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Weekly Update: September 11, 2020

Weekly Update: September 11, 2020

Dear Grinnell Newburg Board of Education, Staff, Families and Friends:

Happy Friday! We are thrilled to see our students and staff back in school! Although the weather did not quite cooperate, the students were excited to meet their teachers, see their friends and get back into the swing of things! I have shared some of our first day photos in this update.   Things looked a little bit different as students returned to school this week. Our students wore face coverings, sat behind the plexiglass and followed the directions for passing in the hallway. We are proud of our students as they navigated the new normal.  

This Just in…...Free Breakfast & Lunch Meals for All Students:

We have exciting news from the USDA. We can now offer FREE breakfast and lunch to all of our students! This will continue until our last day of class in December or until funding is depleted, whichever comes first. We will notify families as soon as we know the end date.

Free meals will be offered to both our in person learners and our online/hybrid learners, starting Monday, September 14th. At that time all students can get one reimbursable breakfast and one reimbursable lunch for free each day. We will continue our online learner pick up process at the high school with the sign up form for them to receive these meals.  

If you have not already, please submit your free and reduced applications during this time so we have it on file for when this program ends. Second meals, a la carte, single milk purchases will still be charged to the account and will require money to be in the lunch account prior to purchasing. We are excited to be offering this program to our families during these difficult times.  

Data Dashboard for COVID-19/How we will respond if there is a positive test:

I am working on a District Data Dashboard for COVID-19 reporting for our families and community. This dashboard will be a district wide dashboard as to not inadvertently identify a student or staff member who may be isolating or quarantined. I hope to have this ready by next early next week and available on our website.    

I sent a message out to our staff as we had our first positive COVID result. Here is the gist of that message: 

We worked with IDPH to contact trace, and Public Health identified those who had to quarantine. Those students affected will go online learning. That class was notified by letter, if they had to quarantine or not.  We have a letter indicating that there was a positive result, you need to quarantine, or if there was a positive result and you do not need to quarantine. This will be our procedure as we work through any cases. In order to keep confidentiality and not to inadvertently identify the student or staff member, only the class will be notified, or those who have to quarantine. 

I am working on a school district dashboard to keep our public and staff informed. It will be for the entire district, not individual schools as to not inadvertently identify a student. Please know that it is critical that if you are aware of any student or staff member who has had to isolate or quarantine due to exposure of COVID, that we keep this confidential. We are bound by the rules of FERPA and employee confidential health information. Thank you for your cooperation. I want to encourage families to feel comfortable to self report. Together we can limit the spread by acting quickly as we did in this case. Thank you to all of those who responded so quickly. 

Diversity, REDI Update: 

I want to thank our groups for your work this summer as we plan for curriculum development, training, policy, and more. We will be hosting a meeting with our leaders in the upcoming weeks to share our updates on progress. I will be sending a doodle poll out early next week. The recent Derecho and COVID planning has impacted my ability to bring the group together much earlier. Thank you for your patience and we will soon be re-grouping and moving forward once again.  

Upcoming Events:

Go Tigers!  2020 continues to provide challenges for our district. This past week the rain has caused further water damage to the high school’s roof as we work to repair it from the Derecho. We can’t catch a break. The rain also caused a delay for the light installation for our football stadium. Therefore, the home JV game for Monday night will be moved to Newton. Lights are scheduled to be installed on Wednesday of next week for our first home game.  We apologize as it was our hope to have these lights ready for this Monday night. Mother nature is not cooperating with us! Even through all of these challenges we are grateful that our students and staff continue to be flexible and positive with the “We will get through this” mindset! 

Have a wonderful weekend!

Janet