At its virtual annual meeting Wednesday, Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City honored all of our community’s Jewish educators for the ways they adapted to meet students’ needs. In a video shown during the meeting, education professionals from across our community shared their experiences and thoughts on what they expect, and hope, from the year ahead. The educators’ responses are excerpted below.
When the pandemic started, the CDC was considered essential and remained opened. It went to critical care, with a much lower capacity of teachers and students. Teachers began creating online content for the CDC YouTube channel and Zoom meetings to keep in contact with families.
“That was a lot to ask,” Whelan said. “We had in-person teachers and at-home teachers and they stepped up to the plate every single time I asked something new of them.”
Whelan said the pandemic highlighted things that need to change and ways that early childhood programs like the CDC need to continue to update and stay up with best practices in early childhood education.
“It’s an exciting time to think about how we can challenge our teachers, how we can challenge our families and how we can keep everyone involved in this really robust community that we’ve developed at the CDC,” she said.
“This has been a big challenge of every resource in the Jewish community, in our individual organizations, this has been a stressor on every single piece of that,” she said, “and I hope that we remain strong … and that we can remain a robust community.”
What really makes Margolies proud of HBHA is the adaptability of the entire school community, from administrators to teachers, to the support staff, and students and parents.
“This has been a situation where there was no roadmap of what to do. We’ve had to constantly adapt on the fly and that means teachers have put in long hours, both individually and collaboratively, to learn new tools,” he said. “Some of these are teachers who have been teaching for 25 or 30 years who have well-established practices, things they’ve been doing for decades, and they’ve had to find new ways to teach and reach students in a completely new way.”
Even Margolies, as a younger teacher, had to find new ways of teaching that he had never thought of before. Not to mention the students had to find new ways to learn.
“Nobody wants to learn this way, but they’ve been enthusiastic and engaged and understanding that teachers are trying new things that sometimes don’t work,” he said.
While this has been a time of change for education, Margolies said there’s one thing that has stayed the same.