In the aftermath of an event as horrific as losing five teenagers in one terrible night, people reset their priorities to reflect what really matters. We learn, from the worst possible event, that we really are all one community, one Harwood community.
As The Valley towns and Waterbury worked their painful way through all of the Act 46 hoopla that led to a June vote to unify our schools boards, people voiced a lot of concern about fairness in terms of weighted voting and whether each town’s students would get a fair deal.
That all falls away now. We are a community of six towns connected by a high school and a watershed and much, much more. We realize – and perhaps we realized this before, after Tropical Storm Irene – that our community is much too small for creating lines of division and difference. We have much more in common than we don’t.
In the last 12 days we have seen selfless, consistent, vigilance from those who educate, coach and take care of our students. We owe them a great deal of gratitude for what has been an epic response to an unprecedented tragedy.
No one likes a trial by fire, but our educators, administrators, coaches, support staff and all who work with local kids have come through and continue to come through this one with amazing grace and compassion. They are working ceaselessly to do what it takes to help local kids come to grips with what happened and to process it and to be able to talk about grief and to cry and to heal.
Working in education has often been said to be much more than a job but really more of a calling, and seeing how local educators have reacted to this affirms that. They don’t just care, they love our kids.
It is amazing to realize that these are the people who our local kids spend their days with. These are the people who are helping them heal. These are the people, whether by encouraging them to play stronger defense in soccer or driving the late bus or serving lunch, teaching in a class, greeting students in the hallway or noticing which child is glassy-eyed and dehydrated; they’re the eyes and ears and hearts who are helping the kids get through this.
Our differences fall away.
