‘It really truly was like everything just stopped, time just stopped’

A year ago, students at all four high schools in Plainfield School District 202 were participating in the Hoops for Heart fundraiser.

Spring sports were gearing up. Ira Jones Middle School student were powering cars with carbon dioxide down a hallway track. And Ridge Elementary School students were learning new vocabulary words with a paper “snowball fight.”

That is how District 202′s four-part video series “Life in a Pandemic” begins.

Then comes the almost chilling announcement from Gov. J.B. Pritzker that all schools in Illinois would close on March 17.

“It really and truly was like everything just stopped, time just stopped,” Tom Hernandez, director of community relations at Plainfield Community Consolidated School District 202, said in the video.

District 202 posted “The pandemic strikes,” the first of a video series, on its website on March 17, the one-year anniversary of school closings. The second, “Transition to remote learning,” was posted March 24. The third, “A safe return to learn,” posts on Wednesday.

The last, “Back to school and what’s next,” will post April 7, the day students return to five half-days of school, Hernandez said.

Hernandez said the goal was not to show how District 202 navigated education during a pandemic but to show the “real impact” COVID-19 had – in a time capsule sort of way - on the district’s teachers, staff, parents and students.

“It’s an honest reflection of what this last year has meant,” Hernandez said. “I don’t want to be flippant, but when we say this is something our grandkids are going to look back on – our grandkids may still be dealing with this.”

Hernandez said what makes this series unique is that he and his two community relations coordinators, Linda Taylor and Alyssa Groh, all have journalism backgrounds. Ryan Boyce, community relations coordinator and manager of the district’s 31 websites, also contributed, Hernandez said.

“We went to great lengths to approach this as a journalist would approach it. This is not a PR piece,” Hernandez said. “Although, in the end, District 202 had done as well as could be expected.”

In the first video, Liberty Elementary School principal Michelle Imbordino said the school looked as if time had frozen.

“When you would go to teacher’s classrooms, you would see their calendars set up with March, and kids still had things on their desk,” Imbordino said.

One particular challenge for District 202 was that before the pandemic it had focused on professional development for teachers, not on distributing Chromebooks to all students.

That focus had to change rapidly in just a couple of weeks last spring. District 202 wound up spending $7 million of unbudgeted money on 17,000 laptops, which were slow to arrive because of the “broken supply chain,” Hernandez said.

And then those 17,000 laptops had to be distributed, he said.

In the meantime, the second video said that District 202 distributed paper packets to its students, Hernandez said. Or, if students had computers at home, teachers emailed lessons to them. Some students found them on the school’s website. No lessons were recorded in those early days.

In that second video, District 202 parent Jennifer McManaman recalled how difficult remote learning in April 2020 was for her family.

“Once we got into the learning, we felt like there was very little growth,” McManaman said. “It felt like things were rushed a little bit because we really had no choice. So our kids, they did, but it wasn’t a very happy environment.

That broken supply chain also applied to personal protective equipment, Hernandez said.

He recalled talking to the head of custodial crew at the time who’d said, “It’s not that I can’t buy 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer. The problem is that the company that makes the sanitizer can’t get the chemicals to make the sanitizer.”

“The supply chain had broken several links back,” Hernandez said. “That all had an impact.”

For low-income students, in-person learning was more than education and socialization. It was also the place where these students eat at least some of their meals. Social distance is impossible to achieve in a district this size, he said.

That’s why District 202 is only holding five half-days of school starting April 7.

“The thing that is keeping us from five full days is lunch,” Hernandez said.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, District 202 has given away more than 2 million meals.

“Every week, we’re doing tens of thousands of meals,” Hernandez said. “We gave a total of 26,768 on March 24 – 27,000 meals just last week.”

Watch “Life in a Pandemic” at psd202.org/page/life_in_a_pandemic.