Teachers: Our 2021 citizen(s) of the year

Perhaps we can look at The Pandemic as some hideous, great equalizer: it spares no person, no profession, no walk of life. COVID demands that everyone, regardless of age or status, adapt to new or modified practices that are at best unpleasant and annoying, at worst, life-changing.

Our health care professionals, caregivers, and first responders to whom we owe so much and, yes, our representatives at all levels of government (and their staff) whose lives have been upended for the past two years deserve our appreciation. So, too, do the restaurateurs and merchants and their hard-working employees who work each day to deliver a good dose of ‘the old normal’ as we push into this present and future we’ve grown tired of calling ‘the new normal.’

But when we look at this Pantheon of heroic behavior and community service, this year, The Freeman’s Journal/Hometown Oneonta salutes the teachers of Otsego County for standing so tall among them and names them all, collectively, as our Citizen of the Year.

These dedicated professionals — and with them, school administrators, staff, coaches, cafeteria workers, maintenance teams, school bus drivers, volunteers, parents, and school boards — have pivoted with every dramatic change to the terms and conditions under which they must work. They’ve become experts in arranging Zoom classrooms, virtual lessons, and, to the chagrin of just about everyone involved, remote learning on days that we used to call “snow days.” They’ve endured countless and highly public debates over whether their students should be remote or in person and have mastered the navigation of the on-days, off-days schedules that seem to come and go as COVID rates rise and fall.

From the start, every public official pontificated on the need to get kids back in the classroom — it’s just that no one really knew how it could happen.

COVID’s unrelenting hold may have disrupted the systems by which schools deliver education, but it
can’t disrupt the devotion our teachers bring to their work every day.

A few weeks ago, we reported on Cooperstown Central School’s production of its student musical, “The Wind in the Willows.” CCS music teacher and show director Tim Iversen told us he staged a performance of “Little Shop of Horrors” at the end of the 2020-21 school year in June with fewer than six weeks of rehearsal, making Cooperstown one of the only schools in the northeast to render a live production on a school stage during COVID lockdowns.

“COVID had robbed these kids of so much that I felt it our responsibility to them, to the school, and to the community to try to bring a little joy into the last weeks of the school year,” he said then.
That’s citizenship.

Mr. Iversen’s comment was in no way self-congratulatory, it was a matter-of-fact, this-is-why-I’m-here statement that reflects and, unintentionally but accurately, speaks for teachers in every classroom across Otsego County. Art, sports, math, science, history, English, technology, foreign languages, vocational studies — each one of these disciplines and its subsets loom large in students’ lives, every day.

Our teachers know this, they honor it, and they jump through hoops every day to keep COVID in the background so the students can continue to learn, grow, and thrive. Sometimes they’re technological hoops. Sometimes bureaucratic. But teachers — and, again, their administrative and support-staff colleagues — leanred how to keep those hoops invisible to the students.

Well done to each of you individually and all of you collectively, with the appreciation of The Freeman’s Journal/Hometown Oneonta and AllOtsego.com.