Family members, former students who became co-workers, and friends gathered at the Will Coleman Center Friday morning to pay tribute to the man who mentored countless young people through the Center’s programming for almost 50 years.
Coach Richard Robertson is retiring from the responsibilities of the Center in what would have been his 49thofficial year, had the COVID-19 virus not shut down activities there this summer. And he’s not retiring because he wants to, but because “my girls just boss me,” he said, referring to his daughters, Michele Robertson and Mirenda Kirksey.
Andalusia Director of Leisure Services Tommie Agee said one of the blessings of his move to Andalusia has been getting to know Coach Robertson.
“Anytime I go somewhere representing the City, people stop me and ask, ‘Do you know Coach Robertson?’ ” he said. “He’s done a great job here at the Center, and we’re going to miss him.”
Former Leisure Service Director Dwight Mikel said, who first met Coach Robertson as a student during integration said, “I love and respect Coach for what he was able to teach not only to the kids, but to some of us grown-ups, too.”
Mikel said Robertson always made people aware of the sacrifices made by earlier generations that made so many things possible.
Councilman Will Sconiers said he grew up swimming at the Coleman Center in the afternoons, and playing Little League baseball for Coach Robertson in the early evenings.
“He was a father figure to a lot of young men in the community,” he said. “He was so dedicated, he would pick us up and take us to practice just to make sure we got there.”
Rose White-Parker recalled that she wanted badly to play basketball in school, but here were no teams for the girls in 1976.
“I told Coach, ‘I wanta play.’ He said, ‘You’re a girl.’
“I said, ‘I know I’m a girl. I want to play,” she recalled. “He said, OK, but he was going to treat me like he did the boys, and he did.”
White-Parker dressed out with the boys until Robertson could put a girls team together. Later, White-Parker worked with Coach Robertson at the Coleman Center and in the Andalusia City Schools system, where she teaches physical education and coaches girls JV basketball.
“I would meet him in the hallway, and if I needed help, we’d go work out the X’s and O’s,” she said.
Ann Shakespeare said she and all of her siblings grew up in the neighborhood with Coach Robertson and participated in the programs he ran at the Coleman Center.
“Coach embraced all children,” she said. “He was always encouraging someone’s child to keep going.”
Joe Nix said one of the hardest things he had to do as a youngster was learn to call his first cousin Richard, “Coach Robertson.”
“He was my first JV football coach,” Nix recalled. “In those days, if I got the ball, I would always go around one of the ends. He taught me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
Marshall Locke grew up next door to Robertson.
“He was more than a coach, he was a mentor,” Locke said. Locke played sports with his neighbor as his coach, then grew up to be an assistant coach under his tutelage.
“He would always say, ‘Hey, think about the kids,’ ” Locke, now head coach at Monroe County High School, recalled. “It was always the kids, the kids, the kids.”
Paula Simpson said she could remember participating in Coach Robertson’s summer program when she was a five-year-old.
“We called it play school,” she said. “Every year, I could not wait until school was out so I could go to play school.”
Later, she said, Coach Robertson told her to stop at the Center and fill out some paperwork.
“The next thing I knew, I had my first job. He would give us ‘nuggets’ all day every day,” she said. “I’ve been a teacher for 26 years, and I pass those nuggets along to my students every day.
“When I started a family, and my daughter turned 5, she was right up here every summer,” she said.
“I remember Coach would pull up with some bags of peaches,” she said. “He would tell us, ‘Come get you a peach. When you get done, go plant this seed, and next year, you bring me a peach.’ Same thing with watermelons. We planted the watermelon seeds right up there on the fence row every year, and if the deer didn’t get them, we’d have watermelons.
Simpson said she tells her students every year the same thing Coach Robertson told her and her friends.
“Just do right.”
Sammie Glover, who grew up with Robertson, said his friend has done much more for the community than teach them X’s and O’s.
“Any kid who needed assistance, Coach Robertson was there,” Glover said. “He helped produce young men and women of character.”
Mayor Earl Johnson said perhaps no man in the history of Andalusia has touched as many lives as Robertson.
“This Center is named after Will Coleman, and he was a great man, too. But he didn’t spend nearly as much time here as Richard Robertson did. I’m going to request that the Council add your name to the Center,” Johnson told Robertson in presenting a resolution in his honor. “
Kirksey and Robertson said their father, who has been alternating his time between them in Tallahassee and Texas during the pandemic, really doesn’t want to be anywhere but in Andalusia and at the Coleman Center.
“He thinks we’re too harsh,” Michele Robertson said. “We just want to make sure we still have him around so we can continue to love on him.”
U.S. Census workers will begin door-to-door canvassing in Andalusia today, Saturday, August 8, just as local and state officials are urging residents to take steps to make sure they are counted.
The Census Bureau has shortened the deadline to respond to the census by a month, and will end counting on Sept. 30, it announced Monday, prompting concerns that some will not be counted.
As of Friday, 62 percent of the estimated U.S. population had responded to the Census. The response rate in Alabama is 60.7 percent, and in Andalusia is 60.1 percent. If the rate does not increase to at least 90 percent by the end of September, the state will lose one or two Congressional seats, as well as federal funding.
“It is extremely important that every person in Andalusia and Alabama be counted in the 2020 Census,” Mayor Earl Johnson said. “We know there were areas of the city that were undercounted in 2010, and this has affected our ability to recruit retail here. A second undercount in 2020 would continue to hamper economic development efforts and affect federal grant funding for the next 10 years.
“We know that at least one seat in the U.S. Congress, and up to $13 billion in federal funding that we depend upon for healthcare, education, and infrastructure are at state,” Johnson said. “I urge every citizen of Andalusia who has not done so to take six minutes to complete the Census today.”
The City of Andalusia and the Andalusia Area Chamber of Commerce are joining Alabama’s “Drop Everything and Be Counted” effort and encouraging businesses that have not already done so to schedule time this Wednesday, August 12, for employees to complete the 2020 Census.
“If you are a business owner who is willing to allow employees time to do this during the workday, and you need help, please let us know,” the mayor said. “We can send someone with an electronic device and help facilitate their registration.”
“At the Chamber we believe that improvements to Alabama’s essential services are good for business,” Executive Director Chrissie Duffy said. “There is up to $13 billion in federal funding at stake, and we want to make sure get our share. This small task plays an important role in our collective futures. That's why we're encouraging all Covington County businesses to join us for Drop Everything Day on August 12th."
Duffy suggested hosting a breakfast for your employees during which they can complete the census form, or blocking off half an hour for employees to all focus just on taking the census.
“Create time slots for employees to sign up and take the census if you don’t have enough computers available,” she said. “Whatever strategy you choose, let your employees know how important the 2020 Census is. It’s only 10 questions, but it can make a huge impact on our communities.”
The easiest way to complete the Census is self-response online at www.My2020Census.gov, by phone at 844-330-2020 or by mail.
Census Bureau workers will only knock on the doors of those who have not responded. Federal Census Bureau workers have undergone training and will adhere to all rules of social distancing and face coverings.
“We have spoken with several local residents who will be working for the Census here,” Johnson said. “We have city employees calling all residents to encourage them to register.
A 90-year-old female who had slipped away from her home and caregivers was found safe late Sunday night, thanks to the help of the Andalusia Fire Department and its thermal imaging technology.
Andalusia Police Department Chief Paul Hudson said he and his officers were involved in investigating a stabbing and a police pursuit when the department received a call that a caregiver had awakened to find that the woman, who suffers from dementia, had left her home on Packer Avenue.
“They got up to check on her and realized she was gone,” Hudson said.
The APD responded, and called on the Covington County Sheriff’s Posse for assistance. However, the posse was unable to use their tracking dogs because too many people had already walked around the area.
Hudson said the APD then requested assistance from the fire department.
“From what I understand, Chief Hudson briefed firefights on what needed to be done,” AFD Chief Russell McGlamory said. “We took Engine 7, which has enough scene lights to light up the world.”
As some firefighters drove the neighborhood searching with those lights, others used the department’s thermal imaging equipment.
“It’s basically a handheld device that picks up heat,” McGlamory said. “We normally use them if we go in a smoke-filled house, but you can actually see a thermal image silhouette of the person.”
The woman was found not too far from her home in the edge of a wooded area, where she had curled up.
“It didn’t really look like the silhouette of a human, but they were able to see the heat and locate her,” he said.
McGlamory credited the newest member of the department, Colter Poole, with actually finding the woman. Hudson said she was located within five minutes of the department’s arrival.
“She appeared to be uninjured, but we had rescue come and evaluate her,” Hudson said.
The APD referred to family to the Project Lifesaver program, a partnership between the Pilot Club of Andalusia and the Covington County Sheriff’s Department which provides tracking bracelets for those with brain disorders or injuries who might wander away from their caregivers and become lost.
Hudson expressed his appreciation to the AFD, the Covington County Sheriff’s Department and the Covington County Sheriff’s Posse for their assistance.
Andalusia has been named a 2019 Certified Municipality by the Alabama League of Municipalities (ALM), a highly regarded honor awarded to cities and towns in which the mayor and all councilmembers have earned the professional designation of Certified Municipal Official.
This was the second year Andalusia was recognized as a Certified Municipality. It also gained recognition in the inaugural class last year.
This designation through ALM signifies that the mayor and all councilmembers have completed a minimum of 40 credit hours of formal training on the foundational elements of municipal government conducted or endorsed by ALM via its Certified Municipal Official (CMO) Program. Qualifying municipalities are selected by ALM based on CMO program credit hour records during the previous calendar year and receive an official certificate as well as an annual Certified Municipality digital seal for use on the municipality’s website
“As mayor, I am proud that Andalusia is just one of a handful of cities to be represented with this distinction,” Mayor Earl Johnson said. “This is representative of the hard work members of our council have done, reading the assigned materials, and getting up to speed on the law. I know the citizens you represent appreciate what this represents.”
The 2019 Certified Municipal Achievement Awards were presented in Montgomery on Thursday, July 23, during the Business Session of ALM’s annual convention.
Children need to go to school, and even those parents who opt for a virtual school experience for their children this year could benefit from having their children attend a least a few weeks of classes.
That’s the message Andalusia City Schools Superintendent Ted Watson and local pediatrician Dr. Charles Eldridge shared in a video recorded Friday and shared this weekend to answer parents’ questions about health concerns in the 2020-21 school year.
“It is extremely important that we get back to school,” Dr. Eldridge said. “The American Academy of Pediatrics and others who look at such things think it is very important that we return to in-class teaching. But we want to do say in a manner that our children are protected to the greatest extent possible.”
An abbreviated version of the interview follows.
Dr. E: What do you feel about the importance of attending school in person, even if you have concerns about COVID-19?
Mr. Watson: I think brick and mortar classrooms and face to face instruction are paramount to a quality education, and I think our teachers would all agree with that as well. We know there are some risks that we incur. But we know this also: We have to do a better job than what happened in the spring of last year. We know our teachers did all they could do, but we found that kind of throwing out the education and asking kids to check in once a week was not effective.
We know there are state requirements, and virtual school is one of them. Traditional school is what we’re choosing to take. Traditional school looks a whole like what it always looked like, being in a brick and mortar school setting. Then there is what we are calling blending. We know that absenteeism is probably going to go up, because we know that every virus, every possible sickness we’ve ever had is still out there. We know some of those symptoms are the same, and what happens while we’re waiting for tests to take place is absence from the school.
As a result, we’ve got to figure out how to educate those kids. And then we’ve got virtual, and we have about 180 kids that are signed up for virtual school.
I’m here to make a plea, to not only those who have signed up for virtual, but also for those who think that they might want to (do virtual school), especially for grades K, 1, 2, and 3. A lot of the work that those kids do is tactile. It’s a lot of practice with motor skills and handwriting.
If you are a parent who is going to home school for those guys, you need to have some serious home-schooling skills to be able to incorporate the virtual testing that will take place.
For the high school virtual kids, junior high and even the elementary, we really need, Dr. E, those kids to be in school for the first two weeks to a month, because our plans are to practice the virtual school at school with our computers on our desks. The city has given us one-to-one (electronic device) capability. We have an internet system that I’m being told has been boosted to the point that that we can really kick this stuff out. And we need our kids in the room, actually attending a virtual classroom while they’re in the classroom, so that they can practice what it looks like and what it’s going to be like, when or if, we do go home again.
There is only one thing I requested of teachers. They can handle it however they want to, so long as every teacher makes contact with every kid, every day. We’re going to take attendance during that time and make sure they’re showing up. If they don’t, we’re going to find out why. And then, of course, we want to make sure that we are holding them accountable for their grades. If you do not do your work, and you do not show up for class, you will fail.
The other thing, and maybe the most important of all, is the overall mental health of the kids.
We recognize that we are the first line of defense for some of those kids, and we want to be to here for our kids.
If you’re a parent and you don’t know how to use (technology), we’ll be having some classes for you. You need to let your school know that you need to participate. It’s important that you hunker down and be a part of your kids’ success.
Dr. Eldridge: In transporting children, is there going to be a change, in terms of spacing or protocol on the buses or on unloading at the school?
Mr. Watson: We’re using masks, family members sitting together, assigned seats, and each child will be required to get a squirt of hand sanitizer before they come on the bus. If that is a concern, the best thing would be to bring your child to school instead of riding the bus, if that is an option to you.
Dr. Eldridge: Will social distancing be maintained when children are being let off from individuals’ cars?
Mr. Watson: Yes sir, as much as possible. We’re recommending that masks be used, do hand washing, and try to social distance as much as we possibly can.
Dr. Eldridge: Are we going to screen children for symptoms or vital signs when they arrive at school?
Mr. Watson: The first thing that needs to place is parents need to take ownership in this, as well. If your child is sick, or they don’t feel well, or they have fever, please keep them home. But when they come to school, we’ve bought every teacher an infrared thermometer that they can check the kids temperature the first thing when they get in the classroom.
Dr. Eldridge: What’s going to be the protocol in terms of movement around the school during the school day?
Mr. Watson: That’s different for high school, to junior high and elementary. Grades K, 1, 2, 3 and 4th grade, those students are self-contained, which means they stay in the same classroom all day long. Fifth grade and sixth grade, they switch classes. With those kids, it’s important to outline directional flow, and maintain social distancing as much as we possibly can. Wear masks, and keep our hands cleaned.
Dr. Eldridge: How is lunch going to be handled?
Mr. Watson: We know that Pre-K students will go to the cafeteria because they are the first ones who go, get their pre-boxed lunch. Everybody will have a hot meal, but it’s pre-boxed by the cafeteria staff. They’ll pick it up, eat, and we’ll do a thorough cleaning of the tables.
We know that the first, second, third and fourth grade will come to the cafeteria and pick up their plates, and go back to the classroom.
Grades five and six will be served in the cafeteria, by grade level. The cafeteria at the elementary school is large enough that we can social distance.
At the high school, we’re going to make use of our safe room at the junior high, and also the volleyball gym. And those guys are going to eat outside on pretty days. The key there is masks, hand washing, social distancing, and taking advantage of the outdoors when we can.
Dr. Eldridge: Are there facilities for hand washing in the rooms?
Mr. Watson: In the elementary schools, the answer is yes. Of course, everybody is going to have access to hand sanitizer that they can use on a regular basis. Teachers can have students clean their desks as often as they would like to. One of the things we are going to talk to our custodians about is making sure they make it around to clean door knobs, and make sure our restrooms are cleaned more consistently and thoroughly than ever. We actually hire a local cleaning company to come and clean every night, and they are aware of the deep cleaning that has to be done on a daily basis.
Dr. Eldridge: Will there be sharing of supplies, or utensils that are used in instruction, or will they be limited to one child?
Mr. Watson: As much as we possibly can. We were talking to a math teacher about the use of calculators. When there are manipulatives, teachers will make parents aware of the need to bring their own, or there will be cleaning that takes place in between classes.
Dr. Eldridge: How are you going to handle physical education period?
Mr. Watson: We’re hoping to make sure we go outside as much as we can. At the elementary school, we have four physical education teachers, and the plan is to conquer and divide. We’re going to make the numbers as small as we possibly can. We’ve decided for the purpose of getting everybody in, and getting everybody scattered out, we’ll move the class back down to 30 minutes, and split the groups into smaller sections, and go to different portions of the school. We’re very fortunate that we have ample space to spread out.
Same at the high school, with kids on the football field, practice fields, baseball fields, and the front lawn.
Dr. Eldridge: What’s going to be the protocol at the school when a child becomes ill during the school day?
Mr. Watson: We have hired an extra nurse, so that each school will have two on hand. A space has been located as a COVID sick bay, where we take kids if they’re sick, if they have fever, if they have symptoms. That’s why it’s very, very important for parents to make sure in Pre-K through 12 that we have accurate phone numbers and accurate email addresses so that we can make contact with parents, because we’re going to need to get those kids out of our school and back home to a place that they can’t transmit the disease.
Dr. Eldridge: Will they follow CDC guidelines, state department of health guidelines for return to school? Are you going to require a medical release, or what?
Mr. Watson: We have CDC guidelines, but more importantly, we have a number of guidelines that have been set out by the governor with regard to masks, and with the return. The CDC has reduced the number of days to be away to 10, but the governor’s policy still says 14. We will iron out those things in the next few days and push those policies out to parents.
Dr. Eldridge: Will there be a change in the protocol for picking children up at the school day, particularly in the elementary school?
Mr. Watson: Yes. Not only pick-up, but drop-off as well. We know how crazy schools are, especially at the elementary school, at the very first of the year. Especially the first week, or how every many days Mrs. Johnson and her staff designate that it’s appropriate for parents to walk kids in.
Please know, parents, if you’re coming into the building to bring your kids, we understand that’s a landmark date. To allow you to do that, we’re going to do something a little different this year. We’re asking that your Pre-K kids and kindergarten show up at 8:15, as opposed to 7:15 when the other kids are showing up. That way we can allow you to take your kids in. We also ask that you follow our protocol, wear your masks, bring them in and love on them. We love you, but get out as quick as you can so we can start our school day and minimize the possibility of some kind of health issue.
Dr. Eldridge: As a community, we need to be aware that returning to school is important. And parents need to encourage their children more than ever that the need to follow the rules and the instructions of their teachers. The parents need to work with the school and be part of the solution rather than creating a problem. We hope that the information that Superintendent Watson brought to us today is helpful to you and reduces your anxiety. There is some relatively good news about the virus, in terms of the morbidity and mortality of the disease not being as great as we had feared when it initially presented. But the education of our children is critical to our community, and attendance in the physical community is important on multiple levels. So please bear with Ted. Bear with the teachers. Be a supportive parent that makes Andalusia greater.