Daniel Booth’s first year as superintendent has been an interesting one. He’s had to deal with mask mandates, an increased tardiness issue, and much more. 

Earlier this year, Superintendent Booth sent out a newsletter concerning the repeal of mask mandates for public schools in Illinois. This made wearing a mask inside the school optional for students and teachers. 

“It’s very frustrating,” Booth said, “the hardest thing with dealing with COVID is that no one has ever done this before. And so much is happening on the fly and you have to be so flexible because you’re learning new things every day.”

Due to the repeal, we have already seen appeals being filed, which will extend the issue and may even cause the requirement of a mask to be reinstated and repealed once more. A more internal problem, the school has seen an increased rate of tardiness in the school. During September and October, the two first full months of school, the school averaged 77.7 and 82.6 tardies per day, respectively. Booth believes in a central problem as the cause of an increased amount of tardiness.

“For 16 months, students did not have structure in their life….. So that means that students could do class from their bedroom, they could wake up two minutes before class starts and turn their computer on, turn their camera off,” Booth explained. 

One of the biggest problems for students is actually getting to school in the first place. For Carbondale, the period that most students are tardy for is 1st hour. The school’s administration has shown a larger effort to motivate students to make it to class on time. It has been the main focus of newly implemented SSR videos each week. 

Due to weather conditions this past winter, Booth decided to cancel school on days where the road conditions weren’t safe enough for students and buses. Other schools in the area have done the same thing, but many students have noticed that some schools decide to utilize e-learning on those days so students can learn from home. Booth has recently shown a dislike of using e-learning days in place of snow days. 

“From an educational standpoint, I don’t think that students get much from a remote learning day, a random remote learning day or Friday in the winter,” said Booth. “One of my jobs, especially after the pandemic, is to make sure that we are maximizing our instruction time, we’re getting students what they need in order to catch them back up. What we’ve learned is that nothing takes the place of in person instruction.”

Superintendent Booth’s first year is like none other before, and every experience is going to be a new one. Through mask mandates, tardies or snow days, he continues to try to build relationships with teachers and students throughout the school.