Sonya Whitfield did not have a guidebook for what was happening.
A 33-year employee of the Pulaski County Special School District, Whitfield was the principal at Baker Elementary School in Little Rock when the nation’s school system shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lifelong educator, Whitfield was used to consulting with others and using “best practices” whenever any kind of crisis popped up, but zero best practices were available for the total shutdown of student learning. No script existed for how to keep a school district going in the face of something that had never occurred in modern America.
Whitfield, along with thousands of her colleagues nationwide and millions of students and their parents, was cast adrift without an anchor. The world of education is grounded in schedules and calendars. Each class has a set number of minutes, each day has a set number of classes, and each school year has a set number of days. The basic American school year, which had changed little in over a century, was suddenly wiped out with little warning and even less reassurance about the future…