It’s New Year’s Eve, and so today is an appropriate time to look back at everything that happened in 2020.  Certainly it’s been a challenging year on many levels with the pandemic, the fight for racial and social justice and a contentious presidential election just to name three, but we hope you’ve been able to find several silver linings along the way.  Here at American School, where we were rightfully designated an essential business because we provide educational services, our staff continued to serve students on a continuous basis throughout the year.  Instructors graded exams in middle school and high school correspondence courses and did the same for students who take online middle school courses and online high school courses.  Other staff members provided caring student service when it came to sending course materials, sending transcripts and diplomas, shipping course materials, handling billing issues or any number of services which made life a bit easier for students, parents and school officials.  We did all of that while following COVID protocols.  The end result is that we served thousands of students and helped them reach their academic goals.  Amidst all of the chaos 2020 brought us, we are happy 2020 didn’t take that away from us.  We close the book on 2020 confident better things are ahead in 2021.  We’re grateful to you for allowing us to serve you, and we hope you’ll come back here Monday for our first blog of 2021.

It's December 11, and Indiana became a state on this date in 1816.  Because our office in the far south suburbs of Chicago is so close to Indiana, many American School employees live across the state line in Indiana.  That proximity got us thinking about the home states of American School staff over the years.  When we were founded in 1897 in Boston, we assume almost our entire staff lived in Massachusetts.  When we moved to Chicago in the early 1900s, we assume most of our staff lived in Illinois, though we did have rare instances of employees living in Wisconsin and making the commute from the Badger State to the Hyde Park neighborhood where our offices were located for more than 90 years.  These days our staff is almost split evenly between Indiana and Illinois residents.  Sometimes people who live outside a reasonable driving distance will contact us and ask if they can work for us.  Currently all American School employees must live within a reasonable driving distance of our office.  Should our needs change and we need additional people to help grade our high school correspondence courses, online high school courses, middle school correspondence courses or online middle school courses, we will post something in this blog.  We appreciate everyone's interest and are happy to serve students whether they live in Indiana or Illinois or places much farther away!