Audience: All Students
Re: School Calendar for Semester 2
With the return to full time face to face, we will be returning to our traditional school calendar which was set last spring. Therefore, the start of semester 2, scheduled breaks, and end of the semester will follow the District calendar.
Audience: All students attending Face to Face
Re: Daily attendance
Daily attendance and engagement is critical to student academic growth. As semester 1 progressed, we witnessed a number of students enrolled in Hybrid A/B learning that began to opt out of attending in person instruction to engage in class online. Additionally, we saw an increase in the number of students who opted to engage in class in a car on their way to a vacation destination. Although this sounds like a vogue way to learn, we witnessed many situations where this became more of a distraction for the student and we believe classroom performance suffered as a result. Therefore, beginning second semester, we will be changing the way in which a student gets ‘credit’ for being in attendance to the class as a face to face learner.
During first semester, we created an attendance code ‘PO’ (stands for Present Online) to accommodate the student who was at home due to illness/possible close contact/awaiting results of COVID testing. In many situations, students had minor or no symptoms so they were able to engage in class virtually. When this happened, the PO code was entered and the student was considered as not being absent for class. As mentioned above, this quickly grew into wide variety of requests which were not COVID/medical related (i.e. vacation, tired from long weekend, not feeling ‘class’ for the day, etc.). We will continue to use the PO code this semester for students who are awaiting designation with our COVID protocol or have a substantiated medical reason for not being able to attend in person. If a student has a different reason for not being in attendance, they may be able to engage online to take in a portion of the class but, it will be counted as an absence (excused or unexcused depending on the reason given).
Audience: All Students
Re: Final exams for Semester 2
Given we plan to offer a traditional schedule for this semester, final exams and a final exam schedule will take place during the closing days of the term. Also in effect will be our test exemption policy. We did make some modifications to the policy this past fall to accommodate absenteeism due to COVID/medical so take some time to review those changes(in the student handbook) if you have forgotten the details covered with you this fall.
Audience: All students attending Face to Face
Re: Social Distancing/Mask Wearing
Given greater than 90% of the student body will be in attendance every day, the ability to social distance in classes and hallways will be extremely limited. Therefore, there will be limited opportunity to temporarily remove your mask as there will be few instances where you will be 6 ft. or greater socially distanced. Another area where social distancing will be difficult is in the commons area. We will continue to promote staggering of lunches, limits on tables, and sanitation between groups but the volume of students will create a different environment than we had in the hybrid schedule. Therefore, we will ask students to wear masks when they are not eating/drinking and ask them to create a consistent lunch/breakfast group with other students who are socially connected outside the school day (i.e. same extra-curricular group, friends who spend time together outside the school day, etc.).
Audience: Distance Learners
Re: Different feel to Distance Learning
Our plan is to continue offering distance learning using the same modalities as first semester. Even though the delivery model will be the same, the feel is going to be quite different. In some regard, you may be the only person in a particular classroom who is doing distance learning. In this situation, it will naturally happen whereas fewer questions are asked online and fewer responses will be shared online since there will be a significant drop in the number of students engaging online. Therefore, it will be important to continually commit to engagement in the class and maintain strong communication with the teacher if you don’t have clarity on a topic.
Audience: Freshman
Re: Freshman Advisement
With the return to full time face to face, we will be using our freshman advisement program as an avenue to balance and stagger lunch periods. Since we will be attending every day of the week, freshman advisement will be every day of the week. We do not desire to have this be a long term situation as we do not believe an advisement program maintains its effectiveness by meeting 5 days a week. Therefore, our plan is to monitor our lunches and COVID dashboard with a long term goal to have days set aside for freshman to have extended lunches in lieu of freshman advisement.
CHS Administration
