June 21, 2022

Celebrating the Arts at Friendship!

Last week, we celebrated scholars across all our campuses who showcased their talents at Friendship’s Annual Arts Festival! From a mobile art gallery to musical performances that featured singing, dancing and more – you name it, the entertainment and artistic talent was there! Kudos to all of our scholars for their hard work and round of applause for Director of Arts Integration for executing such a awesome event!

We also want to give a BIG shoutout to Braelynn Haywood, 2nd grader at Blow Pierce, for winning the National Cherry Blossom Festival Student Art Showcase for her Cherry Blossom portrait (shown above).

Updated Mask Mandate: Effective June, 21, 2022

In keeping with the current guidance from the CDC and DC Health, beginning June 21, 2022, masking will be optional for students and staff when at all of our campuses, indoors and outdoors, and at the community office. Friendship is committed to ensuring a safe and supportive environment for all members of the community, regardless of whether or not they choose to wear a mask. We encourage those who are most comfortable continuing to mask to exercise their personal choice to do so. In addition, Friendship will continue to provide masks to those who want them.

Throughout the pandemic, Friendship has benefited from your commitment as we’ve all worked together to maintain a safe and healthy learning environment, despite the impact of COVID-19.

Friendship will monitor COVID-19 infection rates published by the CDC and DC Health and reserve the right to reinstate indoor mask mandates and surveillance testing if conditions warrant it.

Based on our continued receipt of supplies, we expect to continue our rapid antigen testing program. Friendship continues to strongly encourage all eligible members of our community to get their COVID-19 vaccine and boosters.

We welcome your feedback on this approach and encourage you to share your perspective by emailing wecare@friendshipschools.org.

Let's Go on a Virtual Tour!

We are One Friendship, but each of our schools has unique programs, dynamic leaders, and a personality of its own. We have tried to capture what makes each of our schools special in a series of virtual campus tours, which we’ll be sharing with you in the weeks ahead. Please click the video or link below to learn about Friendship Chamberlain!

Press play to learn more about Chamberlain.

Learning Management Systems Launch

In our January Learning Without Limits, we communicated with you about the development of our Learning Management System (LMS) -- a single location for our students, parents and staff to access the Friendship Curriculum, high-quality instructional materials and resources. Friendship is excited to announce that we will be rolling out Schoology for SY 2022 – 2023 and will begin to pilot it during Summer Learning Academy. Schoology is a one-stop shop for parents, scholars, and team members! Our summer experience will have team members using Schoology to enter attendance and grades. We look forward to your feedback after this initial use.

Our vision is to ensure that, regardless of individuals' location or circumstances, teaching and learning continue. Schoology will provide access to learning resources, instructional support, attendance data, grades, and other information that seamlessly connect everyone to the information necessary to provide world-class education and supports for all scholars and educators. Moreover, Schoology will allow for 2-way communication so that educators, parents, and scholars will have the ability to message one another in real time. 

We are also at the beginning stages of creating courses in Schoology aligned with Wit and Wisdom and Eureka Math. This process will take several months as we take our digital access to both curricula and create a student-facing opportunity for our scholars. While we work on these courses, we are asking our instructional professionals to submit lessons plans and related resources that you have used to make our daily lessons even more dynamic. We will include your plan and/or resource with the daily lesson in Schoology. We also want to get your thoughts and questions. Please submit your inquiries, thoughts and favorite lesson plans to  https://forms.gle/ro6EwfxVcutV6eKz6.

To our parents, we will reach out to our Parent Advisory Councils and you as we move forward. What information is most helpful to you for accessing instructional content remotely? What recommendations do you have to help us ensure that we provide a single site to help you access information to support in-person and remote learning? What benefits do you see as we think about providing this resource to support our families? Please submit your thoughts and questions to https://forms.gle/7fu6JuGNPbhnURZz8​.