The COVID-19 theme at newly reopened Colfax High: ‘We have to take care of our own’
Terry O’Keefe walked these halls as a student.
He played sports here, earned academic honors and towered as a campus leader. He is Colfax High School to the core, in his 25th year teaching at his alma mater. It is the only job O’Keefe has held.
Students here are like family because he knows so many of their parents and he takes his role personally. O’Keefe will pick up his guitar placed next to his desk and strum a tune to set a cheerful mood when students come into his math class bearing masks, some hiding glum expressions, as they all try to adjust to school with distancing, modifications and protocols in this COVID-19 era.
As he sees it, small schools have a big responsibility when it comes to navigating the challenges of the coronavirus. He views it in two layers, starting with safety.
“None of this is normal, and it’s not very human,” O’Keefe said, walking through his classroom on a recent Friday, handing out sanitizing wipes to students to wipe down desks and plastic partitions that provide more shielding, not too far from a temperature check in-post.
“Students have a survival mentality,” he said. “We have to let them know that they’re safe here. If a bus is bearing down on you, we can’t say, ‘Hey, let’s learn math and numbers!’ They have to avoid that bus first, know it’s safe, and then learn.”
And there’s also this theme: “We have to take care of our own,” O’Keefe said. “Teaching in towns like this is a community-based investment. I don’t know of any profession that’s more enriching. You let kids know you care. My wife and I had a student live with us awhile back. He was sleeping in a car. You do what you can because you care.”
O’Keefe in 1996 married his high school sweetheart, Jodi, a teacher at nearby elementary Weimar Hills School. Her boundless energy included 18 days of hiking the John Muir Trail in July. The O’Keefe kids graduated from Colfax. Garren, now a junior and football player at UC Davis, and Riley, a Loyola Marymount graduate, stood as Colfax High valedictorians as top scholars.
‘We’re not launching to the moon’
Colfax is part of the Placer Union High School District that includes Del Oro, Foresthill and Placer, and it was the first regional district to open up campus in a hybrid form. This means half the students are taking their studies from home remotely, having opted to do that, and the rest are on campus. Friday concluded the second week of the on-campus model for students.
Teachers such as O’Keefe manage it all in a whirlwind day of instruction, hustling from desk to desk, to monitor everyone - remote and on-campus students alike -- and keep them all engaged. Attitude, O’Keefe said, is paramount. On his classroom wall, a sign reads, “Culture is what is allowed.” It rests near “We are Colfax.”
“We can do this,” O’Keefe said. “It can be done. We’re not launching to the moon.”
Other school districts are keeping an eye on how this district fares. With COVID-19 numbers trending the right way, Sacramento County schools have a goal of opening next month. There is also discussion of whether schools will remain open if there is a positive COVID-19 test. That hasn’t become an issue at Colfax
Wholesome feel but also mental-toll concerns
Colfax High opened in 1959, just up the hill from the town’s historic downtown, with tree-line views and the Sierra Nevada Mountains within reach.
The school has excelled across the board in academics and athletics and draws students from just outside Auburn to Emigrant Gap, from the communities of Applegate, Christian Valley, Meadow Vista and Weimar. Just over 600 students are enrolled, though having all of them on campus at once may not happen until 2021.
The campus includes 16 teachers or staffers who graduated from the school. This includes Karen Hammond, the first person to greet you when you walk into the school office. She is the school’s attendance clerk and receptionist.
“I started school here in 1976, graduated a few years later and never left,” Hammond said with a laugh. “It’s a fabulous place with fabulous people.”
Hammond is the longest-tenured full timer in the district, 40 years and counting. She said she and staff are inspired by youth.
One of those inspirations is Colfax senior Natalie Lundberg. She is the student-body president, a 4.4 student as a junior with honors courses dotting her schedule, a four-sport athlete and the soon-to-be valedictorian for a graduation she plans to attend on campus.
Lundberg is also the daughter of her school’s principal, Paul Lundberg. She spoke to The Bee in front of a campus banner -- reading “Welcome back!” -- about how “neat it is to return to campus,” and dealing with masks and trying to get back to any sense of normal.
”At first, I was concerned students wouldn’t wear their masks, but they have, and I’m glad because it takes all of us,” Lundberg said. “Small schools like this mean we all know each other. We have to be there for each other.”
Lundberg the student and Lundberg the principal said they worry about the mental toll on students during this pandemic with so many things pushed to arm’s length: no sports and reduced extra-curricular activities, though sports is scheduled to return in the winter and spring months, COVID-19 allowing.
“I was talking to a friend’s mom, a nurse, and she said the depression concerns are up for teenagers everywhere,” Natalie Lundberg said. “We want students to know we’re here, or the teachers, and to reach out if you need it.”
Making it work
Principal Lundberg said two weeks of on-campus instruction have led to a sense that this can work and that it has to work. He is also a product of Placer County, a Placer High graduate who married his high school sweetheart, Maria, an elementary school teacher at Cottage Hill School in Grass Valley. Education and parenting is their life.
“Places like this, communities and the school are wrapped together, and it’s often the center of the community,” Paul Lundberg said. “We knew that we wanted our students back on campus, but also in the safest way we could, and that’s what we’ve done. The teachers and staff have put in heroic efforts. Parents have overwhelmingly been positive about it.”
He added, “I want to give the students a lot of credit. I was a little worried about kids not wanting to comply with masks because it’s not easy to wear one for five hours, and I assume in rural areas like this, kids are wearing masks all the time, but we have to do what we can. I walk into our classrooms and I think, ‘Wow! Amazing what our teachers and kids are doing.’ Relationships and engagement remain the foundation of everything we do in education, and we’re still doing that.”
This story was originally published September 26, 2020 at 2:00 AM with the headline "The COVID-19 theme at newly reopened Colfax High: ‘We have to take care of our own’."