A 'weird' first day of on-campus class

MOSES LAKE — There was one word high schoolers used to describe the first day of classes back on campus.

Weird.

“It’s different,” said sophomore Myca Barkle. “It’s weird to see everyone back but also not everyone at the same time.”

Barkle was one of 750 students to find her way back to the Moses Lake High School campus on Monday — the first time a mass of students were on school grounds for class since Gov. Jay Inslee ordered schools closed statewide on March 17 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Classes started at all MLSD schools on Sept. 14, but high school students who opted for some kind of on-campus instruction had to wait over concerns that Grant County’s COVID-19 rate was too high.

And it means that even family members have to maintain social distance.

“Usually we don’t have to wear masks,” said freshman Azaray Alvarez as she stood next to Barkle, her cousin.

“I could just stand like this ... and now we have to stand like this,” Alvarez added as she stepped several feet away.

All MLHS students are following a “blended learning” model that has students on campus in two cohorts of roughly 750 each, the first cohort on campus on Monday and Tuesday, and the second on campus Thursday and Friday, with teachers and staff deep cleaning MLHS on Wednesday.

“It’s really exciting,” said sophomore Kaydence Colee. “I pretty much love this, but it’s really weird and different to have masks on throughout the whole day. We don’t really get a break from it.”

At home and learning online, students never had to wear masks. But back on campus, together, students are now wearing their masks for more than four hours at a stretch, from around 7:45 a.m. to just a little past noon.

It also means their desks are spread out in class, six to seven feet apart.

“It’s really weird,” said freshman Rylee Nollette.

“It’s a shortened day, and classes are an hour long,” said James Yonko, director of career and technical education at MLHS, in between helping kids find their buses. “They’ll do half of their classes today, and the other half on Tuesday.”

“And there are more online studies at home,” he said.

Freshman Dallin Degooyer said that so far, everything has mostly gone well, though he thinks it may get a little challenging with the return to campus.

“I wish we didn’t have to wear these masks, but I think we’ll get used to it,” he said. “Online was working pretty good, but it’s going to be a little harder as we’re in person and going back and forth.”

Yonko said the return to campus was the result of weeks of planning. But MLHS and district officials are going to keep tweaking things as needed in order to keep them running smoothly, or if there’s something their planning didn’t consider.

“We’re going to have to improvise and learn with each day, and we’ll make some slight changes to improve our process,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].