Lauren Martin spins and wiggles. And bobbles and bounds. She moves with the infectious energy of someone looped into a never-ending dance workout class. Except instead of sailing around a sweat-soaked dance studio, she’s on a sidewalk outside Sands Montessori School in Mount Washington.
And her job isn’t to entertain. Rather, it’s to shepherd cars through the dreaded morning drop-off, where 150 or so cars converge on the school parking lot and, in less than 30 minutes, disgorge scores of students at the beginning of their school day.
When Martin joined the school’s staff 12 years ago, dancing wasn’t part of the job description. Indeed, she spends the rest of her workday as a paraprofessional in a fourth-and-fifth-grade classroom.
[ Keep up with the arts. Read more recent stories from David Lyman ]
But back in February, when the Cincinnati Public Schools returned with a hybrid learning plan, there were more than the usual number of parents dropping off their kids than in previous times. The procedure was slowed down, as well, by the need to take the temperature of each child before exiting the car. The slowdown resulted in a line that threatened to stretch all the way back to Beechmont Avenue, four-tenths of a mile away. It blocked driveways and side streets. It was a nightmare.
So Martin was assigned to step in and guide traffic through the complex maze in the Sands parking lot. Two lanes enter the school grounds from Corbly Road. From there, they peel off into a pair of looping patterns, with cars crossing oncoming traffic and, in one case, making a left turn across a lane that is exiting to the street.
It is devilishly complicated. But as long as someone is there to help organize the patterns, it works.
And that someone, it was determined, would be Martin.
She didn’t set out to turn it into a dance routine.
“Lord, no,” said the 39-year-old Martin, whose two daughters both attended Sands. “I’m so uncoordinated. I tried to take a Zumba class once, but I fell over. They asked me not to come back.”
But in the parking lot, it’s a different matter. Martin plugs into her traffic-directing playlist on Amazon and she suddenly surges into motion.
“It’s a pretty eclectic list,” she explained. “There’s a lot of old ‘90s club music. Some Beyonce, too. And Tupac, a little Will Smith, Rage Against the Machine. All I know is that when I started dancing, the parents started smiling.”
Martin’s routines, it seems, are just a lucky happenstance, a matter of the right person being in the right place at the right time. And for those of us in the drop-off line – I occasionally drop off my fifth-grade son – Martin is a godsend, providing us a delightful break from the tedium of one of modern education’s lesser byproducts.
“It doesn’t make any difference what the weather is, whether it’s freezing or raining, she’s always out there greeting the whole school,” says Angie Wilson, who drops off her third-grade daughter every day. “We’re always in such a rush to get out the door, it’s totally stressful. But then we get to school and there is Miss Lauren. She just puts herself out there and does it for the joy of everyone else. She brightens up my day.”
Certainly, Martin must have off days? You know, days where she feels cranky or out-of-sorts.
“Everybody has them,” she said. “But you drag yourself in and get to work. And that’s the good thing about this – as soon as I start moving around, it becomes the bright spot of my morning. It’s my time to shine. The only thing is I need to have more arms. You know – like an octopus.”
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