Dear Parents,
The Governor issued new guidelines today to help slow the spread of COVID-19. The full set of recommendations is attached. These new precautionary measures are meant to slow the spread of the disease by reducing person to person contact and they will have a significant impact on our school operations.
Effective immediately, all non-essential meetings and events are cancelled for 4 weeks. This includes Outdoor School, field trips, after school programs, PTO meetings, parent volunteer activities like Art Literacy and Library, and even walking students into classes in the morning. Buenos Dias and Buenas Tardes are considered necessary child care services and will remain open.
At this time, the Governor and the health authorities have determined that schools will stay open because there is risk to children from being in potentially unsafe or unsupervised situations outside of school. With that said, we know that many of you are very concerned about sending your kids to school. In order to provide you with the option of keeping your children home, we will begin piloting an online learning option next week. School will still be in operation and you are welcome to send your child, but we will also allow you to have your child work from home if that feels like the safer choice for your family.
We cannot completely replace the activities that will occur in the classroom, so the online option will be a scaled down version of the full school day. If you are an elementary school parent, you can expect 30-45 minutes of content per day in Spanish, Math, and English, along with recommendations for PE activities. In middle school, we will provide lessons in all content areas, but the time required for each subject will be less than the time students would spend in class at school.
If you decide to have your kids work from home next week, notify the office and we will pass the information on to teachers. These will count as excused absences and teachers will send you the work by Monday afternoon. If you prefer to have your child come to school, we will continue to have them practice excellent hygiene and social distancing in order to minimize the chance of infection. Families who receive meal benefits may still access our lunch program if they decide to keep their kids home. Just notify the office and we will prepare boxed meals that you can come and pick up at school.
In the event of a complete closure, we would implement online learning for everyone, so it is very important that you let us know if your family needs a computer or other tech support in order to access lessons remotely. Perla recently sent out a questionnaire along with instructions for using Google Classroom, so please respond to that email right away if you haven’t already. If you have an extra laptop at home that you would be willing to donate to families who need them, please let us know that as well. We already had one generous parent come in today to make that offer before we even asked, so thank you for that!
These are difficult times and the information is changing rapidly. We’ll continue to monitor the recommendations for schools and get news updates out to you as quickly as we can. We may not be able to do this as quickly as our BSD neighbors, but you can be assured that we are doing all we can to keep you informed!
Sinceramente,
Directora Michelle