There have been many unsung heroes over the last year since this pandemic hit, and today I’d like to praise the Vineyard’s preschool teachers. While I am the parent of a student at Island Children’s School, we have parent friends with children and our daughter has childhood friends, in every preschool on the Island. I know they all share this same sentiment.

Preschool teachers went back to in-person, full-time, five-days-a-week teaching last fall — at a time when the Island was expecting (and then received) our highest rate of Covid infections. While older students remained learning virtually at least to some degree, these preschool teachers opened their classroom doors to little people who do not yet fully understand boundaries or who can gauge what six-feet of distance is or who can keep their fingers out of their noses let alone a mask on their face. These teachers opened their classrooms while many also managed their own older children’s virtual learning and dealt with the mental well being of their own families and of themselves.

If you’ve never been able to see a smile on a masked face, you’ve never dropped your child off to a preschool teacher waiting at the gate. I can only imagine the stress and anxiety and worry their masks hid while showing up to their jobs so that parents like me could go to mine — because all we saw at those gates were warm welcomes and big grins behind masks. Parents were no longer allowed inside the preschools because of Covid restrictions, so we sent our little ones away outside, to teachers who truly cared for them throughout the day. At the age of preschoolers — 2.9 years old through age 5 — learning is play, learning is fun, learning is friends, and learning is socialization.

The preschool teachers on this Island have provided so much normalcy, consistency, love, vitality — yes, even with gallons of hand sanitizer and masks — to some of the youngest members of our Vineyard community, many of whom remember little of life before the pandemic. As we all begin to speak of this light at the end of the tunnel, and while I’m eager to see this pandemic behind us all, still knowing we’ve got some time yet, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for our Island’s preschool teachers for all they have done for our kids, and I hope the whole Vineyard will join me in recognizing their amazing and selfless work.

Aela H. Mass

Vineyard Haven