It was the first day back for about 250 students in grades 5-12, whom district staff had required to stay home since Thanksgiving break. The district returned to an in-person class schedule for fifth and sixth graders on Jan. 19, the same day junior high and high schoolers returned to a “hybrid” schedule that meant similarly sized blocks of them alternated between online class and in-person class. On Monday, Feb. 8, the school was set to have students across all 13 grades return to classrooms.
A father walks his daughter to school recently at Win-E-Mac as classes resume in-person. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
As they filed in last month, students stuck their hands into a machine that measured their body temperature. If it was over 100 degrees, the machine flashed a red light and Jennifer Wang, a district paraprofessional, would measure the student’s temperature again with a handheld reader. If both readings were too high, then Wang or Heidi Strom, a health aide who stood alongside her, would send them to the school’s nurse. A handful of students ever so slightly rolled their eyes at the temperature reader, or maybe at the school’s building-wide mask mandate, but none turned back outside or put up much of a fuss once they were inside.
Temperature checks at the door are part of a long list of modifications district leaders put in place to slow the spread of a novel coronavirus. Younger students stay in their classrooms virtually all day, and specialists -- art and music teachers -- head to them. Lunch times are staggered in a way that aims to have no more than 20 or so students in the cafeteria at once, staff regularly mist buses and classrooms with sanitizer. And students aren’t allowed to use their lockers during passing time, which, with a large chunk of the student body at home, was relatively quiet and uneventful.
Chairs are placed 12 feet apart for band and choir students at Win-E-Mac school in Erskine, MN. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
In Jessica Strom’s math class on Jan. 19, students worked on graphing the speed at which turtles cross a road. The only people there in the flesh were Strom and a paraprofessional. The students themselves are learning online and, Bruer said, can watch the room and the board on their laptops at home. The next day, they’ll be learning in-person, then back to a virtual classroom the day after that, and so on.
The predicted end of the pandemic that kept them home, at least on the 19th, is still months away, but some parts of the district’s new M.O. could remain. Classroom “Owls” -- small, cylindrical devices stuffed with microphones that can snap focus a camera onto different speakers in a room -- might stick around to help students learn remotely, and distance learning itself might become a more common option for Win-E-Mac students even after the public health risk of in-person school recedes.
But the virus' knock on effects are still wearing on students and staff alike.
“I can’t wait for all this to kind of pass,” Bruer said. “I hope we start off next year on a different beat.”
Win-E-Mac school superintendent Randy Bruer greets students recently as they return to school for in-person classes in Erskine, MN. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
COVID-19 has touched virtually every part of Erskine, a town of about 500 people on Hwy. 2 that, economically, relies on people who visit area lake cabins in the summer and a handful of relatively large employers, such as the school district and some large manufacturers year-round.
“I remember the first time we got shut down, I come up here about 5:30 in the evening, it was a Monday night, and it looked like a ghost town in a western Arizona setting. It was hard on the businesses, gas stations. There was literally no traffic. I mean, it was -- it was literally a ghost town,” Mayor Marc Plante told the Herald. “We rely on traffic. The outside business is a big deal to these small businesses.”
A few years ago, city leaders bought an aeration system for Lake Cameron, which sits adjacent to its downtown. The aerator means more oxygen in the water, which means more fish, which means more people angling for those fish, which means, hopefully, more traffic through town. The Erskine Water Carnival is a big draw among cabin types, and organizers canceled it last spring as COVID-19 cases -- and restrictions -- ratcheted upward, which was an economic blow to the city. City leaders like Plante are seeing how nearby towns are handling their upcoming carnivals, festivals, and so on.
“Hopefully, by June, we’re good to go,” he said.
Shari Parent, a waitress at the Ness Cafe in Erskine, MN, wipes down a table following COVID guidelines recently. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
But only one business in town closed entirely -- The Deuce bar -- during the pandemic, and that was temporarily. Not many people in town have permanently lost their jobs, either, Plante reported. That’s partly because the town, like the rest of Minnesota, reopened to a degree last summer, which meant businesses there could capture some money from tourism -- “that helped and helped and helped,” Plante said -- but largely because large manufacturers, such as DigiKey and Garden Valley Technologies, were never shut down the way restaurants and bars were.
Residents also made a point of shopping at Erskine-area businesses: The Ness Cafe, a downtown staple, is a popular New Years Eve destination. It reported about the same amount of business this past New Years Eve as it has in previous ones, despite being closed to dine-in traffic at the time.
“It’s still tough. I’m not going to say it’s not tough,” Plante said. “But everybody did a very good job of defending the business and staying open.”
And residents, by and large, were OK with closure orders, wearing masks and other protective measures to slow the virus.
“There’s always some remorse,” Plante said. “But I think the gain would have been a lot less than the trouble it would have caused them.”
A view of downtown Erskine, MN, recently. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald
To read more: As part of the Best Burg series, Herald staff visited ... Cavalier ... Oslo ... Roseau ... Michigan ... Fertile ... and Mayville to report how rural communities were faring as COVID-19 hit the best burgs in Minnesota and North Dakota.
To take a trip to Erskine, follow U.S. 2 east. Kimberly Wynn / Herald graphic
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