Glenealy School Newsletter
12th March 2020
Message from Chris
Dear Parents and Caregivers,
I hope our Glenealy families are doing well, wherever you are currently. With the seemingly expansive growth of Covid-19 around the world, our thoughts are with our families who try to navigate the various challenges and interruptions to their lives that the virus has caused. Here in Hong Kong, our teaching teams are continuing to work extremely hard and with great commitment to deliver for our children alongside evolving our approach to distance learning.
In terms of learning, it has been a busy week. We have seen thousands of pieces of learning returned to teachers from our children, with thousands of feedback comments given. Our sessions are also seeing an increasing number of children engaging with the learning on a daily basis. This is great news. It has been wonderful to see the children so actively engaged in the learning tasks with some incredible examples of learning coming in through videos, live sessions, photos, documents, slides and audio recordings. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support of our learners - I know it is not easy to complete the learning in your home environments and this can present some real challenges for our families. We also recognise that some of our children are finding this period difficult. Many are missing their friends, they’re missing being in school and we know this will have an impact upon them. This is another good reason for our move to increasing the number of ‘whole group’ sessions with our children. Our connection with your children (and their connection with each other) is extremely important for us to maintain.
Importantly, after six weeks into the home learning model, and three weeks since our last survey, we would like to gather your views. As a school, we have continually developed our approach to home learning across the period - and we would highly value our parents’ views on our approach. We would really appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to complete the short survey here.
A number of parents have asked us whether we think that April 20th is a firm return date to school. The answer is that we are working towards returning on this date; but we simply can not be certain. We will prepare the school site for this return date, over the coming weeks, undertaking a further deep clean of all classrooms. ESF will communicate directly and regularly with parents, and will certainly be considering carefully the various implications of any government advice that may be given in the coming weeks. As soon as we have more precise information, we will pass this on to parents.
EDB Student Grant Application-Last Reminder.
We have received most of these for our students, however, there are still some families who have not submitted them to the school yet. The deadline for submission is March 20th, when all the forms will be sent to ESF Centre for further processing to the Education Bureau.
Again, if you wish to check if your form has been received, please follow these steps:
Log into your child's Gateway account > Student Demographics> Additional Contact. Under "Remarks" there will be a note to confirm that we have received their form at Glenealy. If there is no remark, it means we have not received it.
As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Once again, I would like to thank you for all your support during this challenging period for our community, and wish you all the very best for the coming week.
Best Regards,
Chris