We are on the eve of a new school year. With a nod to the fact it has been 165 days since we had students in our buildings, we recognize how important this moment truly is for our entire community. While this is the final communication that I will provide prior to the resumption of classes, you can expect to continue hearing from me frequently. However, the mass emails to which you have become accustomed will no longer be a weekly staple of your inbox. You can continue to hear from me weekly going forward, but I will revert to the past practice of posting these messages to my blog and Twitter feed. I would encourage you to please subscribe to my blog by email. You can sign up in the upper right hand corner of my page, and at the same time view the archive of articles, which include almost 450 posts spanning a decade. I guess I've had a lot to say in the intervening years!
Today's message is to provide some final thoughts, clarifying points, and reminders of our procedures once school starts on Monday. I also want to take this opportunity to thank our entire community for your prayers and words of support over these intervening months. Nothing about our operations right now are easy or unfortunately without criticism. As we begin school, it is important to remember that the resumptions of classes should not be interpreted as a return to business as normal, indeed as I shared with you all a couple of weeks ago, we are a long way from normal. We will ask for your continued grace in the coming months. Here are some things that I think you all should be aware of as we begin the 2020-2021 school year.
Visitors and Open House One of the biggest disappointments for me right now is that we can't welcome you all into our brand new facility. We have worked hard as a community over the past eighteen months during construction of our Phase III project. You have all been incredibly patient with our dusty hallways and odd ways of entering our P-8 facility and central administration building. I had envisioned a grand opening ceremony with a ribbon cutting and tours of the new space. Unfortunately I am going to have to beg of your continued patience. We will have that grand opening and tours-but it is going to have to wait. Right now, all visitors to all our buildings are limited to critical personnel and students. Those visitors who have a defined purpose will need to have an appointment. You can expect to complete a health screening before entering any of our facilities and face coverings will be required. As you have also heard by now, we have decided to cancel our open house. Parents and guardians of elementary students will have an opportunity to meet their child's teacher via Zoom later this week. You can expect to hear from those teachers very soon.
Be advised also that at this time we are not renting out any of our facilities to outside groups. This includes our gyms, fields, common spaces, and auditoriums. Access to facilities is limited to school sponsored events only. This policy will be reviewed quarterly.
Activities and Events For right now, our events are limited to half capacity. Every other row of bleachers will be closed to promote social distancing. Again, face coverings will be required at all events: football or volleyball. Because of the limited capacity, we are encouraging you to cheer us on from home in the comfort of your own living room by subscribing to our You Tube Channel. All our varsity and sub varsity events will be live streamed. We really want to allow parents and siblings of our performers and athletes to have the opportunity to view our events live in person. Additionally, it is important to note that children younger than high school age will need to be accompanied by an adult and must be seated in the bleachers.
Recent Board Action The Board of Directors met on Monday evening, August 17th in a regular session meeting. At that meeting, they made a couple of critical final decisions as it relates to our Return to Learn Plan. First, we agreed to partner with Edgenuity for online curriculum and content to use with our learners who are participating in the voluntary offsite learning program. This program will run parallel to those students learning onsite and we are excited for the opportunities this will provide our offsite students. While there can be no replacement for face to face instruction, we feel this will be a good substitute in the interim until we can welcome all our students back to the buildings.
The board also acted affirmatively on a recommendation to add an additional school bus route. We are thankful to those parents who filled out our most recent survey indicating their willingness to transport their own children to school. Yet at the same time we recognize that is not an option for everyone. An added bus route on the northern edge of the district will help us to balance some of our load sizes and promote better social distancing. An added note for our Country Terrace neighborhood: bus assignments this year will be arranged by family unit as opposed to grade level. All students using school transportation will have assigned seats and strict adherence to face covering requirements will be observed.
Get some rest. School starts Monday!
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