Principal goes ‘old school’ to teach students lessons

WHEN Principal Joshua McElgunn turned up to work at Torquay’s St Therese school in October 2020, he wasn’t taking anything for granted.

The COVID lockdowns that had struck months earlier presented a unique challenge to the students at St Joseph’s School where he was principal at the time: how do you provide home learning when not everyone can get online?

St Joseph’s is a small school in the Western District town of Coleraine and has just 45 pupils spread across three classrooms.

The majority of families live on rural properties and have no or limited internet.

“The idea of providing daily online home learning was incredibly challenging, almost impossible,” Mr McElgunn says.

Even the families that did have internet connection did not have a fast enough connection for video linkups.

“We just had to go old-school and prepare hard copy work packs for each student.”

The teachers would spend Thursday and Friday nights at the school, some nights as late as midnight, individually tailoring differentiated work packs for the 45 children.

Then Mr McElgunn would pack up his Ford Everest and crank up a podcast or two.

“Come Saturday morning I would bundle everything into my car, along with my eight-year-old daughter Grace, and we would hit the road together,” he said.

“We did a lot of kilometres and saw a lot of dirt roads.”

For the five-week lockdown, the father and daughter duo would do a three-hour, 240 kilometre, round trip, visiting family farms across the district.

“We would drive down the driveways and children would be on their verandas and at their windows waving at us.”

Often Mr McElgunn and Grace would be the only other people they had seen all week.

“We got a kick out of it too, we felt like royalty.”

The kids would have their completed homework from the week before in the mailbox or waiting on the porch for Josh to collect.

“Then I would give them a wave, toot my horn, flash my lights and be off to the next place.”

“It was a real eye opener. It’s amazing how resilient people can be against the odds.”

Now based in Torquay, Mr McElgunn said we are very lucky in this region to live where we do and have access to the resources that we have, which is something he doesn’t take for granted.

Mr McElgunn recently won a Partnership Award from the Catholic Education Office of Ballarat for his work in connecting regional teachers throughout the 2020 lockdowns.