Teacher gets creative with social distancing

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    ROSWELL, Ga. (WGCL) — Grey Eaton teaches shop and handyman classes at Eaton Academy, a private school in Roswell. His classes are small, but so is his classroom space. When the pandemic hit, he started thinking.

“The wheels started to turn,” Eaton said. “How could we get more students in a fixed space?”

Instead of spacing students 6-feet apart side-to-side or back-to-front, he started to consider his classroom’s vertical space.

With a background in carpentry and cabinet-building, Eaton designed a wooden platform which he calls the ‘Safely Social Station.’ A patent is pending on his invention. In a demonstration, he showed that when a student sits in a desk that’s two or three feet off the ground, it adds 6 to 8 inches of space between that student and his or her peers whose desks are sitting on the floor.

The school itself is not involved in selling the desks, but it is letting Mr. Eaton test out his invention.

Eaton said the platforms could be useful to teachers who might be interested in being perched up high in their classrooms at a time when every little bit of distance helps.

“Because we’re older than all the students,” Eaton said of teachers. “This pandemic affects us.”

It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the invention will take off in popularity, but it shows how creative people are getting during the pandemic.

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