Dear Families:
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedules to attend one of our Back to School Nights last week. Your lives are busier than ever now, trying to manage remote learning and your own obligations. Many of you would hire a baby-sitter to come to school for the evening, but this year, logging onto a zoom call while you managed dinner and bedtimes was the norm. Please know, we recognize the extra effort it is taking for not only students, but parents too, as we continue to navigate remote learning. We truly appreciate it.
Next week, September 21st – 25th we will be bringing in each class (4th – 8th), one day at a time, in small groups, to do STAR assessments in Reading and Math. We will be doing one session in the morning (9:00am-10:45am) and one in the afternoon (12:00pm- 1:45pm) Please see this attachment for the time your child/ren is scheduled to take the assessments. Playground gates will be open for drop-off, at the double door entrance to Banchero Hall. We will take temperatures, have student sanitize their hands and direct them to the testing room. All desks and devices (laptop or iPad) will be sanitized before students arrive. Please make sure students are wearing masks, remind them of proper distancing, and to listen to directions by teachers/staff to assure as safe an environment as possible. Depending on the date for Kindergarten through third grade students returning to the building for in-person class, we may hold off on assessing until they are on-site. (More to follow!)
As I said at Back to School Night, the positive case numbers for Covid are trending down. Last week, King Country was reporting 65 cases per 100,000 people. If this number remains steady (below 75 for two weeks) we will begin to bring back our K-5 students. We will start by bringing the Kindergarten students in for two days, adding the first grade on the third day and second grade on the fourth day. That would mean all K-2 students would be present on the fourth and fifth days of that week. The following Monday, we would add grades three through five so that all K-5 students would be present. We are currently targeting the last week in September as the earliest date to begin this process. I will know much more after the positive case numbers are released on Wednesday of this week. As soon as we have a plan and a date, I will inform all families.
We are doing a slow, phased-in return to the building so that we can mitigate any issues that could arise. We want to make sure students are clear on temperature taking, distancing, masking and scheduled hand-washing. Students will remain in cohorts of 13 students in separate rooms, with the teacher rotating between them. Families choosing to have students remain at home will access recordings of lessons but they will not be interactive zoom calls.
King Country numbers need to go below 50 positive cases per 100,000 before we can begin a hybrid model of bringing our sixth through eighth grades back into the building in shifts. As we get closer to 50, I will communicate plans for the hybrid model.
Please keep up with distancing, masking and hand-washing. It is working!
Have a great week.
Mary