Teacher Appreciation Week: WLVR looks back at teachers’ extraordinary efforts over the past year

Teacher Appreciation Week: WLVR looks back at teachers’ extraordinary efforts over the past year

By Chloe Nouvelle

May 6, 2021

May 7 marks the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week. And throughout the pandemic, WLVR’s education reporter Chloe Nouvelle witnessed local teachers doing inspiring things. 

She looks back at some of the teachers she has chronicled this year.

Come fall, it was clear the pandemic would keep the halls of Allentown’s Executive Education Academy Charter School empty for a while. 

So some staffers stood up remote learning, while others thought about how they’d keep eyes on their kids. 

As teacher Andrew Waldron, who is also the high school team leader put it, he didn’t want the kids to feel like they were on “lonely island.” So, teachers started making masked and socially distanced house calls.

“We’re not judging where you live, we’re not judging the decor of the house, nothing like that. It’s all because we want to see the kids and we want them to know we’re still here for them,” Waldron said in an interview last fall. 

And it wasn’t just Executive’s teachers who were making house calls this year.

When the pandemic closed schools in Reading, special education teachers were forced to move their lessons online too.

But Heather Fisher, a multiple disability support teacher for the Reading School District, found virtual school didn’t work for her class. She watched her kids “shut down.” And that wouldn’t do.

“I cannot sit at my house knowing that these kids aren’t learning and not do anything about it,” Fisher says.

So, after getting the green light from Reading’s medical team, she packed up her car and brought school to her students’ porches and backyards. 

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