Springer celebrates #CHSReset as district opens for in person school year
Coppell High School Principal Laura Springer greets Coppell junior Akshaya Dinakaran on Wednesday. Coppell Independent School District began the 2021-22 school year on Monday.
August 18, 2021
The 2021-22 school year at Coppell High School opened fully in person for the first time since March 2020. CHS Principal Laura Springer expands on returning to campus, curriculum plans and successes in the past two years.
How do you feel about coming back to school?
First of all, we’re just so thrilled to even think about being able to have [students] back in the building and we missed [students]. There’s some things we have to make sure we’re aware of but there’s also some excitement in the year. We think it’s time to get [students] back in the school to work on socialization and academic skills. I worry about [students] mental health. COVID has really just thrown us a curveball, and we had never experienced anything like that before, as educators. So it taught us a lot of things. Getting ready for this year, we really are focusing on the fact that we have a lot of students that haven’t been working as hard as they possibly could because COVID takes up a lot of your mind and energy in fear. So we want to ease back in. The first four days, we’re really going to talk about the Fish and the GRIT. Once we get to that next Monday after, we’ll begin our curriculum.
What is the administration doing to ensure a smooth back-to-school transition?
Our big thing is just [reintroducing students] back into the world of school. Once we get back here, we’ve got to do elections for class officers, we haven’t voted. We usually do that before we leave the year to have our class officers when we walk in the door, but we don’t. So we’re going to have to vote, and about a week and a half in we’ll pick our class officers, and really get down talking about what are some things we can do to pull our classes together to integrate them into our school. Our seniors, we’re gonna hit the ground running. We have our first homecoming in October, so everything’s got to be quick for us to get ready for homecoming and homecoming dance. [It’s] just making sure that whatever we put in place is something that will pull [students] back into school routine [and] into clubs and organizations.
What are your academic goals for the school year?
We can’t just throw away what just happened. I think we grew a lot virtually, to be quite honest, [we] found some different ways of doing things. Our biggest goal is really three levels. [The first is] to really engage the students in relevant material that is interesting and gives them a voice in classrooms. The second level would be about representation. How are we teaching, are we teaching to the level that we know our students have been off for 18 months? You’ve done some stuff asynchronously and you’ve done a little bit of Zoom and in person, but we want to make sure that the rigor does not get lost in this. So we’ll look at that and then we will plan our lessons accordingly and pull you back into the system and the work ethic, but absolutely get back to that rigor.
And the third piece of it is looking at assessments and understanding that we’ve got to give you ways to show us you have knowledge of subjects. COVID has given us ideas to do that differently. [We’ll] look at those and see what worked and what did not work. Integrity is a big issue for us here. [We’re] trying to get everybody to realize that you only cheat yourself when you cheat because you’re not learning material that you’re going to need to carry you through. So, we’ve had a lot of interesting ideas of what we want to do. We just have to get you guys back, see where you’re at and see how we can put those in place.
What are some successes you’ve had in planning for the school year?
It really has spoken big time to the love and loyalty of the teaching staff that we have. They love [students] so much. It was harder for them for you to be away from them. It’s harder to try to teach through a screen than when they need to have you in their room. I just want to give a huge shout-out to my teaching staff. They have done an amazing job. They did not stop because COVID came along, they reinvented themselves, they reinvented their lessons, they decided to find a way to reach you guys and they reached.
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