Following a summer of indecision and fear of the unknown, New Tampa’s schools finally opened their doors to students for in-person learning for the first time since they closed in March due to Covid-19.
“Woo hoo!,” shouted one parent, as she drove off smiling after dropping her two kids off at Benito Middle School.
Students spent the first week of the 2020-21 school year eLearning only, as the fight over whether or not to open brick-and-mortar classrooms for students and teachers raged on.
The Hillsborough School Board initially leaned towards doing eLearning only for the first nine weeks, before settling for four weeks after consulting a panel of medical experts. However, that decision was then overturned by Superintendent Addison Davis, after Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran threatened to withhold millions of dollars in funding to schools that did not offer a brick-and-mortar option for parents.
Busy at work cleaning and prepping their classrooms for a socially-distant learning experience, teachers finally opened the doors to their students on August 31.
After the first week, Chiles principal Teresa Evans said things went “remarkably well.” At Chiles, roughly 450 students were home learning online, while 400 or so learned in classrooms. Evans said none of her teachers were forced back into the classrooms, and praised their efforts in the opening week.
“I think we planned and planned and planned and what we planned has worked out so far,” Evans said. “The kids aren’t struggling with masks the way people thought. They have been very compliant, and the parents have been incredibly compliant and helpful in following the new rules.”
Those new rules include keeping desks as far apart from each other as possible, eating lunches outside under the school’s covered courts keeping everything as clean and sanitized as possible.
“We were nervous, but never terribly worried,” Evans says. “We were very careful and will continue to be, and we are tweaking things as we go.”
While the Covid-19 numbers were slightly rising in Hillsborough County during the first week, schools hadn’t reported any large outbreaks.
According to the school district’s Covid-19 dashboard, the first four days produced only 21 positive cases among students, and another nine from school staff.
The district is not reporting if any classrooms have been quarantined.
From March through July, the district reported 284 confirmed cases of Covid-19.
In New Tampa, the only schools to report any cases were Freedom High and Tampa Palms Elementary, with each reporting one student positive from the first day of school.
John and Sheri Thrasher opened Excel Music on Cross Creek Blvd. in 2006. They have adapted their business model to meet online student needs during the pandemic.
For more than 14 years, Excel Music on Cross Creek Blvd. in New Tampa has been teaching private music lessons to students of all ages. But lately, something has been very different than “business as usual.”
Since March, all of Excel Music’s students have been taught exclusively virtually.
“The nature of in-person music lessons doesn’t permit social distancing,” says Excel Music owner John Thrasher, “so we’ve chosen to do virtual lessons.”
He says the school’s building, located in the Cory Lake Isles Professional Center on Cross Creek Blvd., has remained closed since the Covid-19 pandemic began in March. However, Excel Music’s 20 teachers and dozens of students are as active as always, teaching and learning from their homes.
John says all of Excel Music’s teachers are either university trained (many with Master of Music degrees) or they have at least 10 years of study and performing experience.
The music school offers lessons in voice and practically every instrument, with piano, violin, guitar and drums being the most popular, according to John, and quite a few students learning brass and woodwind instruments, too, such as trumpet, tuba, saxophone and clarinet.
Students work with the same teacher week after week, so although their teachers are now only on a computer screen, the student still know them.
“It provides some normalcy and routine in their lives, when a whole lot of normalcy and routines have been removed,” says John, who adds that the school has continued to add “a steady stream” of new students throughout the pandemic.
“Obviously, parents are just as interested in improving their children’s lives as they always have been,” John explains. “Music is still important, and virtual lessons are kind of the only way that you can do it right now.”
A Little Background Music…
John and his wife Sheri originally opened Excel Music in 2006, with the dream of providing the opportunity for young people to be trained for the kinds of careers and lives they once experienced themselves.
“We both had long careers in music, and were professional musicians who were able to make a living performing,” John says, adding that he was the drummer for country singer Mickey Gilley for many years, which gave him the opportunity to perform on TV, at the White House and for people all over the world.
In the 1990s, John and Sheri had success together with a band of their own in Japan called Tz, where he says they sold tens of thousands of CDs. They also found themselves immersed in a culture that revered teachers, which led them to start thinking about passing on the knowledge and experience they had gained to the next generation.
“We met tremendous people, saw great places, and made a living,” John says. “We started thinking, ‘What if some of the kids who come through our school can experience what we’ve experienced?’”
However, John says he and Sheri recognize that the vast majority of their students will not go on to have professional music careers.
“Our teachers are good enough for that type of student, but most of our students will go on to have another career, such as a doctor or lawyer or something else,” he says.
He adds that the goal at Excel Music is to provide students with an appreciation for music, plus provide the benefits of learning how to play and/or sing.
“There’s so much data about how great studying music is for your brain for spatial learning and big-picture thinking,” John explains. “There are always studies coming out saying that because music is a whole brain activity, when kids learn music, their math and other school skills improve, too.”
Kristy Sargent, who lives in West Meadows, says her 10-year-old daughter Regan has been taking piano lessons for more than a year with Excel Music.
“Both the school and her teacher have been so amazing,” says Kristy. “They’ve been very flexible with being online. It hasn’t been easy to have everything change so much, but they’ve done a really, really good job.”
Kristy says one of her favorite things is how well the teachers communicate. “It’s a fantastic school that feels very personal. It feels like they really care about you and your child.”
The Right Teachers, Too
John and Sheri want each one of their students to feel that way, so they carefully choose only the best instructors.
They ensure that every teacher they hire to work at Excel Music is background checked, has appropriate credentials, and truly knows both their instrument and how to teach it. John says that just because someone has a doctoral degree in music or some other accomplishment,that doesn’t mean they will relate well to teaching students.
“They have to know how to teach, which is a completely different set of skills,” explains John, who says that — over the last 14 years — he has tried to show New Tampa families that they can trust Excel Music to make great decisions about who to hire to teach for the school.
He says two teachers have been with Excel Music since it opened in 2006, and a number of others have stayed with the Thrashers for five, six, or eight years.
“We definitely have stability,” he says. “We’ve been doing this for a long time.”
Age Doesn’t Matter
And, while many of Excel Music’s students are kids, the opportunity to learn to sing or play an instrument is certainly not limited by your age.
“A lot of adults want lessons, too,” says John. “We get retired people who say they’ve wanted to play their whole lives, and now they’re finally going to do it.” He fondly recalls a man who came to Excel Music to learn how to play the trumpet at 86 years old!
Dylan and Diya Arun give a thumbs up to online learning with Excel Music.
John says the last few months have been extremely trying and that he and Sheri — like virtually all small business owners — are just trying day by day to make the best decisions they can for their company, their employees and their customers. However, at the end of the day, they feel really good about the nearly 15 years they’ve spent leading Excel Music in New Tampa.
“We’re putting music in people’s heads,” he says. “We’re not making widgets that end up in landfills; we’re doing this thing that’s good for our community and for the world in general.”
Excel Music, located at 10353 Cross Creek Blvd., Suite I, is open for virtual lessons only right now. For more information or visit ExcelMusic.org, call (813) 991-1177.
Taravat Tarahom didn’t get to bask in the glory of being Freedom High School’s Class of 2020 valedictorian, thanks to the outbreak of Covid-19 cutting short her senior year. Nor did she get to give her speech in front of a throng of her classmates in an arena, instead settling for a safe and socially distant recorded message.
What Taravat says she did get out of being Freedom’s valedictorian, however, was a life-altering accomplishment at the end of what, at times, was an extremely difficult journey.
“This has taught me to look at one goal, but not make (that goal) my entire life,” the 18-year-old says.
She was able to balance a huge school load, deal with the divorce of her parents and the death of her dog, as well as a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, all while unexpectedly rising to the top of her class.
Taravat walked away from Freedom with a greater appreciation of her relationships and health and with the piece of mind that comes from learning how to stay prioritized.
“The experience definitely changed me,” says Taravat, who finished with a 7.64 weighted grade-point-average.
Leyla Mohebbi, her mother, says she couldn’t be more proud. She says academics have always been a priority in her home, where bringing home a B meant you would be asked, “Why not an A?”
“I feel like Tara put the expectation onto herself that she did not want to be anything less than a valedictorian,” Leyla says. “I’m very happy. I knew that was her dream, and she made it happen.”
Taravat has followed in the footsteps of her sister Targol, who was Freedom’s valedictorian in 2015 and is now in medical school at Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Lauderdale. Taravat says she felt the bar was “set impossibly high” before she even started high school. She faced a steady climb up the academic ladder, ranking only around No. 25 in her class after her sophomore year.
She remembers moving up in the class rankings after the first semester of her junior year, somewhere into the teens, and her determination to become the second valedictorian in the family was growing.
She mentioned to some of her classmates and her teacher in AP Biology that she was going to go for it, and they laughed, because she still had more than a dozen students to pass.
“That set something off in me,” Taravat admits.
A former cheerleader, she started her senior year ranked No. 7 in the class, but once her summer grades were input into the system — “I had a crazy workload that summer” — she had quietly risen to No. 3. But, she stayed under the radar, and continued to take a heavy load.
Taravat, who was co-president of the school’s Sierra Club, says a typical day in the fall of her senior year would entail waking up at 7 a.m. for six hours of school at Freedom, then coming home around lunchtime to eat and pack herself a dinner, and working for three hours as an online tutor, driving to the Hillsborough Community College (HCC) Ybor City campus for a three-hour English class and then heading over to the HCC campus on N. Dale Mabry Hwy. for physics lab.
In February, she found out it was official — she had quietly risen to the top of her class. She called Leyla. They cried.
Even More Challenges
The hard work did not come without a cost, however.
In December, she had lost 15 pounds and spent two days in the hospital, where she was diagnosed with Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. “I was so wrapped up in school I didn’t even pay attention to my health,” Taravat says. “I was kind of mad at myself for not noticing.”
Her diagnosis has triggered an interest in endocrinology, which she hopes to study at the University of Florida. She plans on majoring in microbiology and cell sciences.
And while her valedictorian speech wasn’t delivered to a crowd of her classmates, it did come from the heart. Without the trials and tribulations of her senior year, it might have been a completely different speech.
“Remember this,” she told the Class of 2020. “If you fall: get back up. It’s cliché, I know, but get back up. Don’t allow setbacks to steer you off your natural path. Don’t let a single failure ruin those deep-rooted hopes and dreams. Because ultimately, rock bottom could be the solid foundation that you build the rest of your life on.”
Although Hillsborough County is giving parents three choices for the upcoming fall semester, it really comes down to two choices — learn in a traditional classroom with other students, restoring the social interaction and face-to-face contact that are the stalwarts of education; or learn in a more isolated and individual-based online format at home that makes it easier to avoid contracting the virus and transmitting it to others.
However, there is a group of local parents considering something else — merging the classroom and online settings together in a unique collaboration that, they believe, will offer the best of both worlds.
Tampa Palms resident Jenni Wolgemuth, an Associate Professor of measurement and research at the USF College of Education and mother of a first- and fifth-grader, is helping to organize a group of 4-5 families whose children will learn online, but will learn together in a small “learning pod” overseen by a privately hired learning support specialist.
“A one-room school house,” Wolgemuth calls it. “It is an attempt to create a bubble around a group of families, all agreeing to similar standards of social distancing.”
That school house, or learning “pod,” that Wolgemuth has organized will have nine students in it. Four of the students are fifth graders, who would hopefully have the same teachers at the charter school they all attended last year.
The pod also will include two first-graders, a third grader, an eighth grader and a ninth-grader. The parents would rotate hosting and the kids would bring their lunches and eat together and have time for outdoor activities together, too.
Everyone would still be taught by their school’s teachers through the online platform and Zoom video classrooms used by their schools. However, the parents are already interviewing people to be a support specialist, who would monitor the pod from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. and help the students with technology issues, staying on task and doing their assignments.
“Basically what we would have been doing if we had been home,” Wolgemuth says.
The idea was Wolgemuth’s brainchild and she says she began thinking about the learning pod solution before the Hillsborough School District issued its choices for parents. She thought the District was too comfortable with the idea that everything would be fine by August. “I’m a planner,” she says. “This was my plan A.”
She mentioned the concept to friends, but the response, at first, was tepid. She continued, however, to bring it up in conversations.
When she had a Zoom call with other parents after the choices were revealed by the District, there was still some hesitation. During that call with other mothers, however, one of the husbands, a doctor who works with Covid-19 patients, overheard the plan.
“That is a really good idea,” he said, and the plan started to take root.
There are still hoops to jump through for Wolgemuth and her group, which includes a second Tampa Palms family, two families from Lutz and another from Carrollwood.
They will have to see how the pod works for the younger students, namely the two first graders. And, having nine or so computers using the same WiFi network could create issues that would need to be addressed.
Otherwise, Wolgemuth thinks the idea is the best fix for one semester, with the hopes that the coronavirus can be brought under control and that everyone can go back to their brick-and-mortar schools in January.
Pebble Creek resident Adam Rowan was one of King High’s top students.
As Pebble Creek resident Adam Rowan graduates from the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at King High on N. 56th St. in Tampa, he has a long list of accolades.
National Merit Scholarship Finalist.
National Hispanic Scholar.
Captain of the King soccer team.
Co-captain of the school’s tennis team.
Perfect score (36 out of 36) on the ACT.
Even with all of these accomplishments, the thing Rowan he says he’s most proud of is his role as the event lead for his school’s 2019 Relay For Life, benefiting the American Cancer Society, which he says, “raised just shy of $70,000 and had 500 students participating.”
Back when Rowan chose to go to the IB program at King, his dad, Mike Rowan, was the principal there.
“Him being there was a reason for me not to go there,” says Adam, “rather than a reason to go.”
Just about the time Rowan got used to seeing his dad walking the halls of his high school, his father became the principal at New Tampa’s Wharton High, just a quick ride from their Pebble Creek home.
Adam says it was an adjustment having his dad at a different school, but that he never reconsidered his decision to attend the King IB program.
“At that point, I was committed to the IB program and had done too much work to drop out,” he says.
However, Adam concedes he got the short end of the stick on commute times.
“I was leaving before him to drive to school, but he had to be at school before me,” he says. “I felt like I was getting no sleep compared to him.”
The lack of sleep and dedication to academics, sports and community service paid off when Rowan was accepted to prestigious Columbia University in New York City.
He says he toured the campus twice prior to applying and loved the feeling of it, the fact that it’s located in New York City, and that its Ivy League status means the curriculum will be rigorous.
“I liked being there,” he says. “I got a good vibe.”
That good vibe was so strong that he applied for early admission at Columbia. When he was accepted last fall, his decision to attend was binding and he had to decline his acceptance to University of South Florida and rescind the application he had submitted to the University of Florida.
He knew he didn’t want to go anywhere else.
Now, Rowan hopes he’ll be able to be on campus at Columbia in the fall. He thinks he’ll study political science, but also says he might change his mind before he’s required to declare a major his sophomore year.
While he won’t be playing any NCAA sports, Rowan says he can’t imagine life without soccer — he is a defender/midfielder and last year helped King to a 13-6-5 record in Class 5A — and is hoping to play on an intramural team at Columbia.
That, of course, is contingent on intramural sports being offered, and the Columbia campus being re-opened for in-person classes.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to go yet,” Rowan says. He is currently awaiting the official plan for reopening the campus, which is expected to be released on July 1.
As he makes plans to attend college in the heart of a city that has been so harshly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, Rowan says he’s not too worried.
“I’m a little nervous, but I feel like going to college up there, or even if I went to college here in Florida, it’s still a risk,” he says. “I won’t let it stop me.”
Clark Gets New Principal
Delilah Rabeiro was named the new principal at Clark Elementary in West Meadows, replacing Paulette English, who moved to Pride Elementary in K-Bar Ranch earlier this school year.
Rabeiro’s appointment was approved at the Hillsborough County School Board meeting on June 9 and becomes effective on July 1. She was one of 34 principals given new assignments by new Hillsborough Superintendant of Schools Addison Davis.
Rabeiro was most recently the principal at Robles Elementary on E. Sligh Ave. in N. Tampa.
Cotey Repeats As Champ!
Jonathon Cotey, who attends Middleton High but lives in New Tampa, recently won the first-ever ESports District Championship hosted by Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS).
The 16-player Super Smash Bros. tournament, completed online due to Covid-19, was the culmination of a year-long season in which players from nearly 20 high schools competed against each other at neutral sites.
Cotey, who plays under the gaming tag BionicLettuce and was seeded No. 2, defeated top-seeded Nicholas Eisman (Nerva) of Plant High 3-2 in the best of five series, despite dropping the first two games.
“This has been a work in progress for five years,” said Robert Dodson, ESports Club Sponsor at Middleton High. “If it was this popular during quarantine, I can’t wait to see how big this can become in the future.”
