The Gull Lake School has been making the best of the current hardships due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the fall of 2020, the teachers and staff made a "back to school" parody video of "U Can't Touch This" in order to reconnect with students after a period of remote learning. 

Late last month, Gull Lake School was required to once again transition to remote learning when an outbreak hit the community. Now back in the classroom, It gave teacher Neal Boutin a reminder of how delicate the current situation is. As he was sitting in his basement in quarantine, he started to toy with the idea of transforming a Canadian Classic into a song about remote learning. The song he settled on is The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by the Arrogant Worms.

"I was sleeping," Boutin explains. "I just woke up at about five in the morning and I was kind of humming the lyrics to the song (The Last Saskatchewan Pirate) and thought about making them work for remote learning. I texted a buddy, he said he was in, and the rest is history." 

Boutin then reached out to the Arrogant Worms, receiving a quick reply and permission to rework the song. 

The remastered version of the song is called, The Last Saskatchewan Pirate- Remote Learning Edition. The video was recorded and completed by the staff of Gull Lake School.

"I asked people to volunteer to sing some of the chorus lines and some of the verses and myself I recorded most of the stuff," Boutin said. "Luckily we have a great musician here who helped with some of the background singing and the tin flute, and he did the bass. We just kind of threw it together over time."

"It was a way to get our staff and our kids as well just kind of thinking about different things than just restrictions and COVID and all that stuff." 

"I can't speak highly enough of the community and the kids and our staff here. The way that they just come together whenever we have one of these hare-brained ideas, whether it be a video or whether it be something else we do. It's just a great place to come to work every day. I really. enjoy it, I miss the normalcy and I hope that it comes back in the fall.

 You can watch the video for 'The Last Saskatchewan Pirate - Remote Learning Edition" here: