Special Board Meeting (3/24), COVID safety

[prin...@sethigh.org]

Dear Students, Parents, and Guardians,

• Special Board Meeting tomorrow (Wed, 3/24) at 6 PM
• COVID-19 Safety over Spring Break
• New COVID-19 guidance for schools and the impact on SET

Special Board Meeting tomorrow (Wed, 3/24) at 6 PM

Our audit for last year (2019/20) is due to San Diego County on 3/31 and our auditors did not get the audit done in time for the March meeting so we will have a short special meeting tomorrow to approve the audit.  For full disclosure, we have also included another item on the agenda to secure short-term financing since California has decided to be late on its payments to schools for the remainder of this school year.  This is known as deferrals and is a tactic that is used by the State to manage its own cashflow.  Anyway, that is also on the agenda since we want to get the process started as soon as possible.  I mention it now because I didn't want anyone to think that we were trying to sneak that item onto the agenda when I claimed that the real reason for the meeting was the approval of the audit.

I also want to apologize for forgetting to put the Zoom link on the calendar for the March meeting.  In case I ever forget to do this in the future, the zoom link is always on the agenda itself.  Agendas can be found on our website under About|Board Meetings.  The direct link to this agenda can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oq5bX6BNanPxWIB-Q9vxKKf1Z12zULeC_6GHJLkYZI0/

 

COVID-19 Safety over Spring Break

First of all, for the safety of you and your family, please continue to follow all of the customary COVID-19 protocols over the break.  I know that it feels like we are nearing the end of this nightmare, but it is still important to wear masks, social distance, and avoid large groups of people until the virus is knocked out for real.  For the safety of our school and to ensure that we can continue to have students on campus every day for the remainder of the school year, please consider self-quarantining for 10 days prior to returning to school if you engage in any potentially risky behavior (like having a multi-family celebration of Grandma's birthday, or traveling out of state or out of the country).  If you decide to take a COVID-19 test to confirm that you are ok and to shorten the quarantine, please make sure that you follow CDC guidelines by not testing until the 5th day after potential exposure.  For those who are lucky enough to be fully vaccinated, no quarantine is required unless you are feeling symptoms.

New COVID-19 guidance for schools and the impact on SET

You have probably heard that the new guidance for schools is that 3-foot social distancing is now acceptable.  We will be considering what the impact of this new guidance will be on SET over the next few weeks.  We will start with the Full Hybrid program that we had anticipated doing right after Spring Break and will make sure that we do not have and County-wide or local-to-SET outbreaks due to Spring Break.  Once we are confident that it is safe to do so, we will allow our class sizes to increase and will consider allowing students to come to school 4 days per week.  Our primary concern with doing this too early is that once we start to mix Groups A and B, we could potentially have to shut down the whole school if there is a COVID-19 outbreak.  As it is now, the CDC has not updated its definition of a close contact to match the new 3-foot social distancing language, so we could potentially have to shut down the entire school if we are allowing anything less than 6-foot social distancing.

Please know that we view this guidance as good news and we are hopeful that this will mean that we can have school looking pretty close to normal before the year is out.  I just want to manage expectations a bit since this is a bit more complicated than just opening the doors and letting everyone in!

 

I hope you are all having a fantastic Spring Break.  Students who have fallen behind, please use this time to catch up on work.  Hopefully, you have worked out a plan with your teachers and are already making good progress.

See you soon!

Dr. McCurdy