School Visits are Back, Baby

Our 2022 Season: After the Pandemic, Some School Visits are Back to Normal-ish

By Charlie Barshaw

"This is how we pay the mortgage,"

                                                                           says Ruth McNally Barshaw, my wife and hero of this piece. She’ll tell that to educators when we attempt to pick up our check for our completed school visit, or basically anyone who is considering bringing us in. The school visit business, at the best of times, is simply a series of freelance jobs. Like a stand-up comedian performing on a different stage every day. To an unamused audience of children.

Photo and makeup: Emily Barshaw

School visits require a volunteer booking agent, a travel expert, a bodyguard, a chauffeur and a tech wiz. And the talent to wrangle a roomful of children into spending 60 minutes criss-cross applesauce doing the stuff you want them to be doing. Luckily, there are two of us to share the responsibilities. Too often all of these jobs are done by one person, who also writes for a living and attempts to have a somewhat normal life.

It’s been tough paying the mortgage these last two years with school visit money. In March 2020, we were almost to the middle of “March is Reading Month.” We had just finished a two-day stint at the schools in my sister-in-law’s district, when Friday, March 13 happened. Yes, Friday the 13th.

Covid shutdowns for everyone.

All the rest of the engagements for the rest of the year were canceled.

2021 saw “virtual” happen. Ruth and I reluctantly learned how to “film” a video and send it, and she figured out how to hook up our document camera to her desktop. We conducted Zoom school visits.

Enter 2022. We got actual email inquiries, and schools wanted in-person--in a crowded gym with a flock of 200 students--assemblies. You know, the kind of old-school school visit that was commonplace pre-pandemic.

But this was Pandemic A.D. We would do things differently.

First off, we’d need a warm-up. Our in-person school visit muscles had atrophied.

Instead of choosing a local classroom, we chose a school and two teachers close to our hearts, and about ninety minutes north of our physical bodies. Amy Romanowski and Heather Jensen are our friends and a remarkable teaching team, and we asked if we could practice our routine in their classrooms. And they said yes, let’s go tomorrow.

So we did go, more than 100 miles in about an hour and a half. Forgot all but the biggest sketch book. Did one one-hour session, then I packed and set up in a classroom three doors down while Ruth was besieged with young autograph seekers.

Ate the fancy cafeteria lunch they bought for us, and reluctantly took a $50 gas gift card. We owed them and their students much more than what they gave us.

First real visit up, two different schools close to each other, a Pre K-2  and an upper-elementary.  The problem with two schools in one day is the scheduling. One school did a much better job of communicating than the other.

So when upper-el wanted us to host a crowd of 280 ( we specifically ask for crowds of fewer than 200) I just assumed that the other school wanted the same, close to 300 kindergarten through 7 year-olds in one sitting, without a screen or a microphone(!?!)

Then the fifth grades chose not to show up, and all of a sudden we had a lot fewer than 200 in the audience. The afternoon session did not have 200 students, not even close, so they sat at tables in a small classroom. One 2nd grader came up with an axolotl for an animal, a first for Ruth drawing one.

The next week we had three school visits in a row, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. All over the state, from as close as you can get to Ohio without actually being there, to the tip of the “Thumb,” to an Oakland County school in the middle of the “palm”.  All due to me inexplicably leaving a day-off off the calendar.

Ruth decided to book three hotel rooms, and it didn’t take long for me to agree. Those two hour drives at the height of morning rush hour are not good for my blood pressure. Booking a hotel so the early-morning drive is not so early, and the drive 15 minutes or less, was worth the extra cost.

First stop, a school who’d had us before, a repeat customer. They remembered us more than I remembered them, but it all came back when I saw the gym, and the hairy wall we’d use as a screen.

We got an extra half hour for our session with grades 6-8, as we kind of bragged we were great with older students, the older the better. We did great,  then killed (not literally) with grades 3, 4, 5. We got out of there a little after three, a school pick-up time that required a dozen safety guard teachers and about a mile of backed-up vehicles. They allowed us  to escape the chaos.

We drove to the “Thumb”.  To look at your hand and measure from your wrist to your thumbnail, it doesn’t look to be far. Funny little hand. It was a three hour trip, 157 miles, before we made side trips to a bank and a gas station, and drove a lot farther north on Van Dyke than I knew it went.

We ended up in an off-brand hotel where the staff was friendly and hometown. We ate next door and got pizza, mostly for its travel-food quality.

We performed three sessions and an evening thing we call “Family Night” because we don’t know what else to call it. The school kept about 90 kids after school with activities that led to a pizza dinner at 5 when the folks come to pick them up. Oh, and a show.

Ruth made a “model” T-Rex out of Kroger grocery bags, and as always, we built a strange story, brainstormed by the audience, kids and adults, that went off the rails until it mercifully ended, “What happens next?”

Then, at around 6:30, we set out for Oakland County, 125 miles, 2 hours and 22 minutes away. The hotel had a “breakfast bag,” which turned out to be the best “breakfast” that any of the hotels had offered. A Jimmy Dean biscuit that you microwave in a napkin is still way better than a stale raisin bagel and a slug of canister coffee.

Our last school on this leg of the tour should have been a slam-dunk. A private school which allowed their students to buy our books, relatively intimate groups, K-1, 2-3, and 4-5.

A partial list of the challenges that day: locked doors, dead microphones, students at far-away tables, very little teacher involvement. And of course, the disruptive students (sisters, actually) sat, as such audience members always do, front and center, confronting Ruth and throwing off her rhythm.

Some students still came away with pages of drawn story and doodles, but our overall feeling was disappointment that we didn’t have a better session. Then, when no one came to pick up their books or to pay us, we loaded all of our school visit equipment and their box of books on a three-tiered kitchen cart and rolled it to our car, half an acre away.

Then we drove to see Ruth’s Mom in Harper Woods, a suburb of Detroit. We endured until “Wheel of Fortune” ended, then drove home in an exhausted haze.

And though covid seems to be considered a controlled disease, Ruth caught some (non-controlled, non-covid, we checked) bug or other (along with dog  allergies from our suddenly three-dog-a-night house) from the germ factories, also known as elementary schools. It was reassuring, in an uncomfortable and extended way for Ruth, to see disease transmission in schools back to normal.

Ruth somehow rallied to complete our final school visit scheduled in March. It was a fitting finale, in that students and staff loved us, got the talking points from the presentation, enjoyed the absurd humor of Ruth and a roomful of brainstorming 3rd, 4th and 5th graders, and actually checked out our extensive offering of dozens of cool handouts.

Oh, and they paid us.

Now, all the school visit suitcases and containers are stacked haphazardly in my office, our youngest’s old bedroom. We’re hoping for a week or two of Ohio school visits in May (which is Ohio’s version of  “ ___ is Reading Month.”) Edit to read: We gave three Ohio schools a little taste of Ruth McNally Barshaw’s spontaneous sketching. It was spectacular!

Let me circle around to the beginning, which Ruth tells student writers to try to do in their stories.

Me, Amy Romanowski, Ruth, Heather Jensen

After we visited our school teacher-friends up north, Heather Jensen wrote this on FB:

This is how we begin to heal our teaching souls. Ruth McNally Barshaw and Charlie Barshaw came to {our school} to work with Amy Romanowski' s and my learning communities! The first author visit in over two years. The first author visit ever for many of our young people. It was powerful and boy did their creativity shine for the entire day! It felt so good to hug my dear friends and listen to their stories of the last two years. My heart is smiling and happy. A little bit of normalcy felt amazing. If you have not checked out the Ellie McDoodle series, I highly recommend you read them! Thank you Ruth and Charlie for validating my young authors and illustrators! Your kind words made all the difference!

That’s our experience of school visits in 2022. Some things, like a crowd of students bending to the floor simultaneously to draw the thing Ruth drew, stayed the same. Some things, like close-by hotel rooms with no housekeeping, were different.

There are still risks, but in-person school visits are back, baby.

Ruth's info:

Website www.ruthexpress.com

Twitter@ruthexpress

Ruth McNally Barshaw is the author/illustrator of the six-book Ellie McDoodle Diaries series, and the illustrator of two more children's books. She is currently illustrating two books for publication next year, and her new agent is shopping her book manuscripts around. She and her husband travel extensively to as many school visits as they can sanely schedule.

Charlie Barshaw is the author of seven short stories for Amazon Rapids. He is a proud board member of the Michigan Reading Association. He's been a member of SCBWI-MI since 2009. He's got three novels (2 YAs and an MG) trying to break out of the drawer, and is gathering guts to publish online or send out queries.