Recess? What recess? We’re talking the 3Rs, here.
“It does seem to be a silver lining that’s coming out of the pandemic,” Monongalia County Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said. “And if it works, it works.”
Campbell was discussing the nationwide rise of outdoor classrooms over the past year in response to COVID-19.
Note the difference: The outdoor classroom opposed to holding class outdoors, that is.
The latter used to be the province of enterprising English teachers looking for, say, sunshine-lyricism during a writing assignment.
The former was born purely of the pandemic.
The idea, especially in the contagion’s early days, was to get students and teachers away from the confines of four walls – in a structure where maybe the ventilation system hadn’t earned a passing mark in decades.
In Mon County, a permanent outdoor classroom was unveiled last spring at South Middle School.
Other such learning spaces are planned in coming months at Morgantown High, University High and the county Technical Education Center.
Mon’s school district has been known to coexist with the outdoors over the years, from tree-planting at Brookhaven Elementary to the interlocking network of vegetable gardens at North Elementary.
Eastwood Elementary is the county’s only exclusive “green” school, also.
Nearly two years since COVID-19 emerged on these shores, open-air classrooms are catching on across the U.S., even in the colder climes such as Vermont and New Hampshire.
Students warm to such learning environments, as recent COVID-driven research has shown.
Such classrooms aren’t unique to the 21st century contagion, either.
In 1908, when tuberculosis was the scourge, two physicians in Rhode Island fronted such classrooms at a school in Providence. It worked. Not one child got sick.
Educators and urban planners noticed.
Two years later, more than 60 similar schools and classrooms launched across the U.S. and around the world. The wave rolled back after World II and the rise of antibiotics that came out of the effort to keep soldiers safe.
Today, there are now groups such as the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative encouraging school systems to partner with landscape architects and educational consultants to craft new learning environments.
Mon’s superintendent, meanwhile, said a good idea is a good idea, no matter the generation.
He doesn’t mind repeating the lesson plan.
“Any opportunity to keep our kids safe and engaged.”
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