Editor’s note: VTDigger’s Underground Workshop offers Vermont’s high school and college students the opportunity to report and write for a statewide audience. We accept submissions on an ongoing basis, and this semester we’re also offering a few “invitational series,” encouraging students across the state to contribute a piece to a larger project. This post introduces “Our Pandemic Year: Profiles in Resilience,” an invitational series collecting stories from our school communities. Students are also welcome to contribute to our series about the BLM flag in our schools, and our history project, Our Pandemic Media: 1918. Teachers can incorporate these opportunities into their classes, or students can pursue the work independently. We are eager to support students and teachers: for more information, please email Ben Heintz, the Workshop’s editor, at ben@vtdigger.org.
Our Pandemic Year: Profiles in Resilience
An invitational series for Vermont’s students, running through June 2021.
Our last days of “normal school” were strange. By that second week of March 2020 the pandemic dominated every moment. Rumors and speculation swirled in the hallways. Teachers struggled to help their students understand what was happening, and administrators sent out waves of emails about the swiftly “evolving situation.”
Few were surprised that Sunday, March 15, when Gov. Phil Scott announced the “…cancellation of all school-related activities no later than Wednesday, March 18.” Remote learning would last until April 6, the order said, “but may very well be extended for a longer period.” That Monday and Tuesday, students cleaned out their lockers, checked in with teachers and said goodbye to friends. They went their separate ways, into a wide range of circumstances.
A year later, there remains a sense of suspended animation in our schools, doing the best we can with hybrid learning while we wait, without confidence in a clear timeline, for a return to “normal.” There is widespread exhaustion: The past year has taken a serious toll on our social, emotional and academic lives.
But Vermont’s school communities can also celebrate remarkable resilience. Students, teachers and staff have found ways to adapt, to come together, to learn and sometimes even to thrive in these challenging circumstances.
As spring approaches, and our optimism for the future grows, VTDigger’s Underground Workshop invites Vermont’s students to tell some of these stories of resilience, in the spirit of VTDigger’s “Virus in Vermont” project, trying to understand and process this extraordinary year through the specific experiences of individual Vermonters.
We want to explore the concept of resilience in the broadest terms, through a diverse collection of stories. The stories can be about anyone in your school community (students, faculty and staff, administrators, bus drivers, etc.) whose story shows remarkable adaptation, grit, creativity, generosity, etc. We are especially interested to hear stories about young people who took on new responsibilities, at home, as essential workers, as leaders in their school communities.
These people don’t need to be heroes; they just need to help us answer the question: “How did we get through this?”
The basic requirements for submissions:
We are seeking short feature stories, 500 words minimum, derived from interviews (not written in the first person) and accompanied by at least two high-quality photographs. The stories should be written in an engaging, concise journalistic style (no “I” or “you”), and must be carefully edited for grammar, usage and mechanics before submission. Interviews must be recorded, including the interview subject’s consent for publication in VTDigger.
Beyond these guidelines, we encourage students to be creative. You might profile a couple of people who worked together to accomplish something, or anchor your profile in a description of a specific moment, one of those bright spots of the past year, as a way to give the reader portrait of the person who made the moment possible. Show don’t tell!
Support is available for teachers or students who are interested to participate, including conferences to plan stories or classroom visits. Please email Ben Heintz, the Workshop’s editor, at ben@vtdigger.org.
