October 23, 2020

As we near the end of the month of October, we continue to refine our practices and procedures. For example, this week required us to make adjustments with our morning health screening routines. As we welcomed back all of our middle school students, we increased the number of health screeners. We recognize that the process does take additional time with more students and completing screening indoors. In an effort to make the process more efficient, we did hand out copies of the QR Code for the health screening questionnaire. We encourage all students that have a cell phone to create a shortcut on their device to this questionnaire so they can have all of the questions answered prior to walking into the building. The only remaining question that will need to be completed at school with a screener is the student’s temperature.

We are so grateful to everyone that is supporting these efforts. Our health screeners have been doing an excellent job!

This week ended with a celebration of music. Our wonderful music teachers, Grace Chris and Andy Gagnon, worked creatively to host an outdoor coffee house for our students. The weather was on our side and we had a perfect evening on the lawn behind the middle school. We heard solos, bands, a saxophone trio, and a few songs from our music teachers. We are so lucky to have a music department that creates these opportunities for our students and community.

Technology News:

*On Wednesday October 28, LSUU will be testing BrightArrow, our direct notification system. Alerts will be sent to the contact information we have on file including email, text and voice phone. If you have not yet done so, please complete your yearly registration ("Forms" in your PowerSchool parent portal) to ensure we have the correct information on file, before October 26. Please reach out to your school if you have questions about the status of your registration, or if you need help with your username and password. The URL for the PowerSchool parent portal is https://ps.morrisville.org/public. Please note, PowerSchool will be down for scheduled maintenance Friday evening. Registration will be available starting Saturday.

*This year (2020-2021) we are using a new content filter for student devices. The product is called Securly. Securly is designed to block sites and content that are not suitable for school. The biggest difference students and families will see this year is since the filter is on the device, the content filtering that we use in our buildings is now applied to our devices when they are at home. Also, Securly has parental controls that we will enable and communicate more about later in the year. At this point, there is nothing parents need to do. If you have questions, please reach out to our SMHS technology manager Jake Goss (stowetech@lsuu.org). If your student experiences any technology based issues related to Securly, you can submit a ticket to our ticket system by emailing lsuutech@lsuu.org.

Student Announcements:

This year our Student Leadership group is creating student announcement videos for all students. These videos are shared with advisories each Wednesday. Watch the most recent videos below.

September 30 Video October 7 Video October 21 Video

Resources:

*Assistance for overdue utility bills information

*Suicide Prevention Information from our school counselors

*Healthy Lamoille Valley is holding a PhotoVoice Project

Photovoice Deadline Extension: The new project date is Friday, October 23rd. Details can be found here. https://www.healthylamoillevalley.org/photovoice-2020/