking cases and archiving data to illustrate that USN’s mitigating factors helped limit in-school transmission.

Brennan, Director Vince Durnan, and Division Heads began consulting in July with parents at the top of their fields of infectious disease, occupational medicine, and public health for advice as to the best approaches for in-person learning, given real-time data points of high virus transmission beyond the walls of USN. The volunteer task force, known as the Medical Advisory Board, meets weekly.

In July, before the decision to gradually return to the Edgehill Campus for in-person learning, Durnan had each USN family sign a Commitment to Community Health. In it they pledged to wear face coverings even when away from school, adhere to preventative hygiene measures, avoid nonessential travel, evade crowds, pursue vaccination, and complete daily wellness checks before coming to school.

Generosity abounds through hard times

As much as USN has strived to be connected with the Nashville community for years, such altruism did not cease with social distancing and quarantining. In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, USN alumni sent home from college volunteered to watch the children of essential workers called to hospitals and grocery stores while schools and most child care facilities were closed. Band Director Joe Getsi coordinated a faculty donation of Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act stimulus checks to Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, raising some $10,000, enough to fund 43,160 meals to Middle Tennesseans in need.

Stefan Pretorius ’21 and Mia Pretorius ’19 create face shields. With family and friends, their goal was 3,500.

USN parent Susan Schoenecker and daughter Abigail ’22 model the personal protective equipment they’ve sewn.

Susan Schoenecker, 2018-2019 USNA President, made instructional videos and recruited several USN families to dust off their sewing machines to make thousands of pieces of fabric face coverings and scrub hats for health care workers.

“My sewing machine is getting a great workout. We have reintroduced ‘Home Economics’ to our daily routine. Immersed in uncertainty while participating in social distancing, I am grateful to bring out a skill passed on to me from my mother that I can share with my children,” said Schoenecker, parent of Abigail ’22 and Tyler ’20. “Necessitated by the draw on resources caused by COVID-19, there is a significant need [for personal protective equipment]. Amongst an army of friends and fellow hobbyists, we are doing our part by sewing mask covers.”

Kobie Pretorius, 2019-2020 USNA President, also gathered USN friends as well as several of Arts Department Co-Chair Jim Manning’s technical theater students to make 3,500 face shields.

Harper Martin ’26 volunteered to read to incoming USN kindergarteners during her free time to spread joy during the early COVID-19 days.

“It made me happy to know that I was making another little kid happy,” Harper said.

The High School Community Service Club asked faculty and students to record videos of themselves reading children’s books for students at Whitsitt Elementary School, a public school serving many students from immigrant homes. The Metro Nashville public school shared them on its Facebook page.

“We knew that COVID caused a feeling of lack of community, and we knew that parents would need things to do with their children, so we thought that would be a great way for us to further connect with the Whitsitt community since we could not tutor,” said Community Service Club President Lauren French ’21. “It was a fun and easy service for families.”

The club also cooked a meal for 50 people at Urban Housing Solutions and held a community-wide food drive and collecting 200 pounds of extra virgin olive oil, chicken broth, brown rice, and whole wheat penne pasta — the four items the Nashville Food Project listed as of the highest need. Although initially worried about club participation, she said the High School club has had some of its highest participation from classmates.

Hamilton Manz ’24 opens his front door to find a surprise delivery from USNA parents to commemorate his final year in USN Middle School.

Preston Chan ’29 works on math fluency with Gimkit in Third Grade Teacher Barbara Voehler’s class.

At the close of the 2019-2020 school year, USNA parent volunteers made doorstep deliveries to eighth graders, faculty, and staff throughout Middle Tennessee — leaving boxes on porches and ringing bells before scurrying yards away and waving from a distance.

At the start of the next academic year, USN was one of the few independent schools to remain in remote learning. Faculty and staff returned to campus, and After School supervised school-age children of employees so that they could be productive at work. Thirty-two kindergarten through eighth graders came to work with their parents daily and conferenced into class from the Hassenfeld Library and After School spaces.

tops and dual teaching students in the classroom and at home. “I think the biggest thing that I felt was the need to keep connected with the kids because it’s been super hard for everybody to maintain that community. We spend time before the Sam Hubbell ’28 tunes into class on Zoom in August from After School while her father Wilson Hub- lesson on how they feel bell teaches High School physics and chemistry from his classroom. and checking in. That helps me see where they are because it is hard to read the room when students are home,” said Fifth Grade English Teacher Lauren Gage. And the fifth grade shortened its day for remote learning from four classes to three to reduce screen time. Coaches and arts teachers have modified their lesson plans to create asynchronous activities for the same reason. Faculty also have had to move from printed worksheets and assessments to Google Campus changes, grows bandwidth Classroom and other technology-based tools. Gage uses Zoom breakout rooms to keep students in class and at home connectShaped by families’ feedback and faculty’s reflective analysis, ed socially and academically in their book clubs. the virtual experience resumed for a few weeks in August with learning and engagement aligned with developmentally ap- “Wrapping our mind around other materials has been challengpropriate approaches, specific for each division. Summertime ing. A lot of that we have had to learn ourselves before we could adjustments to mitigate teach our students,” she the spread of COVID-19 said. “We’re all doing the and the gradual return to best we can and asking each 2000 Edgehill in Septem- other for grace and underber 2020 came at steep standing and trying to make costs to morale and infra- the best of it. Students are structure. Students, lonely doing it and are so resilient.” and deprived of camaraderie, yearned to see their USN invested upwards of friends. Parents, over- $1.2 million to upgrade whelmed with juggling su- internet bandwidth and pervision of their children cybersecurity, add technolat home while they tended ogy to support both remote to their professional obli- and in-person learning, gations, were vocal in their stock protective equipment, frustrations with remote improve ventilation and air learning. Faculty, becom- purification, and hire addiing like first-year teachers tional staff. Division Heads again, rewrote curriculum High School English Teacher Dana Mayfield sets up an iPad in her classroom to reach solicited young alumni to to fit learning through lap- remote learners. return to campus to aid

students learning remotely and new staff to proctor classes where teachers worked from home.

The Lower School moved to one-to-one iPads for Grades K-4 so that students could have their own devices to join class from home, in the event of transitions back to remote learning. The Technology Department purchased Owl Labs for an immersive distance learning experience for those in quarantine, increased internet bandwidth to two separate 1 GB connections to allow for downloading, streaming, and uploading while on campus, and upgraded the firewall.

“This major infrastructure change gave us the ability to handle the increased internet traffic. Until that was complete, it was like making Edgehill Avenue a 16 lane road but creating a bottleneck with everyone trying to get everyone to drive out of the parking lot at the same time,” said Director of Technology Kathy “Wiz” Wieczerza. “All of these updates in capacity and capability were major changes, especially for them to happen and go well while school was in session. Like Vince often says, it was like trying to change the tire on a car while it was still moving.”

The Operations Department installed new bipolar ionization air purification systems for 20 HVAC units across campus to turn over indoor air at least eight times an hour. Maintenance staff added dozens of automatic and manual hand sanitizer stations throughout campus and dozens of outdoor hand-washing stations. They even installed foot-operated door openers and toilet lids to reduce hand contact and aerosols in restrooms.

Beginning with the youngest students, the gradual return to campus began after Labor Day. Each week faculty welcomed an older grade level back to the Edgehill campus. Just days before Fall Break, the Class of 2021 arrived. Approximately 4% of families insisted upon long-term remote learning to accommodate medical issues that make someone in the home high risk for the virus or for other personal reasons.

Some hallways are one-way with floor tape and signs marking the route to navigate between classrooms. Peering at each other through plexiglass shields is the norm in classrooms, the Sperling Cafeteria, and reception desks. Water fountains closed. Majority of students bring lunch. For the few hundred who order school lunches, brown bag sandwiches and boxed salads are delivered to classrooms across campus for students to eat on Edgehill Lawn, Magnolia Lawn, sidewalks and picnic tables throughout campus now covered with white tents, and Scarritt Field, land owned by the Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church at the corner of Scarritt and 19th that USN leased for $100 per quarter.

Throughout campus, classrooms have been rearranged to maximize floor space and allow at least 3 feet of space between desks and assigned seating. Everyone must continue wearing face coverings, masks, or shields over the nose and mouth while at school, and visitors are few. Across all three divisions, administrators grouped students in cohorts to minimize the range of interactions with peers. To preserve the communitybuilding aspect of weekly assemblies usually held in the Auditorium, they are broadcasted to homerooms and advisories.

Cocurricular activities also have taken on new shape, with dancers practicing outdoors and even performing their compilation piece on the roof. Wind and brass instruments moved band rehearsals into the 21st Avenue garage. And athletic teams limited their schedules to play only schools mirroring USN safeguards and paring down practices to fewer students over longer stretches of time and restricting spectators.

Students visit Hassenfeld Library — repurposed as faculty work spaces for those usually in shared offices — by appointment only. Print materials are quarantined for 72 hours before returning to circulation.

Operations Director Erik Mash uses an electrostatic spray system to quickly disinfect push bars on doors and other high-touch surfaces.

Lessons learned for better days

The long-term impacts of the virus on K-12 education are yet to be fully understood or seen, but school administrators have already seen benefits from the many transitions and transformations the pandemic required.