LAURINBURG — The hallways across Scotland County Schools might have been empty of students, but their voices could still be heard.

Monday marked the first day of school for the district and students greeted their teachers via a screen rather than in person, but didn’t let that stop their excitement.

“They’re excited to see each other,” said South Johnson Elementary Principal LaTonya McLean. “They’ve been out since March so they’re very excited about the socialization piece.”

At South Johnson, the third-grade team was prepared to welcome the students back even though the students wouldn’t be there in person.

“We came in last week and put our feet to the ground and just started calling parents and we had a game plan coming in,” said Allison Boyd. “This is the first year kids get Chromebooks in third grade so we had them set up so when they came in we taught them how to log in and showed them how to get to Google classroom.”

The teachers were on the phone with parents troubleshooting and working with them to get the students online. But there are benefits for the students this way, especially with one-on-one sessions.

”I have one with really bad anxiety and the fact that he has his mom sitting right there beside him and he can talk to me one-on-one and nobody else knew he was with me, I feel like that’s going to be a comfort to some of them,” said Amanda Morris. “They can ask their question with just me rather than in front of everybody.”

Boyd added that typically before the first day of school she’s very excited about getting to hug her students and build a relationship with them, which is something she’s worried about being online.

“Ninety-nine-percent of teaching is relationships that you build with the children and once you get those relationships established that 1% is teaching,’ Boyd said. “But it’s hard to build a relationship looking at a child through a screen when you have everything else going on.”

Beth Clark, a school counselor at South Johnson, worked with kindergarten and first grade in the morning to talk about what a school counselor is and how to reach them.

“Social-emotional learning is our main focus this week and really throughout the entire remote learning,” Clark said. “This week we’ll dig a little bit deeper into emotions and feelings not only about how they’re feeling about remote learning but in general with life and experiences up until this point.”

Not only is Clark working with the students but also working with teachers to make sure they were doing alright with the new type of learning.

At Scotland High School students seem to be more excited about coming back to school as well, even if it isn’t what they are used to.

“We take things for granted,” said Principal Larry Obeda. “Graduation is always going to be the same, we’re still going to get to go to prom. Then all of a sudden that was snatched away from them. So now I think students are more excited about school because you can’t take it for granted. So I think you have a different mindset because they realize things can change.”

Sonya Carroll, American History I teacher, was excited to have students engaging and asking questions even during just going through the syllabus.

“I’ve really been excited about today even though I had no idea what to expect,” Carroll said. “Today has gone really well … I didn’t know how the students were going to respond in terms of if they were going to talk or if they were going to engage but the mere fact they are talking and saying they don’t understand.”

Dennis Ward, an exceptional children’s and financial management teacher, added that there are challenges for teachers from a change in grading to noise issues.

“It is difficult to see a student on a tiny box on the screen rather than being physically in your classroom,” Ward said. “And being able to really monitor the body language and that sort of thing and it is difficult to teach to a computer.”

Reach Katelin Gandee at kgandee@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.