This summer, the NSC’s annual Backpack Project has become more pointed and poignant than ever in the time of the pandemic. 

 

The annual outreach effort seeks to provide backpacks and school supplies to students in need. 

 

Carol Gloff is the Natick Service Council’s board president, and said that new measures likely adopted by schools to combat the coronavirus could complicate even something as non-controversial as school supplies.

 

For students, the summer season can seem less a matter of dates on a calendar than a destination. The school year’s end is anticipated, arrived at. They leave earth for while, bound for Summerland, a place renowned for its relative freedom and remove from structure. 

 

It’s an excursion of exploration, reflection, sometimes boredom.

But this summer has been a trip defined by turbulence, marked by uncertainty. 

 

New and disruptive ways of living have been taken on board, have necessitated a new species of speech to describe them. Social distancing, the bending of curves, and PPE are now phrases of frequency.

Soon for students, parents and educators, the start of a most extraordinary school year is visible on the horizon. 

 

Now we must bring this thing in for a landing, a process that promises to be among the most fraught of our public flight from the pandemic. Preparations have been well underway, procedures checked and plans put in place to make the transition as safe and smooth as possible.

 

For students in particular, it will be remembered as a most unusual summer, one that will frame their return to school in the fall and color the memory of childhood. Summer’s encroaching end has always occasioned a mixed bag of emotions. 

 

Now, constraints of the coronavirus will act as catalyst to those conflicting feelings. 

Even still, school life may be a welcome change after this socially-distanced summer, a return to some semblance of normal. It’s traditionally a time to catch up with friendly acquaintances outside one’s close circle of friends, to tell them of trips taken and adventures had.

 

But beaches were banned, camps closed, and travel largely taboo. It’s been a summer of sequestration, a season of staying at home, which will make for a whole new genre of September storytelling when students are reunited with classmates.

 

And carried along with that mixed bag of emotions are those often-weighty backpacks laden with school supplies. The coming start of classes commences back-to-school shopping sprees, a recurring, return-to-school ritual that vexes so many young summer vacationers. Yet even that tame tradition will require some tweaking in this new era of distance-conscious learning and shopping.

 

As in years prior, the Natick Service Council is working to ease that burden for local schools and students. 

 

For the time being, an ethic of sharing will likely be suspended in schools. The swapping of items like pencils, rulers and other implements will probably be discouraged. The use of lockers is also being looked at as a potential trouble spot in the arena of social-distancing efforts.

 

Hallway lockers have long been that rare patch of sovereign real estate in schools, modest closet-like spaces that students can claim and curate as their own for a time. Hallway harbors in a sea of shared social spaces, lockers can be little alcoves of anonymity, ports of calm where students can steal a precious few seconds of relative seclusion, places to briefly confer with friends between bells.

That’s cause for scrutiny in an environment where students will be encouraged to maintain distance from one another. 

 

Should lockers be deemed off limits or their usage curtailed, backpacks could become a defacto source of storage for student’s supplies. 

 

Natick educator with three sons aged 9 to 12 years, Paul Power has gotten a rare view of remote schooling from both sides of the equation. He teaches science at Kennedy Middle School, and held classes over video chat during the final few months of the school year.

 

Equipped with that hindsight and thinking through what’s to come, Power wrote up a wishlist of some essentials - items he saw and envisions as integral and perhaps in short supply in students’ homes.

Among the list are the usual staples of school, though things that Power discovered many of students didn’t have on hand. Colored pencils, sharpeners and markers made the list, as well as a good metric ruler.

 

Teaching remote classes last spring, Power found that ingenuity and resourcefulness were indispensable tools during uncertain times. He marshaled common household items for science experiments and enlisted his sons to take part in science videos for his students.

 

“Now if we are talking at-home science, then they may need to be flexible to get shopping for some lab materials,” advised Power. “This would depend on the curriculum and lab lessons being taught.”

 

Toward the middle of last month, the implements of art, writing and arithmetic were already being amassed at the Natick Service Council location just off South Main Street. Its upper conference room was doing double duty as a storage and sorting area for school supplies. Bins of colored markers and binders lined the tables, overlooked by boxes of the backpacks that will corral the items and better equip students to shlep them to and from class.

 

Families in need of school supplies let the NSC know how many children they have, their ages, and what school they will be attending. Based on the curriculum and calendar, schools let the Natick Service Council know what kind and quantity of supplies will be needed. Working largely from those two data points, backpacks are stocked with most of the supplies students will need during the school year. 

 

Formerly, the NSC has run the program with the aid of local businesses and groups - partners that would acquire and fill backpacks with the requested supplies and then deliver them to the NSC to be distributed as part of the program. 

 

Natick’s Mathworks has been among the companies that have participated in the past, sometimes procuring and stocking 50 backpacks in-house with school supplies for students.

 

But to protect staff and the public during the pandemic, the Natick Service Council has largely shut its doors to visitors. In this new reality of social distancing, those companies and the public are being asked to donate funds in lieu of such hands-on efforts.

 

The NSC this year is instead hosting a fundraiser, the proceeds of which will be used to purchase the needed backpacks and supplies directly. A “Gofundme” page was created for the Backpack Project, an online effort to raise funds required to purchase supplies. As of mid-July, the site was well on its way (about $17,000) toward meeting a $20,000 target.

 

“We’re confident we’ll get there,” said Dan Shea. He is the Natick Service Council’s new Executive Director, and added that a big part of the process for schools will be confronting unexpected issues and unknowns that will undoubtedly arise with students returning during the pandemic.

 

“That’s part of solving the overall equation.”  

 

That kind of accommodation to the current moment mirrors the Natick Service Council’s longtime and ongoing food drives, which have also switched gears to sustain their efforts during the pandemic. Like school supplies, The NSC pressed pause on in-person donations of food last spring when the pandemic started becoming more salient.

 

Those personal donations of non-perishable food items have traditionally been a tangible staple of the organization’s collection efforts. In the current environment, the group now solicits monetary donations only, and uses these to purchase food that lines the shelves of their Webster Street location.

 

 Gloff is the Natick Service Council’s board president, and said about 240 families are currently getting food from the Natick Service Council per month, but that there are likely more out there that don’t know about the service, or choose not to take advantage of it. People in need make appointments to visit the center, vying for about 50 time slots allotted per week. Those reservation blocks, she added, have of late been consistently full.

 

But whether backpacks and school supplies, or baby formula and canned goods, Gloff said more people are reaching out for (and with) a helping hand during the pandemic.

 

“Folks are struggling more than usual,” she said. “The public has been very generous.”