The Main Things
An MSD Staff Communication that Cuts out the Clutter!
January 14, 2022
Main Thing 1: Operation Keep Our Doors Safely Open
As predicted, we are seeing an increase in staff and student cases of COVID-19 due to the Omicron variant. We’re closely tracking cases with our partners at Jackson County Public Health and expect cases to peak at the end of the month. Hopefully they’ll decrease drastically in February!
This is an INCREDIBLE challenge. We know so many of you are pulling double and triple duty and not only experiencing your own personal struggles due to the pandemic, but bending over backward to help our students who are also struggling.
While some districts across the country, including some here in Oregon, have made temporary shifts to CDL, this is not a plan Medford is exploring. We know students need us and need to be learning from us in-person. Of course, there may be classes here and there shifting to CDL due to COVID exposure or lack of staffing, and in some cases there may be the need for a temporary wing or building closure, but we are doing everything we can to safely keep our doors open.
We have made some temporary changes (through Feb. 4) to support our efforts to stay open, including:
Postponing or holding virtually staff and community meetings, as much as possible.
Limiting volunteers to “mission essential.”
Implementing spectators at athletic contests.
Moving to five day quarantine and isolation, as now permitted by ODE.
Canceling or postponing all unnecessary meetings.
Extending hours for some part time employees.
Working to get campus based subs.
And dispatching district office staff to cover on campuses.
An important guidance change to note: in order to be considered up-to-date on your vaccines, you must be boosted if you are outside five months from your Pfizer or Moderna series or two months from your Johnson & Johnson series. This is required to be exempt from quarantine. It is not required for employment.
Also, the Oregon Department of Education announced today new contact tracing rules. Oregon will no longer consider masked contact in K-12 settings (including on school buses) to be an exposure regardless of distancing. We will be focusing our contact tracing on times when students are unmasked for long periods of time, such as in certain extracurricular activities or in classrooms where individual accommodations to the masking policy are required to support students with disabilities.
We have had a couple requests to reinstate On the Record, which is an open forum for staff to raise questions and converse with Bret and other district staff. Join us for On the Record 2022, Tuesday at 4pm at this Zoom link. Hope to see you there!
Main Thing 2: Calendar Updates
We have made a change to the previously adopted 2022-2023 school year calendar. The newly adopted calendar is linked, here. After feedback from staff and families, we’ve shifted the start date from Friday, August 26 to Monday, August 29, and the last day of school has moved from Wednesday, June 7 to Thursday, June, 8.
Starting on Monday the 29th:
Some Kindergarten Soft Start
1st through 6th Grades
6th Grade Academy
7th & 9th Grade Orientations
Starting on Tuesday the 30th:
Kindergarten Soft Start Continues
Everyone Else!
Main Thing 3: MSD Makeover Lesson Edition Secondary Edition
Other Things:
Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
This Monday, January 17th is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and there will be no school for students. Please join us as we honor the life and legacy of Dr. King. We encourage students and staff to tune into our partner BASE Southern Oregon’s live-streamed video “Martin Luther King Jr.: Our Voices.” This event is a great opportunity to learn about Dr. King’s influence on racial equality and the achievements he made during his life. You can watch the video live at 2:00 pm on Facebook here, Rogue Valley Community Television Prime (RVTV), and on channel 15 or 82 in the area. (We have touched base with our technology department and approved Facebook access for students through Monday so they can watch the event on their Chromebooks.)