Shelburne Community School
Weekly Newsletter
August 20, 2021
Principal's Message
SCS Families,
It is exciting to be reaching out to you with our first newsletter of the year. It serves as a great tool to follow up on much of the messaging we shared with last week's Back to School Letter. You can expect this year's newsletters to arrive on Fridays. This is an effort to align all CVSD schools with the timing of our weekly communications. It creates consistent and timely messaging across all schools of the Champlain Valley School District. Parents and caregivers will be able to read the newsletter over the weekend, as it will always point to the week ahead.
It's been a busy week at SCS as we prepare for the start of the school year. We started the week by welcoming our new teachers for a 3-day orientation. On Thursday and Friday, they were joined by our veteran faculty members. On Monday, we will welcome back the entire faculty and staff as our support staff return from their summer break. We've loved seeing some families (primarily from K-4) back in the building as some early classroom orientations and meet and greets have been taking place. Next week, we look forward to welcoming 5-8 families and their students for their team orientations. Each 5-8 family should have received an update email from their teams detailing some shifts in our orientation plans due to COVID precautions. All teams will meet families outdoors, then they will take smaller groups of families into the building in shifts. This will increase distancing and create improved conditions for the afternoon.
As I mentioned in my last email, we are obviously disappointed that the start of this school year is being shaped by COVID mitigation strategies and universal masking. At the same time, with 18 months of experience under our belts, we feel well prepared to meet the current challenges we face. We are thrilled to be able to offer 5-day a week in-person instruction for our students. We believe that the common-sense strategies laid out by the state and CVSD will help us maintain the in-person instruction and school experience that we know is so essential to our students. These strategies were presented by CVSD this week and disseminated to families via email. I have linked the slide presentation here for families that have not had a chance to review them.
A very recent shift in our plan is that outdoor masking will not be required for students. This will impact both recess and middle-level athletics. This decision aligns will all other schools in Chittenden County and is supported by the Department of Health, which continues to see the risk of outdoor exposure to be extremely low. Masking will be mandatory for all students and staff whenever they are indoors. We have heard loud and clear (through parent feedback) the concerns about maskless periods for students in the cafeteria. The DOH supports students eating in the cafeteria but is asking students to remain in cohorts (assigned tables) and to have those tables separated by 6 ft spacing. While our plan was already to cohort students by assigning tables, we are now working to address the spacing needs for our larger lunch groupings. With construction on our kitchen finishing up in the next week, we will have all students in classrooms and outdoors for the first week while we adjust our planning. We will not move the larger lunches back into the cafeteria until we know we can meet these new expectations. I'll detail our adapted lunch plan in this newsletter next Friday.
We thank the entire community for your support of our collective efforts. Your willingness to monitor your student's health and keeping them out of school when they are ill is probably the most important strategy we have at our disposal. We support and appreciate a cautious approach when making these types of decisions. It is essential to keep our community safe and our doors open.
While this work can be all-consuming, it is far from our only focus. The teachers and staff at SCS are working to assure that Wednesday is magical for our students and smooth and organized for our families. The first day of school is a special rite of passage in our culture. As we older folks know all too well, they are finite. We only get so many. We can't wait to partner with you to make Wednesday a day filled with hope and wonder for your children. Talk up the first day of school with your kids. Get them excited, because it's going to be great.
We will continue to use this newsletter as a space to share honest and timely communication with you. Explore the information, announcements, and resources it contains. In uncertain times, it will continue to help us maintain the healthy school-family partnerships that make SCS the special place it is.
Enjoy the final days of summer break with your families. We are almost there...and we can't wait!
Updates from Ms. Celmer
SCS News
SCS Fall Sports
Registration for soccer, field hockey, and cross country closes today! If you have a student athlete who is interested in participating in a fall sport at Shelburne Community School, please complete and submit this form today, Friday August 20th.
Girls Field hockey, Boys and Girls Soccer are available to students in grades 6th-8th.
Boys and Girls Cross Country is available to students in grades 5th-8th.
All practices will begin on August 26th, and run from 3:00-4:30pm.
Questions can be directed to Leigh Petrucelli, SCS Athletic Director: lpetrucelli@cvsdvt.org.
CVSD News
Early Release Days for the 2021-2022 School Year
A reminder that CVSD will release students in our K-8 schools every Wednesday an hour earlier than the usual dismissal time. This time allows for professional development, collaborative teaming, and other important work with our faculty and staff.
Starting August 25th, the first day of the 2021-2022 school year, K-8 students will be dismissed one hour earlier on Wednesdays. Preschool schedules will be posted. More specific dismissal times will be provided by your schools.
Zoom Meeting with Medical Professionals
This week, we hosted a Zoom call with some CVSD folks and some local medical professionals. They helped to answer questions that we've received from teachers and families about starting the school year, masks, and other measures to stay safe. We did something similar last year and it was very helpful. Hopefully, this won't be an annual event next year too. Here's the recording of the conversation.Important Upcoming Dates
(A complete calendar can be found on the SCS website)
Aug 24th - Red Team Orientation (12:00-12:30pm)
Aug 24th - Yellow Team Orientation (2:00-2:30pm)
Aug 24th - Blue Team 5/6 Orientation (2:00-3:00pm)
Aug 24th - Green Team 5th Grade Orientation (2:00-3:00pm)
Aug 25th - First Day of School K-8 (Early Release)
Aug 26th - DEI SCS Community Committee Meeting (5:30-6:30pm)
Aug 31st - First Day of School for PreK
Sept 6th - Labor Day, No School
Sept 9th - Beginning Band Night (6:30-8:00pm)
Sept 13th, 14th, & 15th - Student Photo Days
Sept 16th - Yom Kippur, No School
Shelburne Community School
Scott Sivo - Lead Principal (5-8)
Email: ssivo@cvsdvt.org
Website: https://www.cvsdvt.org/shelburne
Location: Shelburne, VT, USA
Phone: 802-985-3331
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShelburneCommunitySchool/
Twitter: @SCSLearns