Students Wall-in, Out with Latest Step Towards Normalcy

By Zach Lichter

     With the 2020-21 school year hitting the home stretch, Wall High School is creeping closer to normalcy. 
     As of Mon., April 19, the hybrid schooling environment has been eliminated. Students are now completely in school for their classes or completely virtual. With that move, the high school has also gone back to its regular alternate block schedule instead of the back-to-back A and B Days it featured for most of the year. School days, however, still end at 11:45 a.m.
     The elimination of the hybrid marks the latest in a series of steps forward during the pandemic. On Feb. 8, Wall High School Principal Ms. Rosaleen Sirchio emailed all families to gauge interest in coming back into the building full time. Parents were asked to fill out a survey on Genesis choosing which learning plan their child would want to participate in beginning March 1. 
     Thirty-six percent of the parents who filled out the survey decided to have their children return for five-day in-person learning.
     “At first, I didn’t know if I was going to go back five days,” said Wall sophomore Joseph Sambade. “My parents encouraged me to go back five days and I made the decision to go.”
    As the school year has gone on, Wall High School considered ways to carefully reopen as certain conditions were met.
     “The high school has a pandemic response team,” Ms. Sirchio said. “The team consists of administrators, teachers, counselors, parents, students, school nurse and the security team. The team discusses and evaluates the Health department data and recommendations and brainstorms solutions and plan recommendations for each phase of the return to school. We explored the possibility of providing families with an additional choice of the five-day-a-week learning option. After the questionnaire results came in, we analyzed the data and determined we could accommodate each student's choice.”
     On Feb. 23, Ms. Sirchio emailed students announcing that five-day in-person would begin March 1. The challenge was making sure that all classrooms were safe. The custodians made sure that all students’ and teachers’ desks were safely spread apart. Teachers had to create seating charts for both groups so students would know where to sit with the increase of bodies in each classroom. Some classes were moved into bigger rooms so there was space for social distancing.
     For some families, the idea of having their children learn completely in-person was a little scary. The ever-evolving mutations of the coronavirus and the U.S. surpassing half a million deaths drove the seriousness of the decision. Hybrid or all-virtual presented another option for people who are at high risk, lost a loved one to COVID or were concerned in general.
     “I decided to do hybrid learning because I am just getting into a routine,” said Wall sophomore Brynn Heaney. “It was a super hard decision, but I thought it would be better to keep some sort of normalcy.”
     Many students seem happy being back at school five days a week. They were able to see some of their friends in the opposite part of the alphabet in the building again for the first time since March 13, 2020, the last regular school day at Wall High School.