2nd Week Update

[prin...@sethigh.org]

Dear Students, Parents, and Guardians,

• COVID-19 exposure
• Retreats were a big success!
• Staffing change
• Independent Study contracts can and will be pre-signed

COVID-19 exposure

Unfortunately, we learned of our first on-campus COVID-19 exposure today.  The exposure occurred on Tuesday.  All students and families who were affected have been notified, so if you have not heard from us directly, no one in your family was considered to be a close contact, and no further action is required.  A close contact is still defined to be a contact within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes over a period of 24 hours.

I am thankful that the majority of the students who were affected were vaccinated, so no quarantines were necessary for them.  The others will be doing our modified quarantine which involves twice weekly testing and careful monitoring of symptoms.

Students, please do not try to determine who the positive case is.  Any one of us can wind up being in this situation, and it is important to allow people to tell their own story instead of having others tell it for them.  I can forward any well wishes to the individual.

Retreats were a big success!

We are so thankful that we persevered with the retreats even given the craziness of organizing this during COVID-19.  I was at the 9th grade retreat and it was so amazing to see the students finding friends and growing into their role as high schoolers.  We even had some brave students do presentations in front of the whole grade at the end of the retreat, explaining how they grew over the last few days in the areas of SETUP: Social Responsibility, Effective Leadership, Tenacity and Grit, Uncertainty as Opportunity, and Passion, Purpose and Performance.  This is a great group of students and I look forward to seeing them grow over the next 4 years.

Students in each of the other grade levels were excited to tell me stories about their retreats, too.  The 10th graders went to the zoo, 11th graders apparently rode the roller coaster in Belmont Park until late into the night, and the 12th graders went bowling.

Thank you to the staff for putting together these retreats, and thanks to the parents for getting your students to the venues. 

Staffing change

One of our teachers, Ms. Gibson, left us suddenly after the first week of school.  I am so proud of our staff for stepping up and jumping into new roles to fill the gap despite months of prepping for the classes that they thought they were going to teach.  Mr. Apalategui took over the English 9 classes, Ms. Lennon took over the English 10 class, Ms. J took over Mr. Apalategui's World History class, Ms. Farias took over Ms. Lennon's Debunking Disney class, and I took over the Advisory class.  This was a true team effort and I know that any one of our staff members would have done whatever was necessary to create a seamless transition for our students.

We plan to fill the position with a new staff member at the start of our Spring term in January.  It did not make sense to try to fill the position now when we did not have enough time to properly vet the candidates.

Thank you to our students for handling the transition so graciously.  I apologize that this happened, but hopefully you have already seen that you are in a really good place now that you have met your new teachers.

Independent Study contracts can and will be pre-signed

The State keeps flip-flopping on this, but it seems that now everyone is in agreement that Independent Study contracts can be pre-signed in case they are needed to cover absences that may occur throughout the year due to quarantines and other potential absences.  We will be sending out Independent Study contracts to you next week for e-signing.  Remember that Independent Study can be used even for 1-day absences, so it is important for us to have these contracts on file so that we can recover attendance credit when students are attending school virtually.

Thanks everyone!  Have a great weekend!

Dr. McCurdy