Weekly Forecast for January 17th-21st

 Monday the 17th

No School Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Tuesday the 18th

No Staff Meeting 

Wednesday the 19th

Leah @ a virtual district budget meeting  8:30-12

ILCT @ 3:30

Thursday the 20th

SEGC Meeting 6-9

Friday the 21st

Lunch Duty- Swan, Huff, Manley Schulze

Whew it was a long week. I know we all needed a three day weekend. I hope you were able to take advantage of rain free days. 

I appreciate feedback on the survey I sent out Friday (thanks Dave for getting that put together in minutes). I shared this with Karl who was headed into a district meeting at 2:00 on Friday to discuss the status of buildings across the district. I shared our attendance rate (roughly 63% on Friday) staff outages and information from the survey. By the way 61% of staff preferred a two day pause. Anyway, I have heard nothing back as of 10:30 Sunday morning. I am keeping my school phone on (I will check it periodically throughout the today and tomorrow) for email and text messages from staff in regards to outages etc. I know we will have several staff members returning this week and a few others who will be out. It is kind of like a revolving door. I will update you all immediately if I hear of any changes. 

• A huge thanks to everyone who stepped in this past week to keep the SS HP afloat. I continue to share with people how thankful I am to work with this staff. I know the newspapers and forums are full of a lot of "stuff" and I can say...this is not the case where I am! I have staff who step in where needed, remain positive and show up for kids. 
• Theresa put out some feelers in regards to PLCs this week and it was determined that we will forgo holding them. Please use this time to catch up. on that note, it would be a good idea to continue to have things in mind for the shift to TDL (I can not for the life of me remember what the T stands for...basically a week or so of distance learning). 
• This bears repeating, please ensure your students know how to access Canvas and SeeSaw. I would even suggest doing a practice lesson early this week to ensure your kids know how to do this. I know many of you have already done this. Be thinking about what you can do now to prepare for the shift to online so IF this happens it is not as stressful. I am going to be reaching out to the principal at Faubion this week to see what we can glean from their experience. 
• As you may be aware there were MANY shifts to COVID protocols on Thursday and Friday. The biggest ones being the amount of time that students/staff are out after potential exposure, with a potential exposure etc. Emily and I are still wrapping our heads around things and clarifying, but the big takeaway is that after the identification of a positive test people can return as early as five days if they no longer have symptoms, or improving symptoms. There is a lot of grey area and as I said we are still working through this. 
• We are going to need to make some shifts to lunch procedures. We have the spacing and timing down, but will need to be a bit better about ensuring we have seating charts in place. On the topic of eating, as a building we have to become much more stringent on eating outside of the cafeteria. Students who are eating in your classrooms need to do so QUICKLY and should be spaced as far apart as possible. If your kids are currently coming in and taking their time to eat, please try to expedite this process as much as possible. My personal mantra would be "If we are eating, we aren't talking." The only other time students should be eating in the classroom is while eating the kitchen's snacks or a designated time in your classroom. This is a huge way for transmission to occur and we need to tighten it up. I will be messaging this information out to families and we will be coming into middle school classrooms to reiterate this. Students should not be eating in hallways, bathrooms (EVER), etc.  I will also be sharing with families that we can not allow birthday treats to be brought into classrooms. If they would like to bring a treat in it must be individually packaged and will be sent home. 
• Another change to COVID protocols is we will not longer be contact tracing for the most part. I will bite my tongue about how I personally feel about this. Basically this means if there is a case in the building we no longer need to determine who may have come in close contact with this person and provide them with a heads up. This includes students and staff. I will do my best to continue to provide information to staff, and potentially families BUT it is not something that has to be done. 
• I know there is a lot more things we need to discuss MAP testing results, upcoming end of quarter, test training...the list goes on. We will pause these updates for a bit. Take care and enjoy the rest of your weekend.