Schools get creative to find space for students
Community Content
Schools across the Hamilton-Wenham Regional School District are finding ways to get creative to adhere to social distancing for in person teaching.
At the Buker Elementary School, the gymnasium is a kindergarten classroom; the music room at the Winthrop Elementary School now houses first graders; and the gallery at Cutler Elementary School is being used as a library. Desks and tables have been stored wherever there is available space.
The HWRSD welcomed back all kindergarten and first grade students at the same time for in-person learning Jan. 19 for the first time in more than 10 months.
Laura Kingsley should be somewhere in the Polynesian Islands right now.
Two years ago, the Sarasota County School District chief academic officer and assistant superintendent had been planning the iconic cruise she and her husband would take to celebrate her retirement, originally planned for the summer of 2020.
The around-the-world trip would be a fitting end to a four-decade career in education, and Kingsley had assembled a three-inch thick binder of research on all the places she would visit.
But in November of 2019, former Superintendent Todd Bowden resigned, district leadership was in turmoil, and, in March, COVID-19 shut schools down for months. Kingsley knew she could not leave in the midst of such chaos, so she pushed it back a year.