001hello this is chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here with a brief summer update it's been a busy quick and recently very hot summer and it's hard to believe that we will have students in our buildings 28 days from now it is 28 days so the first day of school i want to give a shout out to our custodial maintenance staff and all the work they've been doing this summer to get our buildings back up to speed and up in in great shape ready to go for another school year some things i wanted to mention uh one is the enrollment process if you're not already aware online enrollment is open if you had a returning student you should have received some information already about that it's generated a few questions because it's a little different
002process typically those questions can be both best answered at the building office level our building offices are staffed on monday mornings throughout the summer but starting a week from monday august 1st they'll be staffed with regular hours the secretaries and the and the principals will both will all be around starting august 1st so a better opportunity to answer some of those questions one of the changes in the enrollment process has to do with uh breakfast and lunch for the past two years due to cover the federal government has paid for everyone to have a free breakfast or lunch that has changed we're going back to the way uh the system worked before so we'd encourage you if you might qualify to go ahead and fill out the free or reduced launch application that's in the
003enrollment process and then you'll be notified if you do qualify for that that's also the first step in the process of getting uh free or reduced school fees as well so very important that that you do that and we'd ask that you fill those out as you go through that process we also have a different fee payment system and um you will be receiving some information after you've enrolled here in the next couple weeks about how that process is going to work we're trying to make everything um simpler than it was before technology is always a challenge and uh and some learning curve but we believe that we're going to have a new system that's more friendly on the parent side of things to pay our fees in one spot um our web page also
004has a new look so again trying to update and get things more user-friendly so uh if you haven't been there take a look on our webpage one of the challenges we're facing that seems to be pretty universal right now is staffing issues so we're still working to get everybody staffed believe we're going to be there the place that that's really hit the hardest is um bus drivers you may have seen the bus out along uh the street saying we have uh we're currently hiring bus drivers fortunately we fortunately we were able to bring some folks on this week but it's a really tight timeline to get them ready to drive for school already so if you know somebody that's interested in driving a bus have them reach out to us because we may be a
005little short handed when we start school even if we hire someone right now there are some options that we may have to consider these aren't things we're definitely going to do but i wanted to be people have people aware one of our uh options is to shorten the time it takes to do a longer route combine some routes and to do that one of the things that we would do is uh implement bus stops and some of our housing developments out in the country so if we have a bunch of kids tightly packed in a housing development rather than going door to door we would have a bus stop where kids might have to walk three or four hundred yards to get to a place and then get on the bus that would get us
006out of that those housing developments quicker get get our drivers down the road another thing the hope is that we get drivers up to speed and ready to go our least favorite option but one that we might have to implement um is that we um the state expects us to bus students that are more than two and a half miles from school currently we bus a lot of students inside of two and a half miles as a courtesy and we want to keep doing that but if we start school really short on drivers that might be something we would have to implement is not busing students who live within two and a half miles of the school door hopefully that would be temporary if it does come it's not something that that we want to
007do and i don't want people to panic it's it's not uh something that we may have to do but i wanted people to uh parents to have some time to think and go what if that did happen if i lived two miles from school and there's no longer a bus what what would my options be as another thing i'm going to go take my test i've driven a bus in the past i'm going to get up to speed so hopefully i can fill in in emergencies and and cause things to run smoothly so i just wanted to recap online enrollments open for returning students out of district students new students if you know someone who's moved to town ask them if they've enrolled their students yet and and help them get through that process if
008you know someone from out of district would like to be here have them reach out to us and or go to the web page and hopefully walk through that process i want to end this update just reviewing our vision the usd 264 vision is that we're one team one family one district where each child reaches their full potential and is well equipped to be successful and coming out of what we've come out of the last couple years uh in in the world and and here in clearwater we want to focus on that one team one family one district coming together so we're going to intentionally do some things to bring not only our staff and students together but the whole community so i hope you can be a part of some of those things as
009we come together to to to make a difference for uh students families in our community here this is mr cooper signing off work hard have fun and be your best self