INTERGENS CONNECT

Honor Floyd has always been an eager learner. Her mother Dennia noticed signs of kindergarten readiness when Honor was four, but her home school district had a firm policy on kindergarten age cut-offs. So when Lakeshore Intergenerational School assessed Honor’s skills and welcomed her into kindergarten early, the family was thrilled.

Sure, Lakeshore was a bit out of the way compared with their district school in Richmond Heights, and the weeklong fall break that October of Honor’s kindergarten year posed a childcare challenge, but Honor thrived in her new school.

“We love the closeness—it felt like a family, like a community,” Dennia said. “One of the things we loved about Lakeshore is they meet the students where they are.”

At the end of the school year, Dennia and her partner spoke with Honor about what to do for her first grade year, beginning Fall 2019. They decided to give their nearby district elementary school a try.

While Honor quickly made friends and was enjoying her new school overall, she progressed quickly through first-grade lessons and was feeling unchallenged. When Dennia approached Honor’s teacher to request enrichment opportunities, she was met with a tepid response. In February, Dennia reached out to Lakeshore to see if there was space to return, but ultimately decided it would be too disruptive for Honor to move back in the middle of the school year.

At the same time, Dennia was receiving email updates from Lakeshore. These updates became a stark point of contrast between the two schools when the coronavirus pandemic shut schools down in mid-March.

“We didn’t get Chromebooks or hotspots. Everything was on paper… We had no interactions with teacher besides receiving assignments and prerecorded videos. There was no actual interaction at all with her teacher or classmates,” Dennia said. “We were really frustrated, and on top of that, getting these emails from Lakeshore, ‘Oh, we have Chromebooks, and everybody gets a hotspot, and the students get to meet with their teachers every day!”

Seeing how the Intergenerational Schools responded to the school shutdown affirmed the Floyd family’s decision to go back to Lakeshore for the next school year.

Once the school year ended, Dennia reached back out to get Honor re-enrolled at Lakeshore.  “The attention, the care, the community that overall Lakeshore encompasses and provides to their students and parents, we found that to be unmatched. So we got her signed back up!”

Wwhile the end of Honor’s first-grade year was a challenge for the entire family, Dennia is optimistic about the future.

“This has been a learning experience for everyone, and we’ve really been able to unite as a family,” she said.

“It reunites the unity of community, between school and home, and parents and teachers and students, and really making that work. We’re all in this together,” Dennia said. “Everybody’s experiencing the same thing. We’re making it work, finding a way to push forward in a positive light.”

“We have found a really great place in the Intergenerational Schools. Lakeshore Intergenerational School has really been great to us. Even with us coming back, we felt very welcome. ‘We are so excited to have you back! We really missed Honor.’ It’s hugely important to really be in a place that makes you feel like… home.”

And now that the lines between school and home have blurred, Dennia is glad that Honor and the entire family feel so much at home at Lakeshore.

Out of Hand in the Best Way

Near West teacher Sarah Tribuzzo knows that sometimes an adult’s role in transformative learning is getting out of the way of a good idea.

So when her Applying Stage English-Language Arts students proposed wrapping up their fiction-writing unit with an awards ceremony, she stepped into the facilitator role and encouraged her class to take the lead on what would go down in Near West history as the first-ever Boscars—that is, of course, the Oscars for books.

After two months of lessons around character, dialogue, setting and other key components of fiction writing, along with intensive personalized instruction and coaching through revisions, Ms. Tribuzzo’s 16      students each had a story they were proud to submit for judging for the Boscars.

While Education Director Molly Toussant organized a panel of guest judges, Ms. Tribuzzo’s class divided themselves into committees to choreograph everything from musical accompaniment, stage management and photography to organizing a decadent spread and “Meet the Author” after party.

Student emcees took turns announcing the winners of each category – categories that included, “Shine a Light” for stories featuring social justice issues, “Best Disaster Story,” “Best Drama,” “All the Feels,” and “Most Un-Put-Downable.”

“I was almost reluctant to let this happen because I didn’t want to discourage the kids who wouldn’t win a Boscar—they had all worked so hard and all their stories were amazing,” Ms. Tribuzzo said. “But they were adamant, and at the end, because everyone came together to make the event happen, they all seemed really proud and gratified of the entire project. It was about so much more than just the awards.”

“The most remarkable thing was how invested they got in it,” Ms. Tribuzzo continued. “When you’ve worked hard on something, you know, we all know that feeling. They got to experience writing their story and being proud of it, but also having a lot of freedom and choice in this idea that got out of hand in the best way.”

As The Intergenerational School’s art teacher, Mrs. Lowery uses art instruction to connect students to history, to their community and to their own creativity. When schools abruptly shut down in March, Mrs. Lowery used art—and the art of conversation—to maintain and strengthen the connections that became more important than ever for our extended school family.

In addition to adapting art class to virtual class, using more readily available at-home supplies and recorded lessons to supplement live virtual class, Mrs. Lowery took on a new role.

“The specials teachers and our other support staff—LLI teachers and paraprofessionals—took on the role of communicating with families,” Mrs. Lowery explained. Each one adopted a homeroom class of TIS-East families and committed to checking in with them by phone every week to see how they were faring, provide updates and answer any questions they had.

“We wanted to show them we value their education, make sure we’re still providing education where they can be successful, even if it’s virtually,” Mrs. Lowery explained.

“I think the things that our administration did prior to the pandemic to set up these communication lines with families really helped us in a time of emergency, so that it wasn’t bizarre for a parent to get a phone call, text, email because of the work we had done previously.”

As the 2019-2020 school year drew to a close, Mrs. Lowery knew she wanted to maintain the connections she and her fellow specials teachers had worked so hard to hone throughout the spring, as well as to find a way to help families cope as the pandemic continued.

So Mrs. Lowery and Miss Connie, TIS-East’s yoga instructor, spearheaded Wellness Wednesdays—themed, recorded video art and yoga classes throughout the summer that students and families could participate in each week. They posted these videos to Facebook and invited families to share their creations.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Mrs. Lowery said. “Anxiety is high. One of the things that’s important for all of us is to maintain our wellness—mentally, physically and emotionally. Yoga and art seemed to really help.”

On their own or alongside their siblings, parents and grandparents, TIS-East students had the opportunity to work through their feelings, express themselves and try new things through Wellness Wednesdays.

Through these concerted efforts at building and maintaining connections, Mrs. Lowery has found a few silver linings during this difficult time. She noticed that some of her most reserved students found their voices and thrived in recorded art presentations; she feels closer than ever to the families that she has been calling each week; and she knows she has the confidence and ability to adapt to even the most unexpected challenges—and so do her students.

"If I had to pinpoint one favorite moment from this, it's seeing students get to do art with their parents," Mrs. Lowery said. "When we go back to school in person and when we’re able to open up more, I would love to be able to have parents and families come in and make art with us, because it has been awesome to be able to see students making art with older and younger siblings, with their parents and grandparents."