Whether enrolled in school or living life, all of us have learned countless lessons over the course of the last year. Within the next week, a lot of local school districts in Southwest Indiana will put the 2020-21 school year to bed when they dismiss for the last time until August. Local colleges are already out for the year, pre-schools are winding down, and soon public, private, and parochial K-12 schools will be joining them. Graduating high school seniors will be flipping their tassels and framing their diplomas as they start to plan for their next steps in becoming full-fledged adults.
If you have school aged children, you are well aware of this fact, and have perhaps been stressing for weeks about how to keep the kids occupied and engaged in the next twelve weeks before school starts again. If you don’t have children around, you might be completely unaware of the change of pace our communities are about to encounter.
The past school year has been fraught with more stress than usual for teachers, students and parents as they have navigated the unchartered waters of learning in the middle of a global pandemic: face masks, social distancing, contact tracing, staying home at the smallest sign of any sort of physical ailment, multiple COVID-19 tests, e-learning, extra cleaning, and less extra-curricular activities to enrich students’ lives and learning. The list is endless when it comes to how the pandemic wreaked havoc on school children of all ages this year as well as the teachers and parents who have tirelessly shepherded them. Everyone needs this summer and a bit of the return to normalcy it looks like it will bring.
The end of school itself is always festive and celebratory, which everyone lost out on in 2020, when the pandemic abruptly closed school in March, causing the school year to go virtual. The 2019-2020 school year ended with a whimper last May, as spring seamlessly morphed into summer without the big explosion of relief that tends to accompany the last day of school. Then, summer 2020 was without many of the normal markers that make a summer great. Summer camps were cancelled as were summer vacations. A lot of teens were unable to find summer jobs. Pools were either closed or severely limited in capacity. Playgrounds were closed.
And yet, last summer helped us rediscover some long forgotten joys: leaning into the true refuge our homes provide; hiking at new-to-us trails; teaching the kids to cook while they were stuck at home; encouraging the whole family to help out more willingly and regularly with household chores; experimenting with new garden plants; playing backyard games; hosting smaller, more low-maintenance, intimate gatherings on your back porch.
In the next few weeks, regardless of whether you still have children living in your home or not, you will probably start to notice a different rhythm in the various communities you operate in. The morning traffic patterns will change and you will no longer have to watch for children at bus stops or worry about getting behind that line of traffic behind the school bus. You will however have to watch for children playing as you navigate later in the day. Convenient and casual restaurants will probably be busier at lunch time with children out of school and parents needing to get them out of the house. Golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, book stores, shopping malls, museums, movie theatres…they will all probably see increased traffic in the coming weeks. You will see more teen workers at various business establishments, trying to learn how to be an employee for the first time and earning money for gas, dates, college, etc. With more people getting vaccinations, mask requirements are being relaxed and more venues are opening up their capacity and things are starting to feel more like we remember them in the “before times.”
Regardless of whether you are closely tied to the school systems or not, this summer will test us all on the lessons we have learned since March 2020, and this is a good thing. In more ways than one, we are arriving at a new normal. We can enjoy the joys of summer like we remember it and at the same time, we can put into practice all of those good lessons we learned last summer: enjoying our home as a refuge, focusing on relationships, paying attention to the small pleasures, and being grateful for sun, fun, and freedom.
