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By Teena Monteleone

Carlton teachers connect to students with uplifting video

May 6, 2020 | 2:55 PM

Inspired by scenes of quarantined Italians singing to each other on balconies and viral videos of celebrities crooning to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, the staff at Carlton Comprehensive Public High School in Prince Albert has released their own video of camaraderie.

It features more than 80 staff members contributing their own take on a line from the song ‘Lean on Me.’ Principal Jeff Court said the idea was to celebrate ‘Crusader Day’ and engage the students and community as a whole through social media.

“It’s a challenging time. It’s just one of those things where we’re used to seeing their faces every day – similar to other industries – so we’re trying to put together some sort of communication plan and connection to our community,” Court said.

What impressed Court was the number of staff who took part and were willing to sing on camera – an activity he said was likely out of the comfort zone of most.

“You obviously need to be vulnerable and open to do that. Its just an awesome number of folks that we have on our staff to be able to take that risk cause it’s not easy to put yourself out there like that,” he said.

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Teacher Dani Van Steelandt put the video together over the course of a week and said the goal was to send a message of compassion and encouragement to students in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic.

“We get in to teaching knowing that its hard and we stay in teaching know that its hard but the celebrations make it worthwhile when we can say ‘yay, you did this’ to a student or ‘we’re proud of you’ – we miss that,” said Van Steelandt. “It becomes emotional because you miss the very thing that kinda drives us as teachers in education.”

While graduation ceremonies won’t be celebrated traditionally this year, Van Steelandt said she has offered lots of assurance to her graduates that they won’t miss out on their ‘right of passage.’

“You’re still graduating. We’re still going to celebrate. We’re still excited about it,” she said. “It’s just coming up with those ways of how we’re going to celebrate our kids because they won’t miss out on grad. That won’t happen. It’s just going to look different.”

Van Steelandt and Court both said it’s the school’s next big hurdle – trying to determine how graduation will be acknowledged. The hope is to have a plan unveiled in the week ahead.

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teena.monteleone@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @TeenaMonteleone