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and Google Classroom. As a rural community, many of our families had unreliable internet, so we organized weekly material distribution/pick-up with our bus drivers. Elementary teachers held phone conferences weekly with the parents of struggling students. Results of a spring survey indicated overall approval of our approach to remote learning, high satisfaction with the level of communication parents received and a sense that there was minimal impact on learning. I breathed a sigh of relief and put together a transition team for return-to-learning in the fall. The “bright side” of navigating the pandemic as a first- year superintendent was the fact that every one of my colleagues, from a nearby peer in his third year to an old friend in the suburbs in his 15th, was in uncharted territory. Being so new to the position, I felt fortunate that such an impactful decision had been made for me. Governor Pritzker made his proclamation, the doors were shut, and decision making was relegated to the hows, whens and whys of remote learning. For many of my colleagues, every decision was right and every decision was wrong; it was like a never-ending snow day. Getting ready for the 2020-21 school year, on the other hand, provided me with a number of significant challenges. It had become clear that school reopening was going to be a local decision, and I had already begun hearing of rifts between superintendents (some with longstanding roots in their communities) and Boards who were not on the same page regarding reopening. Personally, I had two distinct obstacles, the first being my status as a newcomer to the community. The second was geopolitical. I live in the Chicago suburbs and drive over an hour each day out to my very small district in a rural area between Rockford and DeKalb. Both the impact of and attitude toward COVID-19, masks and mitigation efforts, social distancing and sanitizing, are markedly different in these two geographic regions. Without a strong finger on the pulse of my community, I needed to rely on staff members, Board members and my administrative assistant to gauge the sentiments and attitudes regarding the start of the 2020- 21 school year. Where I lived, virtually no school districts were returning to in-person instruction. However, with very small class sizes, ample room to socially distance in the classroom and a communal imperative to return in person,

we formulated our approach. In addition to a mask mandate and floor spacing, we shortened the school day, eliminated sports and extracurricular activities and built capacity for a hybrid system in which a handful of students in each grade level would attend via Google Meet each day. We’ve been lucky. Other than two staff members who contracted the virus on the edges of Thanksgiving and Winter Breaks, and therefore were not in contact with students or other staff members, we’ve made it to January relatively unscathed. No classroom outbreaks and no adaptive pauses (knock on wood). Many of our students who began the year in remote learning have returned in person, though a few have done the opposite. I have continued to learn on the job and celebrated demonstrably when my first budget and first levy were approved. I’m learning the nuances of my Board’s decision-making processes and idiosyncrasies of my staff, as well as the philosophical underpinnings of my community. I make mistakes daily, always striving to learn from them and make adjustments. I don’t shy away from asking questions or saying, “I don’t know.” Throughout this last year I’ve been fortunate to find myself part of several leadership cohorts that have challenged me, buoyed me and sustained me as I’ve navigated the first year of my superintendency amidst the once-in-a- century challenges of a global pandemic. I’m grateful for the colleagues and mentors who’ve shared their wisdom, experience and struggles, and treated me as an equal despite my inexperience and the minute size of my district. I look forward to the possibility of a (relatively) normal start to the 2021-22 school year, but in the meantime, I’ll wear my mask, sanitize everything and prepare my left arm for a couple of doses of vaccine.

Dr. Michael Shapiro is the superintendent of Eswood CCSD #269 in Lindenwood, IL. He is nearing the end of one full year as superintendent and has been an administrator in urban, suburban and rural settings,

working in public, private and charter schools. 2020–21 marks his 25th year in education.

15 LM February 2021