A New York City teacher saw the pandemic coming and made sure her students were prepared.

As both a mother of two very young children and a third grade teacher in Brooklyn, Katie Rust-Brown is used to planning ahead. So when she began to see news reports that a mysterious illness was attacking China and starting to show up abroad, Katie’s intuition told her that she’d better start preparing. But instead of stocking up on hand sanitizer, toilet paper and masks, Katie was focused on her students.

“I knew that we would get shut down at some point, so starting in March, I started planning for whenever that happened, when we just didn’t come into school,” Katie says. “We started sending home chapter books for kids just to have at home so that they had books available during the shutdown. I put them in a bag and called them ‘Just In Case Books.’”

It was impossible to predict just how long they’d be conducting remote learning, but Katie did her best to prepare as many digital-friendly, relevant lessons as possible, even as she continued to teach in the classroom. For much of the school year, her class was learning about different kinds of communities, taking field trips to other parts of the city as well as suburban and rural locations to get an up-close view of how people live.

When COVID-19 began to wreak its havoc across the country, and New York in particular, she was able to transition that into lessons that helped students understand some scary current events.

“We took our community study and shifted it to be a study on resilient communities,” Katie explains. “It became about how we get through really difficult times together. It was a really cool way to integrate what was going on in the real world with our kids.”

Katie’s school is staying remote all throughout the fall, which is safer but makes teaching more difficult. She has to not only prep lessons for class, but figure out how to handle each child’s particular home situation and how to make sure they’re understanding and processing each lesson. And beyond that, being in the classroom is what she loves most, so time away is just emotionally hard to handle.

“I desperately miss the kids,” she says. “I miss their hugs. I miss their comments that make no sense. I miss their references to things I don’t know about. I miss all of it. Their energy is infectious and it’s what makes me happy.”

You can thank Katie directly and personally here.