LEANDER, Texas — With school out of session, many teachers are turning to online learning, but missing their interactions with their students.
Like every school across the country, Rouse High School in Leander is shut down. It's not exactly how any of the teachers expected to finish out this school year.
"Many things are out of our control," said Marguerite Swilling.
"Schools are our family. We are that person or the people that your child sees for eight hours," said Kelly Mantay.
Both Mantay and Swilling were left wanting more connection.
"Not having our students is hard, but also not having our staff, not having our friends – we're incredibly close," explained Mantay.
That's why the school administration made this.
"Our whole intention behind creating this video is to thank our staff for working so hard as we've gone through the digital format," explained Stratton Brown, one of the vice principals at the high school.
One of the other vice principals, Darla Smith, actually came up with the idea; Brown made it happen.
"I didn't have all the musical talents. I don't have any actually, so I reached out: 'Hey friend, I got this idea,' and he ran with it," said Smith.
"We're on corona-ca-ca-cation, I'm stuck in my house," sings Brown in the video as others lip-sync over.
"Whenever Darla called me and said, 'Hey, I got an idea to do a parody to the song 'My House' by Flo Rida, I said that's a perfect song right now, obviously," explained Brown.
"I think it was therapeutic for us a little bit too, just for us to have a little bit of fun and to share with our staff since we can't share in person anymore, and that's so hard," said Smith.
"I died. It's funny, because we're all so close, so seeing all of our administrators do this was just it was shocking but fun. I loved it," said Mantay.
Even if the school is closed down, they're still together as a family.
"Absolutely," said Smith. "We miss our kids. We miss our kids at Rouse a lot."
"It came at the right time. It was a good point for us to get something like that," said Swilling.
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