“Kids are very resilient,” said Mark Johnson, interim principal at St. Paul. “I think they’ve taken it really well.”

He said that while the younger, preschool and kindergarten-aged students don’t understand what’s going on with the coronavirus, the older students adjusted well to the changes caused by the pandemic.

“Maybe sometimes the kids are handling it better than some of the adults,” he said.

Johnson, a longtime educator and former principal in the Fort Dodge Community School District, stepped into the interim principal role while school leaders search for a permanent replacement for former St. Paul Principal Barb Kozisek.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert St. Paul Lutheran School kindergarten teacher Roxanne Schuur leads her students in a math lesson recently.

“I’m keeping things together, keeping up morale, doing the daily things a principal does,” Johnson said.

The staff and students at St. Paul have been diligently following safety precautions this year to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the building.

“The school and teachers have done a really great job of adapting and adjusting,” Johnson said. “We really haven’t had hardly any issues at all with quarantines and people testing positive. We all wear masks and everybody does a good job of social distancing as much as possible.”

Concerns posed by COVID-19 led to St. Paul postponing its school-sanctioned sports programs, Johnson said.

“We’re not exactly sure when we’ll get that going again, but we’re looking forward to getting volleyball going again once the pandemic leaves us,” he said.

Johnson noted that while St. Paul did see a slight decrease in enrollment this school year, he doesn’t expect it to have a significant or lasting impact.

“We’ll see what effect the pandemic has had on our enrollment in a month or so to see if we need any staffing changes,” Johnson said. “We didn’t lose that many, but we don’t know who will come back or new people will come in.”

Using funds provided by the CARES Act, St. Paul was able to purchase new Chromebooks and iPads for each student to use this year, Johnson said.

“We pretty much have computer accessibility to everyone in our school,” he said.

At the end of January is National Lutheran Schools Week, an event teachers and students look forward to, Johnson said. The celebration looks a lot like a school’s homecoming week, he said, filled with events and dress-up days, but is so much more than that.

“We’re going to try to do some outreach,” Johnson said. “Our model is to serve, so we’re going to do some service projects like making cards for nursing homes, first responders and military.”

He touted the benefits to students in small classrooms. “We’re pretty proud of giving a good, solid faith-based education to our students,” Johnson said. “Small classroom sizes are very productive. With our class sizes and the teacher-to-pupil ratio, we can really get relationships built and teach the fundamental things that need to be taught.”

“It doesn’t take long before you pretty much know everyone’s name,” he added.