When the Ojai's 2,300 public school students were sent home last March, we had no idea how long until those students would be back in their classrooms. Turned out it would take more than a year before the schools could safely reopen. 

One of our earliest guests on the Ojai: Talk of the Town podcast was Tiffany Morse, superintendent of the Ojai Unified School District, to talk about the extraordinary measures the district was taking to make sure that the students (and parents) could meet the terrific challenge of remote learning. Not to mention the hundreds of meals each day being served by the district as many families struggled to get enough to eat. We talked about the entire cohort of student athletes, dramatists and musicians who lost these important rituals of passage, including their graduation ceremonies.

This time, the news was a little better. The schools reopened, with safety measures including outdoor classrooms, earlier this month. Among the good news was that Dr. Morse had been recently selected as the Superintendent of the Year for the tri-county region, in large part because of public-private initiatives during the pandemic, as seen in the overwhelming support for a $45 million bond measure, which is already being put to use building public spaces like a community pool and a massive solar project.

Morse talked about the measured responses to the tremendous pressures exerted on one side by parents who worried about how far their kids would get behind in their education, and teachers, who worried about losing their lives. It has been a time of great challenge and uncertainty, and now it's time for reflection and taking what lessons we can from this lost year. This deep and wide conversation explores the role of teachers, students and key insights into what makes a community work.

We did not talk about taimen fishing on the headwaters of the Amur River, the 16-inning pitching duel in 1963 between Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal, or the novels of Sybille Bedford.