4/4/25 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Charlie Silcott, Paker Cobb & Maxine Loscko had their art displayed at the State Capitol Building last week!

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

This weekend we are screening our incoming Kindergarten class. To put the passage of time into perspective, these youngsters will be the high school graduating class of 2038. How old will we all be then?

Besides making me feel ancient, these children have another unique distinction in that most of them were born just before or during the COVID lockdown that began five years ago in March 2020. Although they will have no memory of how different life was during those months of forced isolation, I am sure that the parents will have many tales to relate to them from strict hospital protocols to grandparents and relatives donning masks to see the newborn babies.

Our eighth-grade class of 2020, who are now already freshmen in college, missed their 8th grade trip, their spring musical and their graduation Mass. We all got out of school that Friday in March cheering for what was to be an extended spring break. It turned out to be a break from which we didn’t return until the following August.

We continued to hold classes that spring, but it was all done remotely. Special kudos to Mrs. Peggy Pickney who had to finish a long and distinguished career as our first-grade teacher interacting with her final group of students via zoom. Teachers, students and parents all did the best that they could but the unknowns at the time outweighed what was known about the disease and its ramifications not only on education but daily life.

And so, while our eighth graders and high school and college seniors had unique endings to their schooling, the mothers of our incoming kindergarten students were facing restrictions never seen in our lifetime about how their infants could interact with the world. Will it make the class of ’38 unique in their outlook on life? Only time will tell.

During the lockdown I came into school every morning like a caretaker watching over an empty building. In person Masses had been cancelled as well. Father Dooley filmed them in church with just a couple of us in attendance. I too learned how to film myself doing morning prayer, birthdays and announcements and uploading them onto You Tube. One of our eighth graders told me the other day that he located some of them recently. Our school superintendent had the principals meet every morning at 10am on zoom for information, and commiseration. It was all so surreal.

Families came to the school door occasionally to pick up books or drop things off. Some schools made the parents wait outside and things were delivered to their cars. Since it was just me, I let them in. If I handed them anything I dutifully wore my mask and washed my hands. We just didn’t know how careful we had to be to avoid becoming infected.

During that summer a group of teachers and parents, Gina Connor and I met on a regular basis to talk about the 2020-2021 school year. We were determined that Our Lady of Peace would keep its doors open every day for the sake of our parents and students and their education. I can say with pride that as a result of careful planning, creativity and collaboration we were successful in being one of the schools that was able to accomplish this.

The COVID lockdown changed the world in many ways that are still with us. The kindergarten program that the class of ’38 enters in August will be different than the eighth-grade class of 2020 entered in 2012. But the fact that Our Lady of Peace operates on a daily basis with Christ and his Church at our core is fundamental to what we hope all our students, whether they were our first class in 1946 or our new students coming this August, experience within our walls on a daily basis. 

Jim Silcott