ESTANCIA, NM — A chorus of quiet voices from a third-grade classroom on a recent morning signaled how far Estancia Elementary School has come in its return to normalcy following the latest outbreak of the coronavirus.
Students in the small, remote village of Estancia, New Mexico, enthusiastically engaged in vocabulary learning by saying words with “powerful r” as well as homophones and homonyms and spelling them on the board.
But there was also a sign of how far the area, about an hour from Albuquerque, still had to go. The teacher, who moved around the classroom and encouraged students to use words in a sentence, was wearing camouflage. “My deputy wears gear,” one of the students replied.
“Yes,” Lieutenant Colonel Susanna Corona replied, beaming. “The Superintendent gives me permission to wear the uniform. I wear a pair of boots.”
Over the past month, dozens of soldiers, airmen and women of the New Mexico National Guard have been deployed in classrooms across the state to help deal with pandemic-related staffing shortages. Gov. Michelle Loujan Grisham has also enlisted civilian government employees, including herself, to volunteer as substitute teachers.
New Mexico was the only state to deploy National Guard troops in the classrooms. But since autumn, when districts across the country started recruiting any qualified adult to temporarily occupy the classrooms, several other states turned to uniformed staff. National Guard members in Massachusetts drove school busesand last month, cops in a city served as reserve in Oklahoma.
Scenes of uniformed officers in classrooms provoked a controversy. Some teachers see this as a disrespect for their profession and a way to avoid solving long-standing problems such as low teacher salaries. Other critics concerned that the deployment of more uniformed officers in schools can cause anxiety to students who have historically had hostile experiences with law enforcement.
But the presence of the New Mexico State Militia, whose members are trained to help with floods, freezes and fires, and to carry out combat missions overseas, has largely been seen by schools as a difficult but important step towards recovery. The teachers expressed gratitude for the “extra bodies,” as one of them put it. The students didn’t really care, but they knew that, as Scarlett Tourville, a third-grader in Colonel Crown’s class, said, “it’s not normal.”
The superintendents were given the choice of whether the guardsmen and women should wear regular dress or duty uniforms; the majority joined Cindy L. Sims, superintendent of the Estancia Public School District, in choosing the latter. “I wanted the kids to know she was here, to know why she was here,” Dr. Sims said. “I wanted them to see strength and commonality.”
For Dr. Sims, the presence of Colonel Corona has breathed new life into a campus ravaged by death. In December alone, Dr. Sims attended seven funerals for people who died from Covid-19. Among them: the employee’s husband, who became infected at school and brought her home, and the father, who left behind a first grader, a seventh grader, and a twelfth grader. The week before Christmas, the district held a double funeral in the high school gymnasium for the father and grandmother of two students.
“Trying to go to school at a time when everyone was heartbroken was very difficult,” said Dr. Sims. “Our mission is to maintain hope, and the National Guard helps us with this.”
Colonel Corona, an intelligence officer in the New Mexico Guards, has been posted to a number of states and countries in his 10 years of active duty in the Air Force. She never imagined that one of her missions would require a lesson plan, wet sleep, and dry erase markers.
But she had no idea that last year her own fourth grader tried to learn from his teacher through the screen.
“You must always be ready when there is a need,” she said, “when there is a call to duty.”
Keep the doors open
The shortage of staff is the latest hurdle for school districts battling the pandemic, which is now in its third year.
Coronavirus related diseases, quarantine and Work-related stress has hit many counties hard. But the country’s education leaders say the pandemic is only exacerbating trends that have been building for at least a decade.
National Education Association, the nation’s largest union of teachers, posted a survey this month It showed that 55 percent of educators were thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned, compared to 37 percent in August. Three-quarters of members said that due to massive absences, they had to replace colleagues or take on other responsibilities, and 80 percent reported that unfilled vacancies led to increased job responsibilities.
“Crisis is the word we should be using now,” said Becky Pringle, the association’s president, describing the recruitment of guards as “a temporary measure.”
“We know that simply placing an adult in front of children will not lead to the learning they deserve,” she added.
Belen High School, located less than an hour south of Albuquerque, is acutely understaffed.
Last spring, the high school reopened for in-person instruction. But by the fall, about half a dozen teachers were missing. One day, 10 teachers dropped out and the classroom was crammed with six more classes. Eliseo Aguirre, director, said he believes the death of a teacher from Covid had a chilling effect on the statements of teachers and deputies.
The arrival last month of Pilot First Class Jennifer Marquez was “a blessing,” according to Mr. Aguirre. On a recent Wednesday, she covered a Spanish class, her third class in two weeks.
“We will use her every day until she receives an order to return,” Mr. Aguirre said, “which I hope will not happen before the end of the year.”
Updated February 19, 2022 7:09 pm ET
Veronica Peria, Belén’s freshman, was also happy to see her. She said her grades deteriorated last semester with her teachers absent and random staff members coming and going from her classes, resulting in inconsistent teaching. “It’s better than watching a video or something,” she said of Ms. Marquez replacing me. “It’s good that there is someone I can go to and ask for help.”
Roysenne Lafayette, adviser to Belen, said the reality of New Mexico, with one of the highest rates of child poverty in the nation and the lowest average teacher wages, has collided during the pandemic in a way she has not seen in her 29 years in the public education system. State legislators have just passed a law that increase the basic salary of teachers by by an average of 20 percent starting this summer.
“The picture that comes to mind,” she said, “is walking into a grocery store and seeing empty shelves.”
“Semper Gumby”
When the governor called, the commander-in-chief of the New Mexico National Guard, Brig. General Jamison Herrera knew he would have no problem recruiting volunteers for Operation Support Teachers and Families (STAF).
Many Guardsmen and Guards have already seen how the pandemic is affecting students by delivering food to those at risk of going hungry when schools are closed.
The guard estimates that 50 of its members will volunteer; the state education department has issued 96 licenses this week.
Volunteers are on state active duty, paid from the state budget, similar to when they help with evacuations and search and rescue missions.. Even those with the highest security clearance had to pass a background check and meet the same state licensing requirements as any other replacement candidate.
While some members have degrees or certificates that could be used in the classroom — a welder is teaching a workshop in one area, for example — General Herrera, a former teacher, impressed his team that they were there for the same purpose.
“We are here to support the goals of teacher education because we certainly know that we cannot replace their place,” he said.
First of all, he told them, stay Semper Gumby.
To demonstrate how unofficial military motto meaning “Always flexible” could be used in the classroom, The guard brought in Gwen Perea Warniment, assistant secretary for teaching, learning, and assessment for the New Mexico Department of Public Education, for a quick tutorial.
Coronavirus pandemic: what you need to know
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“I wanted to emphasize that the class will not be like a guard; it will be like a beehive – organized chaos,” she said.
She taught the basics of how to read the lesson plan and what to do without it; classroom management strategies such as “1,2,3 look at me” and how to approach a problem student with curiosity rather than aggression.
Some of these lessons were recently fully demonstrated at Parkview Elementary School in Socorro, New Mexico, about an hour south of Albuquerque in the Rio Grande Valley.
The Guards were specifically looking for volunteers to visit schools like this, in hard-to-reach places, with hard-to-reach students. The school was shocked when Senior Sgt. Rayna Myers-Garcia arrived at the service.
“When I saw the governor say this on TV, I thought we couldn’t get it because schools in big cities get everything,” said Laurie Ocampo, a school principal. “And here she is, in a raincoat – or, should I say, in camouflage.”
Sgt. Myers-Garcia, a 12-year-old member of the Guard, spent her first week with curious kindergartners, repeating the names of food and farm animals, and supervising change with first graders who called her “Miss.” Soldier” and asked her to sit with their dolls.
Her second week brought her into a class of rowdy fifth graders who recently greeted her with, “Oh, you’re still here.”
The first day of this assignment was hard. The teacher’s absence was unexpected, so there were no lesson plans. She relied on Google searches to get through the little lesson and stern warnings to get her through the day.
“In their defense, I will say that their teacher is not here, and instead of a teacher they have a soldier,” she said.
She arrived the next morning, ready to be “Semper Gumby”. She had worksheets her mother printed out for the morning icebreaker, a bag of prizes she bought at Wal-Mart, and two lesson plans she borrowed from other teachers.
When she ran into the young man who had given her the most trouble the day before, she calmed his brewing tantrum by asking a simple question: Do you need help?
“We’ll get through this, even if it hurts,” Sgt. Myers-Garcia said. “I still prefer to be here than to children who are not in school.”
Colonel Corona received an open invitation to remain as a replacement in Estancia. Dr. Sims, the superintendent, held back tears when asked what would happen when her watch ended. “Having Susana here has been a game changer,” she said. “You might think that one is not enough; one was enough.”
When Stephanie Romans recently had to spend five days in quarantine, the 37-year-old teacher feared her fourth graders were falling behind.
But her fears were allayed when Colonel Corona called her one night and asked if she would be okay if she didn’t move on to a new mathematical concept. She didn’t think the students fully grasped what she taught that day, she told Miss Romance.
“I gave them a math test when I got back and—boom—they did great,” Ms Romans said.
Colonel Corona said she used the same skills – command and confidence – as she would on any mission.
“I answered the support call,” she said. “What this should really inspire is more respect for what teachers do every day.”
Adria Malcolm contributed reporting.
Warnings were in effect in parts of eastern Pennsylvania and New York, as well as northern New Jersey and western Massachusetts. The NWS confirmed that snow squalls were recorded earlier in the day in all four states. By evening, some of the squalls dissipated.