Spruce View School has some serious holiday attitude.
School buses are decked out with coloured lights and garland. Grade 1 and 2 students recently visited the local post office to mail their letters to Santa. Students dressed up like their favourite holiday movie or book characters. The gymnasium was decorated with student art for the upcoming Christmas concerts.
“We’re still trying to do what we can while staying within the guidelines and COVID protocols,” said principal Jay Steeves on Tuesday.
He said staff and older students at the rural, kindergarten to Grade 12 school worked hard to come up with activities to make it a normal season in spite of it being the second Christmas with COVID-19.
On Thursday students will wear their fanciest clothes for ‘Dress To Impress’ in preparation for the highly anticipated Christmas concert performances.
“(The Christmas concert on Thursday) is a big deal out here for the whole community,” Steeves said about the school that has 275 students. About 150 families have a connection to the school.
“We’re able to work the logistics and put on multiple performances so that we can limit the number of parents in our gym so we can still pull off the Christmas concert. We’re fortunate that we’re small enough school that we can still do it. I know the larger schools would be a little bit jealous of that.”
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He said COVID-19 protocols will be followed for the concerts, which may cause some frustration, but they are not the place for pandemic debates.
“You can have whatever opinion you like, but the bottom line is this is not a political forum. It’s all about the kids,” Steeves said.
“For the most part what we’ve been trying to do is make it clear to our community and parent body that we are doing the best we can to make sure it’s good for the kids. We’re going to do everything to keep this building on the rails in terms of making sure kids have access to extra curricular activities, and parents have access to see their kids taking part in the extra curricular activities.
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Steeves said COVID protocols can be tiresome, but people also recognize how fortunate the community has been.
As a rural school, COVID has not hit Spruce View as hard as urban schools. A couple of cases forced a few classes to quarantine in the spring, but no students have been impacted since.
“We haven’t had anything in the fall that impacted students. Other than the mandated shutdowns by the government last year, we actually haven’t had any major shutdowns out here,” he said about the Chinook’s Edge School Division school.
szielinski@reddeeradvocate.com
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