Dear CES Families,

We have had an amazing first month of school! It has been so exciting to see our students back at school and students & staff are more eager than ever to be together at school. Our school structures and learning routines are solidly in place, and our students are engaging in deep learning experiences both inside and outside of the classroom on a daily basis. Thank you families for choosing Chimacum schools to entrust your child's education, health, and safety. We love our students and families and this is going to be a great year!

Student safety remains our top priority. To date, there has been one in-school student-to-student Covid infection in public schools in Clallam county. In addition to mask-wearing, vaccination mandates, and layered mitigation strategies schools are still doing well staving off infections. We closely follow Jefferson County and the Washington Department of Health guidelines to guide our safety practices. Our primary focus is to keep school in person, and we share that vision with our colleagues across the state.

You will only hear about Covid cases in our schools if your student has been in close contact with a person at school who has tested positive for Covid 19. Close contact is defined as being within 3 feet for 15 or more minutes in a 24 hour period. If you do not hear from the school, your child was not determined to be potentially infected in our contact tracing.

If a student has been in close contact with a positive case, they will stay home in quarantine if unvaccinated, or test for Covid within 3 days if vaccinated. All positive Covid cases quarantine at home for 10 days.

If any of our schools experience an outbreak of Covid 19 (defined as 2 or more positive Covid Cases transmitted within schools, not including in-family transmission) we will communicate to all families about the outbreak and response plan, which will include, contact tracing, testing and isolation, and mitigation (like cleaning).

We will be holding conferences with each family on October 28th and 29th. Your student's teacher will be reaching out to you in the next couple of weeks through our Bloomz App to schedule a parent/teacher conference with you.

Parent-teacher conferences are an important time where student strengths, challenges, and goals are discussed. Teachers will also be able to support families with any questions they have with digital tools, assignments, lessons, and attendance procedures.

As in the past, we would like to meet with 100% of parents and guardians. This may happen through Zoom or by phone. Your classroom teacher will be contacting you soon to schedule a parent/teacher conference with you. Below is a great flyer with information on how to maximize parent-teacher conferences.

From time to time, photographs or videos of students are taken during the school day for use in district and educational news releases, publications, video productions, social media, educational projects, and the district website.

If you do NOT wish to have your child photographed/videotaped for news media or school publicity purposes, sign and return this form to the school’s main office. Parents must submit to their student’s school office each year. This form applies only to the current school year. Please fill out a new form each school year if you do not want your child’s image published.

To the greatest degree possible, we are using our outdoor spaces for learning, playing, and eating. For student meals, we are pleased to be offering free scratch-cooked breakfast and lunch for all students. As long as the weather permits, students will be eating outdoors.

When winter arrives and the weather turns too cold, we will be utilizing our indoor spaces for student lunches. Eating outdoors is one of the best safety COVID practices we can do to ensure we stay open for in-person learning. The students have been enjoying eating outside so this practice is not only the safest procedure our school can follow but also one that our students are enjoying.

Please see our safety procedures newsletter that was shared with families before school started: https://www.smore.com/f9aqm

Our 6th-grade students will be participating in the Healthy Youth Survey between Oct. 11th - Oct. 27th. Students will take this anonymous 45-minute survey in their classroom(s). The Washington State Healthy Youth Survey (HYS) is an effort to measure health risk behaviors that contribute to morbidity, mortality, and social problems among youth in Washington State. These behaviors include alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, and other drug use; behaviors that result in intentional and unintentional injuries (e.g., violence); dietary behaviors and physical activity; mental health; school climate; and related risk and protective factors. The 2018 administration was the sixteenth such statewide survey of Washington students and participation has been steadily increasing over time. In 2018, over 230,000 students from all 39 counties participated in HYS.

The Healthy Youth Survey data is used to support our social-emotional instructional programming and to develop our mental health supports. If you prefer for your child to not participate in this survey, we will need you to fill out this form by Oct. 8th. If you have any questions, please reach out to Jason Lynch, Principal at 360-302-5855. For more information regarding frequently asked questions please see this document.

SBAC testing is scheduled starting the week of Oct 11th. We will be adapting our schedules during the week to support testing. If your child has headphones/earbuds, please make sure they bring them to school each day during the week of testing. If they do not have headphones, we will provide them. For more information regarding SBAC testing please refer to this site http://bit.ly/StartStrongReadyWA If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your child's teacher.