COVID 5 YEARS ON

“No easy answers.”

That is what School Committee members Robert LaFazia and Susan Mansolillo say they remember most about trying to figure out how to best educate and care for Johnston’s public school students during the height of the Covid pandemic.

It’s been almost exactly five years since then-Governor Gina Raimondo issued an executive order that essentially shut down the state in an attempt to manage a rapidly spreading virus that no one had ever heard of before.

That decision, and the dozens of necessary decisions in the months that followed, were a challenge to everyone.  In an interview earlier this year, LaFazia and Mansolillo, were asked what they remembered about what it took to keep the school district operating when everyone was in unchartered territory.

“There was no playbook,” LaFazia recalled.  “Things seemed to change every day.  We (the School Committee) met almost constantly.”

There were huge decisions to be made, Mansolillo said, such as how to offer remote learning to the district’s approximately 3,000 students.  And, she said there were smaller, but equally difficult decisions such as how to find a hand sanitizer that wasn’t flammable and would be compliant with school fire codes.

“Nothing was easy,” she said, recalling that state health mandates were changing constantly, safety supplies were in chronically short supply, and the district was being asked to come up with answers to questions it never faced before.

After the governor ordered the cessation of in-person learning at the end of March 2020, Johnston, like all other school districts, had to make sure students had computers so they could connect with their teachers for “remote” learning.

All sports and social activities were cancelled. “It was the students who really lost out,” LaFazia said.  “They lost out academically and socially…. I don’t know if they ever really got a chance to catch up.”

In the fall of 2020, schools were allowed to reopen under heavy safety restrictions – restrictions that often changed and had to be figured out how to be implemented by local school boards.

There were mask mandates, requirements of how far apart from each other students had to remain, and a need to monitor it all for compliance. Mansolillo said that, like other districts, Johnston researched all alternatives.

 The district looked for dividers to place between students’ desks. It had to make sure there were enough proctors to monitor lavatories to make sure that students were not close to each other when using the facilities. It scheduled staggered sessions to reduce the number of students in a building.

And through the early months, Mansolillo said, the schools had to carry on without any of the social activities -- such as proms, plays and homecoming parades -- that really complete public education.

“It’s the students who went through the worst of it,” she said.

Both she and LaFazia credit the students and parents in Johnston for doing whatever they could to help school officials, even though emotions were high and there were so many decisions to be made that the school committee often felt like it was caught in the middle.

They stressed, however, that the school district’s pride was never squelched, and they knew that somehow things would eventually be okay in June 2020, when the district managed to pull off an “in person” high school graduation ceremony, covid restrictions and all.

Before the diplomas were handed out, seniors, retreated to the safety of cars to create a motorcade through town -- traveling down Atwood Avenue from FM Global corporate park to the high school.  Parents, friends, family and townspeople lined the road to cheer on the graduates, taking care they were standing a safe distance apart.

Jumbo television screens displayed recorded messages from the commencement speakers, and, when it waw me to get their diplomas, the students got out of their cars one by one to step on stage alone.

“I think we were one of the few schools anywhere that had a graduation ceremony that year,” LaFazia said.  “We decided we didn’t care what it cost; we were going to do it for our students.” 

It was a huge success, he and Mansolillo recalled, and even as things returned closer to normal in ensuing years, some students still wanted to another motorcade through Johnston. 

“I think everyone in Johnston was out cheering for them,” Mansolillo said.  “We were cheering for our students, and we were cheering for our town.”