Dear Fairview Families,

I hope you and your family have had a good week! We continue to enjoy teaching and connecting with your children while they are here at Fairview. Thank you for entrusting them to us each day as we help them learn and grow. As you have seen in my recent emails since returning from winter break, we have seen an increase in our COVID numbers at Fairview. In an effort to minimize the amount of time students are in close contact with one another maskless within six feet, we are going to have students increase the time they are wearing masks during the lunch period by utilizing the following procedure.

• As students transition into the lunchroom, gym or art room for lunch between 11:50-11:55 (2nd/3rd grades) or 12:20-12:25 (4th/5th grades), students will keep their masks on. If they arrive at the table and are ready to eat, they can pull their mask down to take a bite and then put it directly back on while chewing during this time frame.

• From 11:55-12:08 (2nd/3rd) or 12:25-12:38 (4th/5th) students will eat with their masks off. A supervisor will tell students when this time begins and ends.

• After this time frame, students will put their masks back on. If they are not finished eating, they can pull their mask down momentarily to take a bite or drink and then put it directly back on while they are chewing/drinking, similar to what we do when kids use their water bottles in class. They will finish out the lunch period with their masks on. The time when they put their masks back on is a few minutes short of when we typically are starting to clean up.

Our hope is that this procedure will minimize the number of close contacts we have at school as much as possible and will limit potential COVID spread in the lunchroom. We tried this with our students on Thursday and it went very well. We found that it wasn’t too drastic of a change for our students as most of them finish their lunch rather quickly. That said, we know some of our students take a little longer to eat. In some surrounding schools lunch periods have been shortened entirely, and while we want to look for ways to continue to stop the spread of COVID, we also wanted to make sure students had the time they needed to finish their lunch at their needed pace. This new procedure does not have any impact on outdoor recess as students are welcome to continue taking their masks off while outdoors.

Looking forward, please note that students are off on Monday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School will resume once again on Tuesday. Next week, PTO Special Lunch is on Friday and we look forward to having our virtual author visit with Peter Reynolds on Thursday. Have a wonderful weekend ahead and thank you for reading through today’s newsletter!

Sincerely,

Dan Ophus

Fairview Principal