CHIMACUM — As she enters the final semester of her high school career, Eugenia Frank is seeking to provide a snapshot of student reality.
There’s a Valentine’s dance coming up and the salad bar has been added back at lunch time, Frank accentuated at the start of her report to the Chimacum School Board last week.
Then she went into the tougher stuff.
“As I spread the good news, I can’t help but feel I’ve overlooked the challenges of this semester,” the teenager said.
After saluting all of the Chimacum School District’s teachers for their extra work and caring, Frank acknowledged this is “one of, if not the most frustrating, exhausting and demoralizing semesters of your careers.”
Frank described one way COVID-19 makes school life an unrelenting struggle for her classmates.
“My goal is never to be an antagonist or an accuser; my job first and foremost is to serve as a liaison for students,” she told her audience, which included the school board and superintendent Scott Mauk.
“Tonight I’d like to again relate the feeling of being unsafe at school due to masking defiance and inconsistent enforcement guidelines,” she said.
“I simply ask that a way is found to rid our school of this secondary plague.”
The board members made no comment on the masking defiance issue. Mauk, in his superintendent’s report, spoke about something he’s hearing from colleagues around the state.
Students are “just feeling the weight of the trauma of the last two years … We’re seeing it with students who refuse to mask, or (who are) being disruptive, or getting into fights on the bus,” Mauk said.
He added he’s sought to be a voice for students at every level — yet he doesn’t hear state legislators talking about how to help them now and in the coming year.
“They’re not talking about the trauma our students will have experienced by the time they come back in the fall,” he said, “and how much work we need to do to make it right for them.”
Ava Vaughan, a high school junior, also serves as a student representative on the Chimacum School Board.
“I feel like ‘emotional trauma’ is spot on,” she said.
“It has different ways of manifesting in different students.”
In an interview Friday, Mauk said some students are being disciplined for mask defiance, as his schools use a progressive discipline policy that can lead to suspension.
Yet “the vast majority of our students get it,” when it comes to masking, Mauk said.
Clean surgical masks are provided in every classroom, he added, and teachers are tasked with reminding students why they need to wear them.
The mask policy is clear at school, Mauk said, while his staff continues to see resistance to it.
“People are really tired; it’s been two years of being fearful for our own health,” he said.
“It’s a little easier with the littles,” he said of the elementary school students, who tend to wear their masks correctly.
Now is the time, Mauk emphasized, for the state Legislature to address post-pandemic mental health, teacher and support staff shortages, and future safety protocols.
Mauk sees little in the way of forecasting about what schools will need if and when the pandemic transitions into an endemic phenomenon. By that time, too many educators may have dropped out of the profession because, he said, “they are just cooked.”
The superintendent added he knows his colleagues across the region share his feelings: “When can we stop being deputized public health officials, and go back to being educators?”
As districts plan for the 2022-2023 academic year, “we have some pretty tough rowing ahead,” he said.
“When this all settles down, what do we do to support our people?”
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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidela paz@peninsuladailynews.com.
