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  2021-03-18

  With Hope

  Today is Thursday, March 18, 2021. Saturday, March 13, was the first anniversary of the Friday the 13th that essentially broke the world, and that was our last day of normal. Or at least that’s how we all remember it now. On Monday, March 15, 2021, the students at my high school returned in “full swing” for the fourth quarter of the school year. I mean by full swing that we have no A and B days, and we are not all virtual. We still have an asynchronous day on Wednesday, but we all know that will soon go away. Many kids are staying virtual, and I don’t know how long that will be an option. So, we have had three days of students back on campus, and I think I would be much more concerned if I myself were not vaccinated, but I am fully vaccinated, and my husband completed his two-week waiting period a couple of days ago, so my house is “safe.” (Though I don’t totally feel that way yet) I don’t work on Wednesday right now, so we celebrated being fully vaccinated by going to an outdoor brunch, which was totally socially distanced, and I appreciated it a lot. I digress, though… school feels like school again. Sure, we limit the number of students who come into the library at lunch, but they are here, the halls bustle, and kids' noise in the hallway trails through our open library doors between periods again. Unfortunately, we are jumping back into things right in time for state testing, so we got this week of “bliss” before things become chaos of finding computers to test, getting students to make sure their computers are updated, and the general panic of finding space and making schedules that comes with any year of state testing. I want things to continue to trend in a direction where I don’t have to rescind all this hope a couple of months from now.