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Bridgeport ISD families,
Thank you very much for the opportunity to serve you and your family during the first month of the school year. We have seen hard work and dedication from our students in the classroom and in extracurricular activities. This year is off to a great start and we want to thank you for choosing Bridgeport ISD!
Could we share one of our goals for the 2023-24 school year with you? Our goal as a district is to improve our attendance rate back up to pre-COVID attendance percentages, at 95% attendance rate. Since 2020, we have not been able to get our attendance rate back to 95%, but we believe with your help, we can! Would you mind reading a few of the following attendance tips to help us reach our goal?
How can you help us in this effort?
- 10 a.m.! 10 a.m.! 10 a.m.! What is the big deal about 10 a.m.? The state counts a child present if they are in class when attendance is taken at 10 a.m. each day. By simply planning ahead and scheduling after school or afternoon appointments, you can help ensure that we maximize our funding resources to serve all students. Schools in Texas are funded based on student attendance, not student enrollment.
- Let's work together to support a culture of prioritizing good attendance. Avoid planning family trips, vacation or other special events during regularly-scheduled school. We can all work together to support a culture of prioritizing good attendance in Bridgeport ISD.
- With this being said, we know illness happens! We have all been sick over the last four weeks, we get it! Here are a few helpful hints when you are questioning whether to bring your students to school or not. Our nurses ask that you not send your child to school sick with a fever or vomiting. Students must be fever-free for 24 hours without user fever-reducing medicines before returning (same timeline applies to vomiting). Allowing a child to attend school with a fever or vomiting increases the risk of spreading illness to their classmates and teachers and can have a significant impact on those exposed, making them more susceptible to catching future illnesses.
What are we doing as a district to help prevent your child from becoming ill?
You have entrusted your children to our care and that is a responsibility we take
seriously. We are committed to being proactive in addressing health concerns in
the most effective ways possible.
- We use an electrostatic spray to sanitize classrooms that have a high illness rate within the day or hour depending on the severity or number of illnesses in a classroom.
- We spray our school buses as well! With the last four weeks of sickness in our district, we have sprayed not only our classrooms, but our school buses and will continue this practice throughout the year.
- Our custodial staff is trained to disinfect common areas that students use throughout the day to ensure clean touch surfaces throughout the school.
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To ensure we are creating an optimal learning environment, it starts with the air we breathe. We have air purification systems in each classroom to reduce certain viruses and pathogens up to 99.99 percent. The air purification system is used by world-renowned medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic.
- We monitor our attendance rate at each campus/grade level and when we notice the attendance rate is low, we take additional measures to ensure our classrooms are sanitized before students/staff arrive the next day.
- In specific cases, when our nurses notice increased illnesses from a particular classroom in the building, they notify our custodial staff who then spray the classroom when the class is at recess/lunch/specials to disinfect the area and prevent further spread of illness.
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