OUR EAST:
LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVE Hear from EAST leaders Jerry Prince, Matt Dozier, & Melanie Ridlon
O
ne of the most watched sessions on the Mainstage, Our EAST: From the Perspective of EAST Staff, gave the EAST network an opportunity to ask three prominent leaders with over 50 combined years of experience their thoughts on EAST. We ran short on time but not on questions! Here are a few questions from the chat that our leaders didn’t get to answer on screen. This group had so many stories to tell that we couldn’t fit them all here either! Who knows? They may appear on an episode of the EAST Update podcast or social media. Check out these answers for now!
EQ: Do you think EAST students were more equipped to respond to the pandemic? What impressed you the most? MD: I absolutely believe that EAST students were better equipped to respond to the pandemic. I’m impressed that this is how the question is framed; if it were “Did the EAST students ‘handle’ the pandemic better?” then it would be disingenuous to say that they did any better or worse than others. This has been a difficult situation—in so many ways—and everyone has had to handle it based on so many factors that no one else could easily understand. From that perspective, like I tell people all the time, EAST students are real students…normal students with everything that goes along with it. When a massive, world-changing event sweeps
over everyone then the personal reactions to that are exactly that: personal. Instead, when I think back on the service projects that EAST students were doing as early as March of 2020, it is humbling to be a part of a network that was eager to spring into action to serve their communities and be a force for good in a dark time. When we were first contacted about a coordinated effort to try to mass produce some 3D printed PPE, it was because the state group that was trying to respond to this knew that the number, capacity, a dispersion of EAST students meant that they had resources in so many communities that could turbocharge a project of significant need. From there to hear about all the things EAST students were doing with their projects to serve specific needs (and people) in their communities, well, it just fills you with pride to know such committed people. Beyond service projects, though, EAST students are steeped in an environment where self-directed learning is the expectation, where responding to the challenges of Plan A not working means backing up and taking a run to Plan B (which may be being created on the fly) where working together is about making sure everyone is learning. Well, if that doesn’t look like the reality of the school day in 2020 and 2021, I don’t know what does.
