“Our lives are filled with so many heroes,” wrote one of our frequent Colorado Academy social media readers from New York City. In that city, health workers again counted a new record for single-day increases in deaths from COVID-19. And whether in NYC or Denver, we are indeed fortunate at this time of COVID-19 to be served by many, many heroes.
Heroes include our faculty, who continue teaching while pacing in front of their homes with a laptop or while bouncing a kid on their knee. They include our library staff members, who, most weeknights, are reading bedtime stories to our children live on Facebook, and our Dining Hall staff, teaching children and families about cooking and enjoying meals together.
Heroes include our counseling staff, continuing to work with students by phone and video conference, as well as our IT staff, devoting one-on-one time with families as they work through technology issues to enable online learning.
Too, our heroes include the city workers, government employees, restaurant workers, journalists, and many others in the essential services sectors, who work to keep our infrastructure running, keeping people fed, housed, informed, and cared for. For all of us, heroes include the front line medical workers, who are risking their own health each day to tend to the sick and nurse them back to health.
For CA, our heroes are also our alumni, who are among the workforce in those essential services, like Darby Shockley ’13, working as a pediatric nurse at Children’s Hospital, who is thinking about helping others now and about preparedness for other pandemics in the future.
Then there is Iain Hyde, Class of ‘02, who is the Deputy Director of the National Preparedness Analytics Center at Argonne National Laboratory, who says he is simply glad to be in a position to help and contribute.
There is also CA alumnus Reid Aronstein ’12, who is working the front lines to help support Colorado’s small and large businesses at this time of economic disruption. In his role, he is also working to sustain the flow of medical equipment and supplies to Colorado’s health care providers.
And there is Evan Pushchak ’02, who is completing his residency in emergency medicine at Northwestern University Hospital in Chicago. Early on in this crisis, he took time to speak to us at CA. Not only is he serving on the front lines in Chicago, but he also offered himself as a resource to the CA community.
As I have shared over and over again, I am so grateful to be part of this community of people who support one another, who work on behalf of children, care for those who cannot care for themselves, and for those many parents, grandparents, and others who believe in the future of our school, our state, and our nation.
Godspeed to all of our heroes; we are indeed lucky to have you filling our lives.