We know this will be a challenging era in our schools around the country and each district must strive to make the best decisions to fit the needs of its students and community.
Our administrative team has been working on a plan that makes sense and one that we can implement without causing a complete disruption to our learning environment. Our goal is to give students the best opportunity to learn from our staff either at school in person or at home through virtual/distance learning.
We already saw the challenges for learning to take place during the past four months once the COVID-19 Pandemic became a part of everyone’s daily life. We must use caution and care moving forward to keep things as normal as possible. We will be asking students to do things a little differently when they arrive at school, or sit in class or during passing periods or at athletics and other activities. We are asking that all parents and guardians help us to remind the children of the new habits we must follow so we can stay in school as long as possible. I want to be at school, all the teachers want to be at school, and I know all the students want to get back to school to learn and be with their friends and grow to be better students and young citizens. We have truly missed being with all our students and watching them grow!
We will be following the CDC and local health department guidelines for prep and entry into buildings on a daily basis-ask how student feels, take temperature, use social distancing as much as possible, wearing masks when in buildings, during passing periods and in class as much as possible.
We will have masks to distribute and use, parents are welcome to send students with their own masks if they want to provide them. All extenuating circumstances will be taken into consideration when it comes to learning each day for the children. Please communicate with us if there is a circumstance we are unaware of. We will be providing more information as we continue to get closer to our starting school date of Aug. 13. The world is changing every day right now, so we do not want to list something now that could become irrelevant later and cause further confusion.
We have a ‘return to learn’ plan being laid out to post on the website the first week in July. We want to try to finalize it closer to Aug. 1 to have the latest data and guidelines that we may need to implement and adjust for.
We will provide meal service each day once we start back to school, regardless of being in school buildings or having virtual learning. Meals may be picked up similar to the summer meal program if we are forced to go to virtual learning-more details will follow on this. Again, we ask for parental help in this area, as we want all our students to receive their nutrition during the week.
The buses will still run a normal schedule, we welcome you to bring your student to school and pick them up each day too. We are planning to add a town bus route if needed to pick up those children in town to help with the social distancing on the buses. Students will have their temperature taken before getting on the bus. The windows will be kept down while riders are on, weather permitting. All students’ temperature will be taken when they come into the foyer of the front entrance of the buildings at the beginning of each day. The coaches will be taking temperatures before athletics first hour for the middle school students and 5th grade elementary students. Our staff has been doing temperature checks all summer, so they are trained to do this once students start arriving this fall.
We will be disinfecting and cleaning even more each day with constant wipe downs of door handles, desks, chairs, computers, etc. There will be end of day sanitizing of each classroom, the hallways and cafeterias. We will leave no stone unturned. We will encourage repeated hand washing throughout the day. We also had over 60 hand sanitizing stations added around all the school buildings last fall, even before the pandemic hit. We will have additional sanitizing products in the classrooms and at activities/events.
We also ask if you see an area where you think we could add another layer of precaution and prevention, please call your building administrator and let them know to have that area addressed. We will be listening for additional input as we go along trying to deal with this situation to the best of our ability.
Please let us know how we can help your student get back to being the best student they can be.
All students are going to be provided a learning device to use throughout the year. This will be checked out to them and distributed at the building sites. We are also working with Pioneer to help those with connectivity issues to help solve those problems. We will still have 24/7/365 wifi provided at the schools. We are also asking for families to continue to notify us if your situation changes on Internet access.
We are posting information on the school site Facebook pages as well as the school website. Please watch those for updates and added information. We will use our automated calling system to send out reminders to check those postings along with other important information as needed.
I hope your summer has been as enjoyable as possible!
Stay tuned, more to come!