001hello chris cooper here superintendent of clearwater schools i want to give you an update as we head into the 21 22 school year sounds weird to even say that but i'm excited that we're here and ready to roll uh first of all our first day of school if you weren't aware is august 19th lots of summer activities have been going on sports practices will start prior to that but our official first day of school is august 19th we've had the enrollment process online open for a few days if you weren't aware of that make sure and check your email you should have received something from us on july 12th if you're a returning student that would a parent of a returning student that would have had some information about online enrollment if you're a new
002student we ask that you would call the school office we'll get you some login information you can start that process neither of those things work you can come to our on-site enrollment which will be august 10th 8 am to 4 pm so that's august 10th we should mention there's there is an accompanying letter that goes with this video that will have probably better more detailed information in it one thing i do want to highlight about the enrollment process this year is a change and that's the household economic survey so every child will receive free breakfast and lunch again this year but you could also receive reduced or free enrollment fees technology fees and at the high school a ct fee one time so we'd ask that you fill out that that household economic survey when
003you do the enrollment process and that'll let us know you'd like to be considered for that the other thing those surveys do is may allow our school to access some additional federal funds so that would help out our budget and and would be a win-win for um both you and the school if you've completed the enrollment process and you didn't do that we are attaching a uh form to this uh update that you could print off and fill out and bring to the school you could also stop by the school we could get those to you and have you fill that out at that time for those reduced or free fees well what a year it's been i've officially completed my first year as a school superintendent i never would have guessed i would have
004been doing many of the things i was doing last year but i have to say it couldn't have rather been a i wouldn't have rather been in any other place so a great year we had and i believe that's because we came together kept kids in school and again that's that's our focus is to educate educate kids so again though this year there are some recent changes i'm sure you've heard of the the national concern of covid uh and the recent uptick in hospitalizations and cases so i'm trying to keep an eye on that and we will be having some meetings in a couple weeks because a lot of things can change in two weeks to look at our plans and see what we need to do moving forward what i can tell you right
005now that we know is a few things one is we won't offer remote learning that's not going to be an option this year for students to stay home and receive remote instruction from our teachers what we will offer is a full virtual option through a service provider so if you would like to take that option please let your school know as soon as possible probably the big question it gets about masks and so we are planning a mask being optional for students and staff they can choose to wear them choose to not wear them we will make every ever possible to make sure that no one's treated any differently whether they choose to wear a mask choose not to wear a mask that's going to be personal choice we will continue some hygiene measures with
006hand sanitizing available encourage frequent hand washing not touching nose and face a lot of other just good hygiene measures as we move forward we'll also have social distancing where it's possible without being a disruption to the academic learning or social emotional uh well-being one thing we know we're going to be doing as it's required by law is that's continuing to work closely with the sedgwick county health department and i've been in contact with him several times in the last week and one of the things that we'll we're required to do is to report positive cases and then anybody who was a close contact to that positive case they are planning on uh issuing quarantines for close contacts of coba 19 positive cases so what we're trying to do is to to mitigate what that might
007do to students not being in school first of all if students or staff are fully vaccinated they won't be required to quarantine as a close contact the second option that i'm working with kansas department of health and environment on to provide is if a close contact has no symptoms and receives a daily uh negative coveted test then they can continue to be at school so i'm working to to provide that as an option for students parents and staff so if if students or staff were in a closed contact situation need to be quarantined they could choose to receive a daily test if and if that was negative they could continue to be at school to learn and play we're also working on working on some other creative options my goal this year is that we're
008able to adapt and change and not have a year-long plan but we may come to a point where we say hey we need to do this for this classroom to keep them in school and we want to do that and then get back to normal as quickly as possible and safely as possible i think the big thing we can do is continue to come together in a positive way my request would be to parents is if if you're if your students are sick please keep them home i really think that uh saved us last year it did a lot of good um that that's gonna save us again this year the other thing my other request and it's in the letter i stated that we would deal with each other with mercy understanding and assumption
009of positive intent when i tell my kids what's the assumption of positive intent i tell myself that everybody's doing the darn best they can right in this moment and if we believe that i think we can all come together and continue to work through this as always reach out if you have questions again similar to last year there may be more unanswered questions and answers for questions at this point we will be continuing to communicate with you looking forward to a great school year i believe we're going to get through this bump and have a good plan to keep kids in school keep them learning make up for any losses that we might have suffered as quickly as possible that's all i have for today is mr cooper signing off have a great day