Last week, one of my children caught a cold. Not a big deal, but in the pandemic era that meant staying home and getting tested. Fortunately, all is well. But this episode gave us the opportunity to take advantage of the Academy’s remote learning capabilities. My child kept up with classes in real time and returned to campus in a couple of days with very little work to make up. My wife remarked to me that it really seemed like Atonement “had it together” with remote learning compared to what she had heard was going on at other schools.
Our experience as parents was a refreshing reminder that at Atonement, excellence is a way of life, not just an ideal we urge on our young charges.
Developing the capability to daily serve nearly a third of our student body remotely and also be able to seamlessly integrate those in temporary quarantine has been a labor of love on the part of many. First and foremost, our teachers trained over the summer to simultaneously instruct on-campus and remote audiences, have overhauled their familiar way of creating lesson plans, and hold remote as well as in-person office hours. From the beginning, Mr. Patrick has fielded technical questions, Mrs. Powell has coordinated remote enrollment, and Mr. Creech’s day-to-day leadership has held the whole project together. If you see any of these folks, be sure to say “thank you" for a job well done.