October 30, 2020

Dear Burr Families,

Tomorrow is Halloween! While I think it's especially important for students to celebrate milestone holidays this year - holidays that remind them of the joys of being a kid - it's also important to maintain safety for your family and our community. Below is a link to both a CDC article and CT guidance article about Halloween. In addition, if you don't feel comfortable having your children trick or treat, think about a Halloween movie together, a pumpkin decorating contest, and/or a lot of eating of sweets and candy.

CDC - Halloween

CT Halloween Guidance

I wish you a wonderful weekend and some fun, light family time.

Also, please remember to keep your child home if she/he has had a Covid test and the results are pending. While I understand it is an inconvenient, it's important to keeping our school open and preserving the safety of our students and staff.

Please note too that there is no school on Monday or Tuesday for students. Monday is a professional development day for staff, and Tuesday is Election Day.

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, don't hesitate to contact me directly at jbluestein@fairfieldschools.org

Be well,

Jason

Parent Corner

Resource: Link to CDC

Read It (Together): A Different Pond

Read It (Together): Truman

Read It Yourself : Talent is Overrated

Watch It with Your Children: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on Netflix

Arrival/Dismissal

Starting Wednesday, November 4th, we will no longer have police officers supporting our arrival and dismissal process. In order for arrival and dismissal to continue to run smoothly, we would appreciate it if all parents driving their children to school continue to follow our procedures. They include:

• No left turns into the Burr driveway. Please line up northbound on Burr Street.

• One lane of traffic only.

• Display your child's name (and any other children you are picking up) in the window.

• Leave room for busses to pass.

• Obey signs and staff in the pickup loop in the front of the building.

• Drive carefully. Avoid texting or using your phone. It's a busy driveway.

We have a great system - which we should be able to continue seamlessly even without an officer.

Re-Opening

As you know, a full reopening for elementary schools has been postponed. The district (for now ) will maintain a hybrid model for learning. Our planning and preparation for a full reopening continues, however. Some things for you to be aware of include:

• We will do our best to accommodate any students in Remote Learning whose parents would like them to join the hybrid model. We will be in touch with those families directly about which cohort. These changes would start November 9th. If those families needed bus service (and hadn't registered for it during the summer), they would need to let us know directly.

• I do not have a date for a return to full in school learning. It will be based on local and State health data. There is also the possibility (of course) based on health data, that we could find ourselves in full remote learning for all students. Hopefully, this doesn't happen, but it is always a possibility.

• There are many logistical challenges to a full reopen, but we are proactively planning for them for if/when this happens. These include maintaining three feet of distance between students in the classroom, scheduling lunch so students have six feet of distance while eating, planning for snack procedures in the classroom, and creating recess space for students to play safely - with or without masks. We are also considering whether (or what) adjustments would need to be made to arrival/dismissal that includes both a car line and ten busses at once.

• Just as importantly, we are thinking deeply about classroom instruction and how teachers can teach safely and effectively with potentially up to 25 students in their classroom at once. This is especially challenging when our teaching methodology is partly based on small group, 1-1 conferring, and student partnerships. Since, we feel that this instructional model is extremely important to meeting the needs of individual students, we will have available trifold dividers for all students. We also hope to use technology in the classroom - Chromebooks, doc cams - to facilitate safe interactions between teachers and students as well as students with each other.

• If / when there is a positive case reported at Burr or students or staff have to quarantine due to exposure inside or outside of school, there will a number of messages communicated to families. Any students or staff who either test positive or are in direct contact with anyone that tests positive, will be contacted by Fairfield's Health Department with directions on what to do next. The entire school community will be sent a letter by the Superintendent that details what happened. To preserve medical confidential information, this correspondence will not be able to talk specifically about names, individual cases, etc. While I imagine that this could be frustrating, we appreciate in advance your patience and sensitivity to private medical information.

Have a great week!