Weekly News and Notes

 Greetings, everyone.

We are in the final stages on planning for the 2020-21 school year. First off, thank you to everyone for your patience as we navigate these uncharted waters. We are doing our best to work quickly but thoughtfully through a variety of steps that need to be finalized before both staff and students report. Fortunately, we are confident in our planning and ability to maintain safety to the best of our abilities, and we will be communicating out some final steps in these next couple of weeks.

Cohort Assignments

If families have not yet indicated whether they intend to be in-person or remote, they will be called early next week. Fortunately, most of our families have responded - some multiple times! From there, we will be building our cohorts in concert with the other schools, with the priority of keeping families together. That being said, we need to be mindful of class sizes and equity, so we will do our best to make sure that we keep our cohorts aligned and even.

Because of the complexities of a high school schedule, we cannot guarantee any requests.

Schedule Changes

Should any schedule changes be necessitated by cohort assignments, we will be sure to notify those students individually. Right now, our priority remains to keep as many courses as possible running, and making the appropriate accommodations for those that have shared equipment or nuances that require additional supports.

High Need Cohort

For students identified as being part of a high-need cohort, communication will be sent in the coming week. These are students prioritized, due to disability status or specific needs, for in-person learning on all five days of the week.

Athletics

While there are those who were no doubt excited by the MIAA's announcement mid-week about athletics for the coming year, there are many steps that still need to be followed. First, we are awaiting individual sport committee recommendations to the Sports Medicine Committee, which will then make final determinations to be voted on by the Board of Directors. Those will then have to be implemented by the individual schools with respect to the sports and their respective safety plans.

At the same time, we need to design plans for scheduling and game play at our local level, while communicating with coaches all safety precautions. Similarly, there will be specific plans for attendance at games, which will be limited this year and far different than what was done in the past. Parent responsibilities regarding sports will also be different, particularly as we consider the safety of all student-athletes and subsequently our community as a whole. We also need to consider attendance procedures and protocols, academic responsibilities, and our own practice and game schedules to ensure that we have all needs met. Finally, the game schedules that are determined by our district could look very different, and there may not be the same "league" structure to which individuals have become accustomed.

For example, there has long been a tendency of student-athletes to come to school feeling ill, because they feel as though missing school will result in their missing a game and "letting a team down." In these times, a student coming to school when ill can have significant impacts. We have already seen how a symptomatic athlete in professional sports has led to team shutdown in Major League Baseball and college athletics. This is obviously our biggest concern.

We will be finalizing protocols and procedures for athletics in the next week or so. When we have them, there will explicit instruction provided. To those ends, we thank you for your patience.

Grade 8 Orientation

We are planning a couple of days of grade 8 orientation for next week, where we will have students and parents able to come in small groups to UHS for questions and answers. We have also arranged for device pickup for this Thursday. The orientation will be a little different than years past, but we will do our best to help organize something worthwhile and meaningful.

FAQ's

Earlier this week, we published some FAQ's, which seemed to help some of the confusion. As always, we cannot necessarily identify every single variable or answer individual questions to the extent some may desire. That being said, if there are specific questions or procedures for which you have a question, feel free to reach out. If Mr. DiMeglio or I cannot answer the question, we will put you in contact with someone who can.

Have a great weekend, and be safe.