Stressed, but grateful: How first day of in-person classes went at SC Midlands school

Class is in session at Batesburg-Leesville High School, but there is much to be done before academics begin.

Students need to learn how to use their Google Chromebook laptops to access schoolwork; they need to get used to one-way hallways; they need to get used to waiting in classrooms while only a few students at a time change class; and they need to learn how to be a student in a classroom while also constantly socially distancing and wearing masks amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’re doing orientation today,” principal Sonya Bryant said Monday as she led media on a tour through the school on the first day back. “It’s a little stressful today. We just want to make sure we do things right.”

A student walked out of Alex Richardson’s ninth grade world history class, and Bryant, standing in the hallway passed along words of encouragement.

“First period was awesome, girl. I told you we got this,” said Bryant, who was named 2020’s Secondary Principal of the Year.

“Love ya; mean it,” Bryant says to her students.

Even among students who didn’t speak to reporters, it was clear students have felt the bizarre and relentlessly surreal year of 2020. As classes switched, one student walked by with a T-shirt structured like an online review that read “2020: Very bad. Would not recommend,” alongside a one-star “review.” Another student walked by with a shirt that had a picture of a sloth in a graduation cap and said “Class of 2020, we’ll get there when we get there.”

For some students, the return to in-person classes couldn’t have come fast enough.

“I’m excited. I wish we would be here all five days, but I’m happy to be back,” said Maggie Childers, a 10th grade student who stepped out of Geometry class for an interview.

“It’s a good environment,” Childers said. “Here, everyone talks to everyone.”

“It got very, very boring when you couldn’t interact with people,” Childers said.

Outside school, Childers is a setter on the volleyball team, which is still practicing, albeit with social distancing protocols. For example, a volleyball has to be cleaned every time someone touches it, and players need to stay 6 feet apart, she said.

While some of the changes to school, such as one-way hallways and social distancing in sports, are likely to fade with the virus, other changes could be here to stay, said Courtney Richardson, a ninth and 10th grade teacher at Batesburg-Leesville.

And that may be a good thing, Richardson said.

For one, Batesburg-Leesville is returning on a hybrid schedule, which means one group of students will attend school on Monday and Tuesday and the other group will attend on Thursday and Friday. As a result, class sizes are a fraction of the size they usually are.

This “allows them to explore a different kind of schooling they wouldn’t have had in the past because of class sizes,” Richardson said.

“I like the smaller group,” Richardson said.

Richardson said she is a bit nervous, but that’s mostly because she’s worried about balancing the students learning virtually with the students learning in person.

“If we’re going to keep advancing our ways of teaching, we need to keep moving forward,” Richardson said.

Bryant expressed confidence the school curriculum can be just as rigorous — if not more so — now than before the coronavirus pandemic. That’s because COVID-19 has forced schools to rethink how they teach students and is causing them to focus on “students, not large groups of people” by pushing high-performing students and helping lower-performing students, Bryant said.

However, in order to do that, the state needs to bridge its digital divide, Bryant said.

“My new platform when I talk to anyone who will listen is our rural students deserve the same internet as any other student in the state of South Carolina,” Bryant said.

School districts throughout the state, including Lexington 3, have been distributing wireless hot spots to provide internet connection for families who lack access to high-speed internet, but that falls short of the needs of modern families and the modern education system, Bryant said.

State lawmakers are considering allocating more money toward improving broadband access in rural parts of the state. The General Assembly expects to return to session in September.

“It’s going to take our state government to step up,” Bryant said.

This story was originally published August 31, 2020 at 3:36 PM.