St. Francis School – Letter to Parents – November 12, 2020

November 12, 2020

Dear Parents,

After contacting the Adams County Health Department, our Superintendent, our Advisory School Board, and Father Arisman, we have decided to stop in-person education on Monday, November 16, and move to Remote Learning for all students. We wanted to give parents enough time to plan for this transition so that all students will have proper supervision and the technology that will be needed. Please assist and monitor your children during this time to ensure academic success. Daily attendance will be taken and all assignments and grades will count. Our standards will remain high.

Because of the high numbers of teachers and students out in quarantine, we cannot staff the school adequately. The vast majority of these quarantines are a result of exposures that are happening in the community, and we have had very few exposures in our school. So, we are pleading with you to please do your part to help our community bring our case count down. Please, wear your masks when you are out in public. Please, avoid large gatherings and maintain social distance whenever possible. If the cases affecting our school do not come down, we will not be able to resume in-person education as scheduled. The only things that we can do to avoid that is for each family to do their part in trying to reduce the spread of this virus in the community.

Our hope is to be proactive instead of reactive. If we would have a surge of more teachers out tomorrow, we may have to close earlier, but we hope that will not happen. Our plan for now, is to finish the week with in-person education.

After school on Tuesday, November 17th, we will have our pizza deliveries from 2:30-3:30. Plan to pick up your pizza that you have purchased at that time, as we will not be able to store them for you. Because of the high demand, we were lucky enough to have sold over 600 pizzas! Great job, students and parents! Thank you for the tremendous effort!

Our QND Placement Exam for the 8th grade students which was scheduled on Thursday, November 19th will be rescheduled. We will inform you of that new date as soon as possible.

We are currently planning on Remote Learning ending on December 2nd, and returning to in-person education on December 3rd. The December 3rd return is contingent upon our current quarantine numbers coming down. We want to know how our families are doing on December 1st, so that if we cannot reopen, we provide parents adequate notice. Therefore, if your child WOULD NOT be in school on December 1st, due to illness or quarantine, we ask that you call the school and notify us. Based upon the numbers we receive on December 1st, we will notify all parents on December 2nd if we are going to proceed on returning to in-person education as scheduled or not on December 3rd.

We thank you for your support in advance of this difficult decision. This was not an easy decision, but feel it is in the best interest of all involved. We will keep you and your families in our prayers.

May the Lord watch over us all and keep us safe.

Sincerely,

Reverend Steven Arisman, Pastor

Lori Shepard, Principal

Amanda Venvertloh, Board President