KANSAS CITY, MO — On Valentine's Day, the Kansas City Public School District wanted to show love and appreciation for their teachers and staff.
Tokens of appreciation made their way down the hallways of Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, as teachers and staff stopped to smell the roses and chocolates that were hand-delivered to them as a thank you for their hard work.
“A lot of our staff are giving up their planning time to support other teachers in classrooms and acting as subs because substitutes are hard to come by,” Assistant Superintendent Student Support Services Lateshia Woodley said.
“We wanted to go out to our buildings and support them because we know how hard it is. We were all once educators inside these buildings and so we know how hard it is to truly get support,” said Ritchie Cherry, KCP's Retention and Recruitment Coach.
Educators like Courtney Poulsen, who teaches kindergarten at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, say during the pandemic, the support from those outside the school has not bloomed.
“Figuring out, 'are we going to teach virtually?' and sending the iPads home with the kindergarten, that’s very difficult with the kids, Poulsen said. “Sometimes we feel like we have so much stress and so much pressure, and sometimes as a teacher we feel like we’re overlooked, maybe were not as important.”
Poulsen added the pandemic has made lesson planning and learning new skills difficult for some of her students.
“You teach something and then half the class isn’t here, so then you have to reteach it," Poulsen said. "We only teach a letter for a couple days. If they missed those couple days, they’re missing that and you have to go back and try to catch them up, and keep everyone caught up, and raise the bar so that our kids are getting the quality education they need.”
Cherry and Woodley with KCPS say they partnered with Shop Local KC owner and CEO Katie Mabry van Dieren, who went above and beyond to make these teachers smile.
“We found a farm in Ecuador and they FedEx'd us 2,500 roses which is 100 bundles of 25,” Mabry van Dieren said.
Spending eight hours a day for three days, Mabry van Dieren and her team were happy to strip thorns out of thousand of roses for teachers and staff across the district.
“Through this whole coronavirus thing the one thing that’s remained normal is the teachers and the families,” Mabry van Dieren said. “I would totally do it again, it was wonderful.”
