Dear Lions Park Families,

I hope you are all staying warm despite the frigid temperatures. I think we are making up for our mild December!

This past 22 months has been filled with countless challenges and subsequent changes to address the issues posed by the pandemic. This year we have worked hard to keep students and staff safe while providing meaningful learning opportunities and social emotional support for our students. We have done many things to preserve ongoing in person learning for students. While we do have some students who are still remote by choice and some who have had to quarantine due to illness or exposure, we have not had to move to remote learning for entire classrooms or grade levels. It is important to us that we continue to offer uninterrupted in person learning.

The increased number of cases in our community and school have caused more students to be learning from home. In an effort to prevent spread and reduce the number of students being identified as close contacts, we are going to move back to having students six feet apart at lunch. This is what we did last spring. However, we now have almost 100 more students in the building than we did last spring, since we have only a small number still learning online. Therefore, we are going to return to some of our practices from the spring and make a few changes because we have more students to accommodate. The changes we will be making are described below. Please know that we realize nothing about this situation is ideal. Ideally, all of our students would be seated in the multipurpose room as they were pre-pandemic. We are truly doing the very best we can to keep as many children as possible in school learning with their teachers and peers.

• We will move to three lunch periods. This will result in a schedule change for second grade. They will now learn through 12:20. At 12:20 they will go to recess with third and fifth grades. At 12:50 they will eat in our multipurpose room and a classroom or two. Lunch and recess times will stay the same for third, fourth and fifth grades.
• Third, fourth and fifth grade students will no longer eat in their classrooms.
• Some students will now eat lunch on the gym floor spread six feet apart. This will be rotated between third and fifth grades since they will both continue eating at 11:50. The students will be provided with a tray that will be sanitized after each use. When we did this for the seven weeks last spring, students were encouraged to bring a placemat from home or they were provided with a disposable one. We are glad to have reusable trays this year. Students are welcome to bring a towel from home to sit on. The classes that will sit on the floor first are: Bajzek, Davidov, Murphy (5th), Pavlowski, Rush, St. Denis and Vlaming.

We look forward to more fun ahead with our Valentine's Day parties on February 14th. The PTO room parents will be planning some activities for each class, and students are welcome to bring Valentine's cards to pass out to their classmates. They should bring enough for everyone in their class. Please don't send any cards with food or candy attached. Students may bring cards with stickers, pencils, etc... but no food items. Please don't include anything students take in and out of their mouths, such as whistles or fake teeth.

As always, please feel free to reach out to me with questions or concerns.

Warmly,

Katie Kelly

Principal