Students at the Harding Township School learned important lessons in astronomy, persuasive writing and civics when they took their arguments for a half-day in honor of Monday’s solar eclipse to their school board…and won.
The Morris County district joins at least six others in New Jersey that will be closing early for the eclipse. Districts including Livingston, Shore Regional, Pennsauken, Cherry Hill, Winslow Township and Burlington Township chose to avoid the possibility that children will damage their eyes by looking at the eclipse without protective glasses. Districts are also concerned that distracted drivers may cause traffic problems when darkness descends.
Todd Jones, a fifth-grade teacher at the K-8 school in New Vernon, said the push for an early dismissal grew after his students chatted with Superintendent Matthew Spelker about getting a day off to watch Monday’s eclipse. The school’s 297 students usually get dismissed at 3:15 p.m., just when the moon will be traveling in front of the sun.
“He laughed and said, ‘That’s above my pay grade, you’d have to ask the Board of Education for that,’” Jones recalled.
The students took Spelker up on the dare, Jones said.
Turns out, more than heavenly bodies were aligning this term. March happened to be the month for the school’s two fifth-grade classes to study persuasive speech as well as space, so they brainstormed and wrote up arguments for early dismissal, each addressing letters to the board. The classes combined these letters to present at the March 18 board meeting.
The student arguments included:
- “Our class goes crazy whenever it snows. We can’t imagine what it would be like with a real solar eclipse.”
- “Over 200 students exiting the buildings at this time with the light levels changing from the eclipse could be very hazardous. This can lead to many students tripping and falling, and, worse, damaging their eyesight if they look directly at the sun.”
- “Can you imagine if [your eclipse] memory was of trying to see it through a window on a bus?”
- “Parents and bus drivers can’t focus on the road with crazy children on board. The danger level of the predicament doubles because of the dark. The probability of an accident is high.”
Then they got a little goofy: “On an extra cautious note, nocturnal animals might get confused and think it’s night time, and could possibly walk on to the school grounds. If you’re thinking of coyotes, deer, foxes, or raccoons, we were thinking bears! Keep in mind, bears are dangerous, and if a bear walks on to school grounds, we probably wouldn’t see it because it’s so dark out.”
“It was really fun to watch the kids talk it through,” said Jones, who teaches fifth grade at the school along with Jen Crum and Erin Nedick.
“It was all about the kindergarteners, they were going to go blind, they were going to look up,” Jones said. “Their focus got very serious. Their writing got very serious.”
Twelve of the 25 letter writers attended the March 18 school board meeting, presenting a PowerPoint and reading their arguments to board members. Jones described it as a mini civics lesson, as none of the students had attended a board meeting before. School board president Davor Gjivoje walked them through their need to make a request, gain support from a board member and a recommendation from the superintendent.
Then they had to field questions from the board: will you go from class to class to explain the early dismissal? And, a harder one: will you agree not to play video games all afternoon?
The students fell silent and looked at each other.
“The biggest shock was that they’d be delivering that message, that we agreed on the school’s behalf that there’d be no video games,” Jones said. It was an additional civics lesson on the joys and pitfalls of representative government.
The kids’ eyes widened when they watched the board prepare for a vote, Jones said, as they had not believed a decision could come so quickly.
“They were saying ‘oh my gosh, oh my gosh’ and holding hands with each other as the votes were being taken,” he said, and celebrated when the vote went in their favor, unanimously.
The students spent the days following the meeting visiting classrooms to share knowledge about the eclipse. And other teachers have been congratulating the fifth graders for their persuasive skills.
“This was one of the most inspiring cross-curricular projects we have ever done,” Jones said.
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Tina Kelley may be reached at tkelley@njadvancemedia.com.
