The Way We Work Now
I’m a School Board Member Bringing Kids Back to Classrooms. It’s Not Going Well.
‘There’s so much intensity. It’s kind of depressing.’
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The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
John Havenstrite is a school board member at the Eanes School District in Austin, Texas. He spoke with Omar L. Gallaga earlier this month about preparing for an unprecedented school year, dealing with vitriol from parents, and coordinating reopening plans for a district that covers six elementary schools, two middle schools, one high school, and an adult transition center.
We didn’t know what exactly to expect in June when the schools closed for the year. We knew we weren’t really delivering services as effectively as we needed to. But we didn’t anticipate that we were going to be shut down for six, eight, nine months. Like everybody else, the pandemic took us by surprise.
Parents have been very anxious about what schooling is going to look like. I don’t think anybody wanted to repeat it in the form we left it. Everybody wanted something better. And we got working on what that might be. What we’re dealing with is constantly changing. Something that may have made sense for us on Monday doesn’t make sense to us on Wednesday because we learned something new on Tuesday.
There was all this political pushback. Just in the last several months, we’ve had 11 different and conflicting pieces of guidance that have come either from the University Interscholastic League or Texas Education Agency (TEA) or the Attorney General Ken Paxton or Governor Greg Abbott, and the county health authority as well. It creates an additional layer of complexity throughout the school boards. It’s been very, very difficult. Our school superintendent said that he’s never worked harder in his life.
