Week Two of School

On Highway 55, the school bus stops fast in front of a trailer, honks twice, and opens its doors. Small dogs play in the front yard, but no one comes out. It’s Monday, the first day of the second week of school.

Starting up again and traveling west, away from the strong morning sun beaming over low-lying soybean fields, the bus collects big kids with wet hair and heavy backpacks who share their ride with little kids in bright clothes. Across from Charlie’s Restaurant, a cinder-block building known for its fried seafood, the bus turns into the driveway of a brown-brick, single story building: Pamlico County High School, whose 450 students are known as the Hurricanes.

The teenagers are dropped off there first. Then the bus continues around the parking lot to the Fred A. Anderson Elementary School, where its smallest passengers disembark.

Sharing resources is how counties like this, where 16 percent of the population lives in poverty and the drug-overdose rate is double the North Carolina average, survive. The four public schools—the high school, the elementary school, Pamlico County Primary School and the Pamlico County Middle School-- are a safety net for children. The schools provide breakfast, lunch and access to caring teachers and friends. In the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced administrators to send students home, many of those children struggled to get enough to eat and to find other supports. Their homes are spread across 562 square miles; for many, the school bus is their only means of transportation. 


At the high school, a teacher stands outside the front doors to greet arriving students. “Good morning, everybody,” she calls out. “Happy Monday.”

Several students are late. Some call in sick because they have been exposed to someone who has COVID-19, or have it themselves. They call it “delta” after the name of the highly contagious virus variant.

Last week masks were optional, but the school board now requires students, teachers and staff to wear them.

“What’s your name, li’l sweet thing?” asks Wendy Lacy, the office manager at the high school, asks a shy sophomore who is standing across the room from her desk, a leather backpack at her feet, trying to understand the computerized sign-in system. Lacy sits behind a plexiglass shield, hers is the only desk in the office. It is 8:30 a.m. The first-period bell rang at 7:50. Lacy, known as Miss Lacy to all, has a lively welcome, dangly jewelry and a smile that has helped hold the school system together for 26 years. She gives the student a handwritten pass for class. The computerized system is down.

“Everyone here is family,” Lacy says. She is rushing to make photocopies, answer the phone and write down messages. “Excuse me,” she says. “The phone won’t stop ringing.”

There is no homeroom; students go straight to their first-period class. The halls are dim and quiet. Classrooms look half-full, though Principal Brandolyn Holton says enrollment is up from last year.

“We are willing to go through anything we can to keep us from going remote again,” she says. “For a lot of these students, school is the only safe place.”

This is Holton’s first year as high school principal. Her voice sounds tired. Aside from sorting through bus routes, staffing, COVID requirements for students, she and the teachers also help students through bouts of ordinary teenage angst. She says that the strain students feel from the pandemic and a lost year of normal school is palpable. They have become territorial, dividing into small packs, displaying less confidence.

“We simply want them to feel like high school students again,” she said. “We want them to enjoy it.”