Head of School Weekly Email: Contingency Plans for Campus Closure Days
October 30, 2020
Dear TA Students & Families,
With the season’s first snowfall this morning, along with the news in recent weeks of COVID cases in schools as close to us as Lyme and Lebanon, we need to be prepared for occasions later this fall and winter when we might need to cancel the on-campus school day experience at TA and shift to fully remote instruction.
The need to do this could occur for a variety of reasons, including inclement weather*, COVID cases, or staff shortages. The length of time could vary; it might be as brief as one day or last for multiple weeks.
As part of the contingency planning:
- You can anticipate a test of our emergency notification system tomorrow, Oct. 31, at approximately 12 noon. This is the system we will use to notify families if we have to ‘call a remote day’.
- Please review the TA daily/weekly schedule for schoolwide remote days. It is very similar to the one already in place for Fall 2020. For students who already work from home 2 or 4 days each week, there will be few changes to the daily routine. One additional structure in the schedule is time at the end of the day for pods to meet or for 1-1 check-ins between the pod teacher and students.
- This information has been added to our Fall Reopening Handbook; see the new section on page 12 titled Plan for Campus Closure & Schoolwide Remote Days.
(*Regarding snow days: Due to the mandate for all Vermont schools to delay the start of school until September 8, we now have a shorter year than we typically do and were not able to account for snow days in our revised calendar. In order to avoid extending the year past mid-June, we plan to have ‘remote days’ instead of traditional snow days this winter.)
Wishing everyone a safe and fun Halloween weekend,
Carrie Brennan, Head of School