Preschool News
March 14,2021
Message from Mrs. Kilday
I hope this email finds you all well. I am sure you have heard a lot about the "all in" plan for our elementary students. This plan hopes to bring all elementary students back in person very soon. At the preschool we have also been talking and thinking about what an "all in" plan might look like for us. As you know, the students we must service are already "all in", so you may be asking yourself; what does this mean for us? In considering the answer to that question, I think immediately about the need to bring back some community peers. Due to initial reopening guidance, specifically square footage recommendations, we were not able to welcome any community peers this fall. The loss has been tremendous. We fully believe in the importance and benefits of inclusive environments, especially for young children, so as this "all in" opportunity presents itself, this is where my thoughts immediately go.
We have developed a plan to gradually begin to bring peers into our program, starting with 1-2 per classroom. Our hope is that by the end of the school year, each class has doubled in size with the addition of 3-5 peers, depending on the classroom. Safety, and the needs of our current students, are first and foremost in our mind. This shift will be cautious and gradual.
You may wonder how we can accommodate more students while remaining at the current square footage. In September, when we reopened we followed the recommendation of 144 square feet per child. As we learn more about this virus and transmission, the Department of Early Education and Care has adjusted the recommended square footage to 41 per student. As I said earlier, this shift will be gradual and we are cautious. Therefore, we will be allotting 88 square feet per child, exceeding the current recommendation. The updated guidance from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education also allows students to be three feet apart when other mitigating factors are in place. These include mask wearing, handwashing, proper ventilation, windows open etc. We will continue to follow these protocols. Our students will continue to have their own play spaces and we will begin to include opportunities for more cooperative play, ensuring the three foot distance.
We hope to begin this shift soon and know you probably have many questions for us. Rich and I will be hosting drop in sessions throughout the week so that we can be available to answer your questions and share more information about our plan with you.
Watch for an email tomorrow morning with sign up details.
You will also see a quick survey at the end of this week, so please be on the look out for that.
We are committed to providing a safe, quality program for our Rodman friends and are excited to take this next step forward.
Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns.
Donna
Community Peer Lottery for 2020-2021 School Year
The application is here.
If your child is on an IEP, their placement is determined by the special Education Team and you do not need to complete an application.
SEL Screener
We are excited to announce that we have started our universal social emotional screening program. Our teachers received the screeners last week and parent/guardian ones will be coming to your email this week.
As you know, our school community prioritizes understanding and supporting the needs of our students. And we recognize that social emotional skills are essential to preschool and our young learners! These values have led us to pursue universal social emotional screening for all our students, in order to best understand their unique needs in school and at home.
The screening tool that we are using is called the BASC-3 Behavioral and Emotional Screening System (BESS). The BESS is an age-normed screening survey designed for the preschool population. This quick screening system will help us identify social emotional areas of vulnerability (e.g. anxiety), which will help us individualize our classroom support to meet our students' needs. We are also using this program to evaluate the effectiveness of our current SEL curriculum, Social Thinking, and will use the results to better inform our social emotional lessons in the classroom.
Classroom teachers will be completing a survey for each child. In addition, we will be sending you a parent survey via email. By seeing both the parent and teacher perspectives, we can get a better sense of your child’s needs across all environments. The way the account is set up only allows for one parent email per student. However, if you want to fill out two screeners, let us know and we are happy to send a hard copy home. Hard copies are also available to anyone if preferred!
Please be on the lookout for an email from “Q-Global”, the evaluation software we are using for the survey. Once you get the email, follow the link to fill out the survey. It should only take a few minutes. If you have any questions, please email Anna Russo at russoa@cantonma.org. Do not respond directly to the survey email as we will not receive it.
Please let us know if you have any questions about the screening process. We are excited for this opportunity to better understand our young learners!
Once we analyze the data we will be sure to let you know what we find.
Rodman Early Childhood Program
Email: kilday@cantonma.org
Website: cantonma.org
Location: 960 Washington Street, Canton, MA, USA
Twitter: @CPS_ECC