Reopening Update
July 19, 2020 ~ WSD Parents
Good Afternoon,
As you can imagine, it has been a very busy summer following the COVID-19 transmission in our community and formulating multiple contingency plans for the return to school. We appreciate your feedback in multiple surveys and your patience as we have tried to address the layers of logistics involved in the various scenarios related to starting a school year in the midst of a pandemic. Please know that we have regular and ongoing conversations with the St. Charles Department of Public Health and that the safety of our students, staff, and community have been at the forefront of all our discussions. I have shared with you since May that I believe face-to-face instruction is what is best for our students and that has been our goal since the close of the 2019-2020 school year. However, we also fully recognize that we need to be flexible based on the status of transmission in our community, and that is why we have developed multi-leveled plans.
Tomorrow evening beginning at 6:00 p.m., we will present an overview of our Roadmap to Reopening Plan to the Board of Education during a Special (Open) Meeting at Liberty High School. The meeting will be livestreamed on the WSD YouTube channel and we encourage you to watch. On Tuesday, we will share the detailed plan with you. We understand and appreciate that as parents, you need to make your own plans for child care and work and that you each have unique and personal situations related to risk and comfort levels. We have kept all of that in mind as we have developed the plan.
I would like to thank the staff members and community members who devoted their time, energy and thoughtful consideration to developing this multi-leveled plan. As I ask for your flexibility during these uncertain and rapidly changing times, I know that we will also need to be flexible and willing to alter these plans based on guidance from health officials and with what is always our guiding focus - what is best for students.
We understand that the pandemic has caused various levels of apprehension and numerous challenges for all of us to work our way through. In the WSD, the scope of those challenges is only compounded by the size of our buildings and the rate of our historic growth. But with your continued patience, flexibility, and feedback, I am confident we will effectively work together to ensure the safety and well being of our students, staff and community.
Curtis Cain, Ph.D.
Superintendent