Governor Jared Polis’s orders closing Colorado’s public schools during the coronavirus pandemic, now to remain closed through the end of the school year, have greatly challenged students and parents… and teachers.
Kelsey Wright (‘Ms. Kelsey’ to her students) teaches sixth grade at Pagosa Peak Open School, the community’s only District-authorized public charter school. Pagosa Peak opened its doors in 2017 as a purposefully small elementary school, with the intention of creating a school culture that emulated “a large family” rather than a “large educational institution.” Ms. Kelsey came to Pagosa Peak last fall to become the “Mom” for the new sixth grade class, and she’s well aware of the emotional hole left in the lives of her students by the ‘stay at home’ orders — to say nothing of the reduced intellectual and physical stimulation — when her close-knit classroom group was forced to separate from one another.
An emotional hole has also been left, we assume, in the hearts of the teachers who were suddenly prohibited from meeting face-to-face with their students for daily classroom activities.
To help everyone get through these difficult days, Kelsey Wright created individual ‘quarantine survival kits’ for her students.
From a press release sent out by Pagosa Peak Communications Manager Alison Beach:
Each kit contained a squishy or sticky lizard for the moments when they are stressed or frustrated and they need to squeeze something. She packed a bouncy ball and googley eyes just for fun as well as a pencil for the moments when they can’t seem to find one or need to doodle.
In every kit Ms. Kelsey had also packed a wooden puzzle piece. She asked every student to decorate their puzzle piece because they are all a big piece of the class. When they are allowed to be back together again, the 6th grade class will assemble the puzzle, representing the importance of each student to the class as a group.
On April 27, Ms. Kelsey took a little field trip, along with the school’s Food Security Advisor, Lexi Bernstein, and delivered the individual packets to the student’s homes.
We can imagine the resultant students’ smiles… were like a beam of sunlight on a stormy day.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.