Our annual interview with North Springs’ Principal, Micahel Scott Hanson– a “State of the Union”, if you will–finds staff writer Zitzijani Uvera Castro asking him about North Springs, education in a post-pandemic world, and himself!

Zitzi: Last fall marked a year since we’d been in online and hybrid school. What are your thoughts about hybrid learning? Do you ever miss it, and if we ever have to go back to virtual, what would you do differently? 

Mr. Hanson: Ok, I despised hybrid learning. I understand and agree with the reasons why we were needed to do hybrid to keep our students, staff, and family safe, but it is not a good substitute for being in person in front of our great teachers. Students that struggle with focusing on academics are easily distracted, (think “squirrel” from the movie UP!), and that takes its toll. It is really hard on the teachers, trying to navigate managing students in the building and those at home.

Students struggled with lots of social/emotional demands while in hybrid learning, and not having those students in the building so we could physically see them, have conversations with them and provide help was incredibly difficult. I always worried about what we were missing socially and emotionally with our students. I think our plan for hybrid learning was better than most, in that we had a block schedule and expected our teachers to teach live, vs. posting lessons asynchronously as some schools did. While not perfect, it was better than some others I saw. I would also change the schedule again to reflect some “office hours” time for students and teachers to meet for help, to get caught up, and check in. We did that during the first semester of COVID in 2020, and it worked well.  

Zitzi: Were there any plans for the school that you had pre-pandemic that did not happen because of the outbreak?  

Mr. Hanson: Well, the first thing we had planned was to move to a true A-B block in the 2020-2021 school year, which we had to shelve because of the hybrid learning plan. With that, we had planned to offer more electives, which we also had to shelve because it those didn’t work well in a hybrid environment. Some of the social/emotional events we had scheduled also got pushed back by necessity. We wanted to become an ADL No Place for Hate school, which we couldn’t do virtually as well.

Zitzi: In your opinion, what has shifted in education since last year as a result of the pandemic and online / hybrid learning? What do you differently now that you did not do before? 

Mr. Hanson: My opinion has shifted seismically, and I look at this as both a principal and a father. At the start of the pandemic, I thought that kids would still be able to function somewhat normally, and that this wouldn’t be too big of a lift to catch back up once we got back to normal, what ever that looked like. I didn’t think to much about access to technology and the internet, and quickly learned that there is a huge divide between groups of students that leads to lots of inequity.

The first weeks of the pandemic I spent time at Lake Forest Elementary handing out laptops and hotspots to families, and was shocked at the amount of people that were doing without those devices. When we thought internally about why some kids were not actively participating in virtual/hybrid learning, we had to learn to manage how to re-engage students differently, something nobody had any experience in doing. As I said in my graduation speech in 2021, there were 17 seniors that I could not convince to come back to school to finish and graduate, because economic necessity took precedent over finishing school. I took that personally, because it meant as a school we couldn’t do all we could do to help students.

What do I do differently? One thing is that I spend more time up front welcoming students to school each and every day. I want students to sincerely know we are glad to see them each day. If they see and hear that from the principal daily, can that get students starting the day on the right foot? I can also check on lots of students every morning, and see kids who are struggling or need something, and I can get them help early in the day for whatever they need. I realized early on during the pandemic that while I communicated with parents and the community a lot, I needed to communicate with our students as well. I spend more time crafting communications necessary for students to know what is going on. I never thought about that before the pandemic.

One thing that I am proud of our student body, is that many of them learned more self-advocacy skills. I had students emailing me, and they still do, daily to ask questions. Before the pandemic, who would ever email the principal? I answer every student’s email and help them however I can, even if sometimes it is to tell them I don’t know the answer, but will find out. I ask my own two HS teenagers if they would ever email their principal a question, and they looked at me in horror, and said heck no. I am glad the North Springs student body feels comfortable about reaching out to me. That is something that secretly makes me very happy.    

Zitzi: How has the pandemic affected your view of education? What are your observations about “learning loss?”  

Mr. Hanson: Education will forever be different. Think about it, there will never really be a need to have a “snow day” anymore, because we have access to technology 24/7. I think that is a negative….who doesn’t like a snow day? I think we also have to rethink what we do in the classroom to make things more relevant for students. How do we incorporate the technology we have in a better way to make learning more relevant is the question I ask?

The pandemic has also had us rethinking equity and access, because I think this is the most apparent problem with how education was delivered during the pandemic. Those with the means continued to make progress, and many without the economic resources went backwards and now we have to recover from that backward slide. I think learning loss is relevant, but I would disagree that learning did not happen duding the pandemic. Students (and parents for that matter), learned a lot during the pandemic about finding and using resources, resiliency, self-sufficiency, and other things that allowed them to cope. Those are important skills, but not something that has a way of measuring what they know in math, ELA or science.    

Zitzi: How did the county mask mandate affect sports and school events, like the Prom Dance? How do you feel about “mask optional? 

Mr. Hanson: The county mask mandate was designed to help minimize the spread of COVID. All last year, we had a mask requirement for everyone that came into the building, and limited the size of crowds at sporting events. This impacted some events that were indoors, but had a smaller impact for those outdoors. Limiting spectator capacity at football and basketball games, and doing temp checks and screenings added a new level of headache. I did not enjoy telling family members that we had reached capacity and that they could not enter to see their students play.

A positive of this though was that it hastened the use of GoFan, the online ticket app which has been better for everyone. We had to cancel some shows and other events in the building because gathering together in groups would be a problem. We had to limit access and capacity for other events like Prom, to avoid these becoming super-spreader events. Who would have ever thought that those words would be something we would be considering? We cancelled Prom in 2020, and had to make it a senior only event in 2021, with no outside guests. We had to move the senior honors night to a virtual event, Baccalaureate was cancelled, and we had to limit attendance at graduation. We could not have the band/chorus perform at graduation last year because of the mandate. Those were difficult to deal with.

I support our district and the leaders in making the tough decisions in regard to the pandemic mitigation effort, and I think the results of those decisions made us all safer. Our community did all of the right things to help slow the spread.

How do I feel about the mask optional policy? I think we are at a place now where it makes sense for people to be able to make a decision. The CDC guidance is now there in support of the mask optional policy. I continue to support students who wear masks, as what they are doing is a personal choice to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. I wore my mask for the 1st two weeks after the mandate ended, just to show everyone that it is still ok. I have stopped wearing it around campus, but always have one with me in my pocket. If I am in a meeting with a student or parent, and they ask me to put one on, I do that out of respect for them. 

Zitzi: How are schools addressing the needs of students after the pandemic? What are the challenges and successes you are facing? 

Mr. Hanson: The district is doing a lot to catch students back up after the pandemic. All of the social/emotional work during crew time is a part of that help students need to receive. We also have a lot of extra tutoring/remediation opportunities for students, both before/after school and during the day. The district also has added additional counseling resources to each school to help students recover from the pandemic. We are fortunate that as the pandemic started, the community of Sandy Springs rallied around the community and has provided many additional resources that were not available pre-pandemic. Solidarity Sand Springs, the food pantry available to Sandy Springs residents is a great example of something that has continued even after the pandemic has started to want.  

Zitzi: Have we arrived at a point where masks are not needed and there is no concern about returning to online? 

Mr. Hanson: Yes, I think we have arrived at the point where we will at least not worry about returning to online. Depending on which variants come up, a return to masks is always possible, but as we have learned more about the viruses, and the amount of people that have been vaccinated, it will take a going back virtual is a last resort type of scenario.  

Zitzi: What have you learned from this experience? 

Mr. Hanson: What have I learned? I hate wearing masks. I followed the rules and encouraged others to, but the masks were horrible to wear in my option. I also have learned that communicating early and often is important, and what I have continued to do since then. Lastly, we know that many people struggled through this pandemic, for a variety of reasons. Whether you are rich or poor, live in a house/apartment/homeless, everyone was struggling in some way during this time. Being honest about the struggle, and not passing judgement on anyone has been something that I hope everyone learns. Being a friendly face, with an out-stretched arm to offer help is sometimes all anyone needs. 

Zitzi: How has the pandemic affected you personally? 

Mr. Hanson: The pandemic has been difficult for my family. My close family is all in education; my wife teaches at Chattahoochee, my two kids are at Northview. Whenever anything happens at school, we are all impacted. My kids went through what every other student in Fulton went through, and one had better success than the other. My son thrives on being in the building, and he struggle with online learning. His motivation waned significantly during the pandemic, and has never caught back up. As he gets ready to go to college next year, we worry about his motivation. My daughter on the other hand thrived academically, but struggled socially because of the pandemic. They were both happy to get back into the building.

We have done our best to make sure we follow best practices, and not put ourselves in positions to get sick, and thankfully up to this point have avoided it. Where is my wood to knock on, I probably just jinxed us. I have seen the toll that online learning took on my kids and wife, and that has made it easier to empathize and sympathize with wat people are going through. We have grown together more as a family because of the pandemic, but that is not without its ow tribulations. I think more about kids now, and worry about kids from school as much as I do my own. I joke that the pandemic caused me to go from having two children to 1400 children I call my own. That’s not to say I didn’t think of my students daily, but the type of worry was compounded when I couldn’t see them daily.  

Zitzi: How do you manage it all? 

Mr. Hanson: I learned that self-care was important. If you had asked me about self-care before the pandemic, I would have given you the stink eye, and replied “what”? I have always had a release so to speak, when I get on my bicycle and ride to my heart’s content. During the pandemic, this reached a whole new plateau, because I found myself riding more miles alone than ever before. I learned to listen to mindless podcasts while out on rides so I didn’t have to think about anything but my surroundings and what I was listening to. I threw myself into training for the bike races I was missing, and let that be my outlet.

I spent more time with my family, but a different type of time. We did mindless things like playing UNO, Monopoly, and four person Mario Cart Wii, just because we were able to. We had dinner together every night, which we never could do with all of our different schedules. As we come back out of the pandemic and the scheduled become whacky again, we find ourselves reminiscing about the things we did, and try to schedule time to make sure that happens a little every week. My son graduates in May, and heads off to college in June. We only have so much more time to do that as a family. 

Zitzi: Thank you for the interview!