How one Bluffton teacher found a way to visit students during coronavirus closure
Bluffton resident Claudia Peacock was ready for the visit.
She’d been getting texts all day:
“I’m coming by today, what time is good?”
“My husband is driving the van!”
“We’re leaving!”
“On our way!”
“Three miles out!”
When the text: “We’re out here waiting!,” arrived, she took her daughter outside.
Emma Bette knew her second grade class at Bluffton’s Cross Schools had been assigned to draw on their driveways with chalk that day.
But she didn’t know that once she was out there, her teacher, Bridgette Halker, would pull up holding a big white poster that said “I miss you!” while her husband honked the horn.
And she didn’t know that Halker had planned similar visits for all 16 of her students - visits she finished Friday morning.
“Their faces just light up,” Halker said. “It just brings some sense of normalcy to their day… I mean, by this time of the year, we are family.”
Halker said she got the idea from a local family wondering what they’d do about their twins’ upcoming birthday as coronavirus cases in South Carolina rose. They ended up asking family and friends to stand in their yards with birthday messages as the twins rode by, in lieu of a party.
Inspired by the story and her Christian faith, Halker texted all the parents in her class to arrange times she could stop by.
“She made sure they felt loved in this,” Peacock said. “And my child almost cried, she was so happy.”
As teachers adjust to the reality that students won’t return to their classrooms until at least the end of April, many are taking steps to give the kids visual reminders of how much they care.
At Bluffton Elementary School, principal Christine Brown asked town residents to leave bears in their windows and yards Thursday so students could go on socially-distanced scavenger hunts.
By the time students left home to hunt down bears, Bluffton police officers, firefighters and mayor Lisa Sulka had decided to pitch in.
“The police department put them in their cars,” Brown said in a Beaufort County School District video. “We had a Care Bear in one of the fire trucks. It was just that wonderful feeling of everybody coming around to support each other during this time.”
Halker said Friday she hopes other teachers will consider her idea as a way to keep up with students during nationwide school closures.
And while she’s finished her visits to students, the positive messages they wrote remained.
“Our God is bigger than the coronavirus”
“You are not alone”
“Stronger together, but six feet apart”
“(We’re) just helping them learn that life doesn’t always go as you have planned,” Halker said. “And that’s a huge piece that these children can really learn from what we’re doing as adults.”