May 5, 2020
By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT
Rutherford County Schools
When Ashley Witt, principal of Buchanan Elementary, met with her faculty and staff last August, she asked each one of them to be very intentional when engaging students and parents alike.
It was a focus of the 2019–2020 school year.
“It’s not only about engaging our students — we want to engage them every day —but it’s also about engaging our families because they’re our partners at home,” Witt explained. “How can we also engage them so they’re helping us to help their child become successful?”
She could have never imagined, by March 2020, a pandemic would turn the world inside out.
Nationwide, schools were emptied, and students were sent home, including right here in Rutherford County. Ultimately, students would never return to finish the 2019-2020 school year in their respective classrooms.
Instead, districts like RCS, provided online resources along with opportunities to checkout devices. And local internet providers, like Comcast and AT&T, provided free internet service in homes that otherwise did not have internet for students.
It was and remains a challenge for everyone.
At Buchanan — and other schools throughout the district — the relationships fostered from August to March paid off.
Alexandra Piper, a third-year special education instructor, received an email three weeks ago from a concerned mother. Her daughter, who was enrolled in Piper’s class at Buchanan, was in a funk, and the mother, who had tried several things from reading together to watching story time videos, was unsure of what else to try.
So she reached out to Piper.
Piper — described by Witt as an extremely hard worker — and the parent had already developed a months-long dialog and trust in one another.
Witt said she’s blessed and proud of those types of relationships between faculty and parents, and “it was a natural thing for our families to reach out to us.”
During the portion of the school year spent in the classroom together, Piper reserved the first 10 minutes of every Friday for dancing. It was an opportunity for everyone to have fun, relax and let go of all their bad feelings.
Piper, who thrives on face-to-face instruction and responds to the needs of her students, is a self-described goofball. That’s a good thing considering she has little to no rhythm when it comes to dancing and, yet, she thought her students might benefit from watching a weekly dance video posted through her Twitter feed — @MsAPiper1 — every Friday morning.
“Anything to make them happy because I definitely feel their pain,” Piper said. “They become like my own kids. I don’t have any kids, but my students are my kids.”
She added, “I don’t want to see them hurt. I don’t want to see them upset or anything like that. I know the whole entire process of distance learning is just so hard for them and so I want to try and give them some semblance of normalcy.”
That normalcy is seeing Piper dance.
And, in recent weeks, it has worked.
By posting the clips on Twitter, students and parents as well as her peers at Buchanan and throughout the district have been able to share a few moments of laughter, in what has been an otherwise trying time for most.
In upcoming weeks, Piper plans to incorporate family members in the weekly dance videos.
“People at work will tell you that I’m a big goofball and so I don’t mind these videos,” Piper said. “I think they’re funny. My family thinks they’re funny and it’s becoming a thing in our family.”
So much so, Piper and her younger sister Emma, 16, are already planning a video together “just to make a fool of ourselves,” said Alexandra. “Oh golly, she is bad.”
Witt concluded, “That’s very vulnerable to put yourself out there and in front of all. I mean, once it goes on Twitter, it’s out there for everyone to see and so I appreciate her for providing that opportunity for her students. I’m very proud of her being able to do that.”
PHOTOS PROVIDED