If Sedona Village Learning Center owner Joanna McPherson and director Shara Coughlin could have looked into a crystal ball a year ago, they might not have chosen March 16, 2020, to be the first day of the new preschool.
“That was the day … oh my gosh, that was devastating,” Coughlin said of Gov. Doug Ducey’s announcement at the time to close all schools in the state due to coronavirus concerns. “I mean, I literally — I think I walked into this room and I stood here for a minute and I almost cried. Like the entire room was set up, the caddies were out, everything was in its place, and the only thing that wasn’t here were the kids.”
Coughlin and McPherson had met the preschoolers who would be attending just days earlier at an open house for the center, which is located at the Big Park Community School campus.
“So, we weren’t sure what we were going to do,” Coughlin said. “We kind of scrambled a little bit and then Joanna and I kind of started talking and I was like, ‘You know, why can’t we just Zoom?’ And she was like, ‘Can you Zoom with preschoolers?’ And so, we tried it. We innovated and we did an online Zoom class for preschool.”
The preschoolers got online with help from their parents, for half-an-hour in the mornings, three days a week. The parents also picked up activity bags from the center on Mondays with all the supplies needed to do hands-on work throughout the week.
“So Monday we would read a themed book, we would do calendar, we would do all the discussion, we would go over the vocabulary, talk about what our lesson was,” Coughlin said. “Wednesday they’d meet back with me, they’d do an experiment; we’d do science, we’d do space, insects, frogs, Earth Day, Mother’s Day — we covered the gamut.”
On Friday, aka “Show and Share Day with Shara,” the kids chose one of the activities that they had worked on throughout the week to share and explain to the class.
There were only a few kids when the Zoom sessions started in March, but two months later when they reopened in-person, the group had grown to 15 and the group was split into two, with COVID-19 measures like frequent hand washing, temperature checks and social distancing in place. The school also installed two HEPA-grade air filtration systems.
“For a brief moment we contemplated closing again when COVID spiked again,” Coughlin recalled. “Joanna and I really had to ask ourselves the big questions, which is: Our mission statement is that we best meet the needs of the community. What are the needs? What does that mean? Is it for the families in here whose parents are essential workers and need somewhere safe for their child to be?”
“Is it shutting down and making sure that we’re not spreaders?” she asked. “Where is that line?”
“It was a really tricky place for both of us. So we kind of went round and round and round about it and we finally came to the place where we actually went to our families and said, ‘What do you want?
“They all said, ‘We feel like our child is safer here than anywhere else we could send them.”
Part of that feeling of security comes from the stringent guidelines that Coughlin and McPherson enforce for students’ families outside of school.
“I think the perception is, because we’re mask-free in here, that we either don’t care, or we’re not taking it seriously … but that’s because we’re strict outside of school,” Coughlin said. “We have created sort of a pod environment …. We’ve made [our families] sign a restrictive covenant with us, that basically says that everyone in this classroom and their households function as a single household … which means that if you are out in public, our protocol says you must wear a mask.
“You cannot have playdates with other kids. You cannot go to the park and play at a strange park. We can provide access to this park for our kids, and our kids only, to do their own play, but basically our classroom functions as a family, knowing that we are all as safe as the weakest link. We are all as safe as that person who doesn’t wear a mask.”
The tight-knit family community has worked so far, with the number of students still at 15 – enough that recent Mingus Union High School graduate resident Briana Fletes was hired as an aide. The maximum number of students that Sedona Village Community Center can accommodate is 21, in which case another aide or teacher would be hired.
The kids and their families have even had some semblance of normalcy with a Halloween party — only for the SVLC community— and were able to participate in the Sedona Village Partnership’s Halloween pet parade, which was a fundraiser for the school.
SVLC is taking advantage of the last rays of sunshine before the coldfront.
“We spend lots of time outside — in the shade — doing things like learning about animals and plants for our unit on farming,” McPherson said. “We learned about chickens, cows and sheep and played with our model cow — even learning how to milk it.”
SVLC will hold a virtual open house via Zoom on Thursday, Nov. 19. Register at sedonavillage.org.
