Dear Parents,
A brief history of the pandemic.
Since the start of this scourge, we have been committed to providing in person education to as many students each day as we deemed safe. In the spring of 2020, we were forced to go to all virtual learning, which we did, literally, over a weekend. We all suffered through the necessity of Zooming and book pickups and struggled through the end of that year.
We started 2020-2021 in person, albeit with a hybrid schedule. We were able to get half the students in, in person, twice a week when MANY schools and school districts were still full virtual. We managed our way through the holiday season and in the spring of 2021, I suggested to the archdiocese that we move our social distance number to 4 feet, so that we could get everyone back in on a daily basis. After some consultation, the archdiocese agreed to allow schools to move to the 4 foot distance. This was before any announcement was made by the CDC about the current 3 foot guidance. We immediately moved to this new distance and offered the opportunity for every student to come four days a week.
As this year has progressed and CDC put out new guidance suggesting the possibility of a 5 day model vs. a 10 day model, I met with the archdiocese and other Catholic DC principals and we asked the archdiocese to consider allowing us to adopt the 5 day model. (Currently DC public schools still follow the 10 day model.) The archdiocese provided updated guidance for our schools on January 12. We adopted this two weeks ago and we have monitored our cases quite closely since then. (Today we have11 individuals who have a mandatory quarantine. Over 98% of the students are eligible to be here in person.) The new model does not seem to be having a negative impact but we will continue to monitor carefully.
Because of our masking and other practices, we have been VERY successful at mitigating spread in the school. Through all of this, Allison Cogswell and our nurses (Anna Meenan, Debbie Ryan and Jenny Williams) have worked tirelessly, days, nights and weekends to identify and communicate with positive cases and close contacts and they have my eternal gratitude. The one thing that has been a challenge is lunch. With a 20 minute lunch period, we are creating a situation where students are unmasked, less than 6 feet apart for more than 15 minutes. This is one of the conditions to be identified as a close contact. As a result, some students are required to stay home that may otherwise be able to stay in school. So, we will be adopting new lunch procedures to avoid anyone being identified as a close contact. We will be doing a variety of things. It may involve staggering lunch within the classrooms for some students or moving to other locations in the building for lunch. If we can accomplish this successfully, only someone who tests positive will be required to stay home.
In addition, we are going to stop Zooming altogether. We have offered this as a necessary option when we had a large number of students missing school for mandatory quarantine. With the 5 day model and the new lunch plan we anticipate that we will have even fewer students (and remember we’re currently at a very low number and some of those are because of our current lunch model) missing time, and when they do, it will most likely be fewer days than in the past. We will supply work for asynchronous learning but no Zooms.
We will continue to provide a safe learning environment for as many students each day as possible. We will continue to look for ways to ‘normalize’ the school day and we will continue to ask you to be patient and flexible as we work our way through these challenging times.
Thank you for your continued support.
REMINDER: Second quarter grades are posted in Rediker.
Faithfully,
Chris Kelly
