A ban on assembling doesn’t stop Harwood Union school assemblies

January 6, 2021  |  By Emmett Gartner 

The Harwood Assembly Band performs without an audience for a video assembly recorded and shared with the school community online. Band members are: Jonah Halter on guitar, Kate Hall on vocals, Carlton Cummiskey on piano, drummer Aidan Flint and Eamon Knight on keyboard. Screenshot.

Before Harwood Union High School’s assembly program went virtual in the spring, senior Zeke Churchill was out of frame, casting lights down on the performers and speakers at center stage in the Harwood auditorium.

Now, with the Harwood tradition that has been in place since the mid-90s going completely online due to restrictions around COVID-19, Churchill finds himself in a new role — the host of a monthly video segment that is entirely up to his creative devices.

“The assembly [segment] is just to make people laugh. I’ve got most of the freedom I could ever want, as long as it’s [rated] PG and not that stupid,” Churchill said.

Harwood Union High School senior Zeke Churchill is host of the monthly assemblies that have successfully shifted to video productions shared online with the school community. Courtesy photo.

For his October segment, Churchill reviewed classic horror movies with his now routine deadpan humor style, neatly summarizing Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project as a movie “where a group of film students go into the woods and lose their map.”

Churchill returned to the screen a month later, teaching a tutorial on how to make potato-leek soup, where he lost his voice trying to record a humorous voice-over in one take.

Like the assembly program’s new format, Churchill has had to adapt to a variety of new roles, which include filming his own segments and providing accompanying audio. 

The final video productions are posted online on the Music Department’s YouTube channel along with Harwood Assembly’s social media accounts. They are shared with the student body on release day so students, faculty and staff can watch them individually, but together. The result is an assembly without the actual assembling. 

The program itself has been kept alive by similar collages, where students and faculty contribute music, art, and public service announcements that bridge together the school’s virtual world with its occupants’ realities.

“Normally, every other week assemblies were the time that the whole student body came together,” said Harwood music teacher Stefanie Weigand, who also serves as the assembly program’s faculty adviser.

“Last semester, when we went remote, we took time as a class to figure out what that meant for us and what our role was, and we realized that it was our job to be the gatherers, to be kind of like the glue that kept everybody together,” Weigand added.

So far this school year, there have been four video assemblies. A typical lineup from November included a preview feature of the school’s new Wellness Center, Churchill’s soup segment, a look at student artwork, an Assembly Band performance, and a clip of  the school’s co-principals on TikTok. 

Former Harwood history teacher Tom Dean first launched the program over two decades ago as a collective way for faculty and students to cultivate school spirit. Along with a physical spirit week and a torch passing ceremony between graduating seniors and the junior class, 1990s Harwood strived to enrich the school community in tangible ways that Harwood in the coronavirus-era has been forced to deviate from. 

As a testament to the school’s resiliency, all three rituals — the torch passing, spirit week, and the assembly program — have continued in an online format, however.

Weigand points to the persistence of students like Churchill and the assembly program’s band, which contributes background music for the assembly videos and an outro performance, for the rituals’ upkeep. 

“It’s one of the classes that’s closest to a real-world deadline as you get,” Weigand noted. “There’s no make-up, there’s not time for revision after the fact, you get it done or you don’t get it done. And they get it — they get it very quickly.”

Churchill, too, appreciates the gravity of each deadline. “Honestly, it’s the only class with rigid deadlines that I actually follow. In a way, it’s the most stressful class and in a different way it’s the most fun class, because there’s rigid deadlines and me doing random creative stuff,” he said.

Given the pandemic, this school year is operating using a hybrid format at Harwood with students attending school in-person two days a week and working remotely the other three days. The arrangement gives the assembly program’s class continued opportunities for collaboration in school and virtually. Should circumstances change in the coming months, however, Weigand said she remains confident in their ability to continue creating.

“I think that if we were to have to go remote at any point, that we would be fine,” Weigand reflected, “we would be able to still produce content and share that community space with each other.”

Harwood assemblies are shared online on social media and on the Harwood Union Music Department’s YouTube channel.