Bethany has been very lucky in terms of life during COVID-19. We’ve been able to be in person for school for at least half the school week and even four days a week sometimes! But a lot of people don’t know how much work the administrative team has been doing behind the scenes to make this happen. I talked with Tim Lehman, Hank Willems, and KP to find out what they’ve been doing this year. I asked them about what the process for coming up with a new schedule was, how many hours they work per day and how many days they work a week.
The administrative team worked a lot this past summer to come up with a schedule for us, with Hank even saying he only got around half of the summer he typically gets. Hank said that for the three or four weeks leading up to school, he was working about 60 hours a week. When coming up with a schedule, the administrative team took quite a few things into consideration and used a lot of their resources to get as much information as possible. They first met to talk about how the current schedule at the time wouldn’t be safe during COVID and began to look for ways to reduce the number of classes each day, while trying to still have around the same amount of class time as before, to reduce possible contact. They then searched the internet for already-made schedules that other schools have had success with but didn’t find much.
With this confirming that they were going to have to make a schedule from scratch, they began the process by doing an analysis of potential issues they could have. They then designed a solution for each of them, with the most noteworthy example of these being the staggered bells and dismissals. They then went on to figure out how to give us the best instruction and education possible for both when students were at home and when students were at school. Due to not being sure yet if the county would even allow us to be in school at all, they came up with as many different scenarios and schedules as they could, knowing that they’d have to be flexible with the schedule when school started. Tim told me that KP and Hank deserve most of the credit for developing the schedule as Tim was more of the overseer.
Bethany has stayed in communication with other Mennonite schools across the country and Christian schools in our area, as well as Goshen Community Schools, the National Association of Independent Schools, and the Mennonite Schools Council. Last spring, Bethany even had other schools calling in to ask how we were doing our e-learning because they heard how good it was.
I had gone into this project assuming that surely the current schedule we have is way different than the original schedule they made, but they informed me our current schedule is only a tiny bit different from the original. They initially had the lower school coming in on Wednesday to do their “specials,” such as gym and art, but decided after a couple of weeks that it just wasn’t working and made it so everyone is doing asynchronous learning on Wednesday.
Between the three of them, they work about an average of nine hours a week, as well as several hours on the weekend. Tim wakes up at around 5:45 in the morning and reads articles and books that are about COVID procedures, schools, and other things, which I really admire. Hank wakes up at about 5:30 so he can send out communications and get to the school to set up the testing stations. I can’t speak for the rest of the student body, but I personally had never really thought about how those stations have to be set up and put away every morning.
After talking to them and finding out some of the things that have been happening behind the scenes, I can definitely say I’m much more appreciative of our schedule and how much work the staff has done.