Educating Through and Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis
We look around our campus and see beauty everywhere, our gardens bursting with life and color, with lessons our students left behind as seeds and soil months ago. We take it in with tired eyes knowing too well the struggles and heartaches that have grown up alongside the flowers this spring. In our time apart, we have seen the wounds of society laid open, reminding us they’ve never really had a chance to heal, pushing us to ask ourselves, maybe finally with honesty, who we are as individuals, who we are as a nation, and who we want to be.
We know that the effects of COVID-19, in health outcomes, economic impact, and access to education, have not been shared equally across society. Overwhelmingly, those whose health or economic standing were already vulnerable have borne the brunt of the devastation, specifically the elderly, communities of color, and families living paycheck to paycheck. We also saw quite quickly that, rippling across every demographic, the impacts were multiplied for families of children with special needs with school districts across the nation reporting regression amongst their special needs students. Our families experienced this struggle as well.
When it first became clear that schools would be closed, we knew the challenge would be enormous. As Waldorf Educators and educators of students with learning differences, we are not an information delivery system. We bring context and experience, with teaching strategies built upon a strong foundation of personal relationships and trust. We questioned how we could reach across the distance to bring this to our students with nothing but a screen to connect us. Nevertheless, we jumped in. On March 16th the State ordered all schools in New York to close. On March 17th, our first online classes began as did planning for a series of videos and weekly communications to keep our students connected.
We took immediate action as well to mitigate the economic impact we knew would come. We applied for the Payroll Protection Program on day one, hoping to maintain employment. We also had to make difficult decisions to let staff members go with the sincere hope to bring them back as soon as possible and understanding the grave risk of losing some incredible individuals.
The time apart has been a struggle for our students, our families, and our teachers that weave our community together and keep us strong in soul and spirit; but we have persevered together and are continuing to navigate towards the future. Our integration and interdependence with the elderly at the Fellowship Community is vital to our programming and remains strong as ever. Due to COVID, however, our students will need to maintain physical distance from the elderly. Six classrooms we have used at the Fellowship in the past are no longer available, placing a dire and immediate need for us to create new classroom spaces before the fall semester.
Otto Specht School has been directly impacted in the following ways due to the COVID-19 crisis:
Reduction in tuition receivables
Delay and reduction in district funded tuitions
Cost of constructing temporary spaces
Need for increased scholarships for families impacted by COVID-19
Our call to you is to give as freely and generously as possible at this time, to help us reach our immediate need of $100,000 by August 1st.
We have launched a peer-to-peer fundraiser to broaden our reach, knowing that while each of us can only do so much, together we can ensure that this extraordinary education continues through and beyond the COVID-19 Crisis.