001good afternoon chris cooper superintendent of clearwater school here to give you another brief update the best news that i have today is that we've been having school there were days that we wondered if this moment would ever come but we've we started on tuesday we've completed four days of school and it's been outstanding i just want to take a minute to thank everybody that's worked so hard to make that happen i want to thank our staff and all the time that each of them has put in to get ready for this week i want to thank our students for the amazing attitude that they've had this week from preschool to seniors the kids have been outstanding with all the procedures and protocols and different methods that we had to put in place they have just
002rolled with it from the masks to temperature scans we have had very few issues and everybody's doing their best to do what we have to do to have school this year and that's greatly appreciated i want to thank our parents many of you did a lot of great work with your students to get them prepared for this week and what it might look like and i want to thank our from community for really just rallying around our school and encouraging our educators to to do the best we can and to provide the an outstanding education for each student this year so many of our students are on site we do have around 60 students that are getting their education through clearwater school district remotely this year and that has went as well as could be
003expected this week i think for the most part we've had a few exceptions a glitch here or there but i do know by our second day we had every one of those students engaged in someone in our learning activities and so many of those glitches were fixed quit quickly it is a challenge to provide six hours of educational opportunities and activities at home is a challenge for students staff and parents we appreciate the partnerships that we have with those parents and the work that you're doing also if you're a remote student a parent of a remote student know that we are continuing to work with the kansas state department of education to try to streamline the logs that we're required to keep to ensure that we're giving a good education so we're looking at lots
004of things to try to ease that burden on parents but it is we also want those students to have a great education so if something changes and we can have everybody back on site that they can make a smooth transition when that does happen we have formed a new committee this week called our learning options committee and that team has some administrators board members and some members our community who are in the health profession and their role is going to be to provide advice to our school board as community cove data changes as to what we should be doing in our schools just want to shout out to them and say i greatly appreciate them volunteering to take on that role because we are going to have many challenging discussions ahead i i presume um
005but we seek their advice and appreciate their expertise one of the things that i wanted to mention is our activity attendance if you're not aware uh our activities like volleyball football will be limited attendance and the way our school district's doing it is each participant for home games is getting four bracelets that you can wear on your wrist and that bracelet allows you to buy your way into the game by a ticket into the game and unfortunately if you don't have one of those we can't allow you to attend because under the county guidance and our abctl league rules that were just recently adopted we need to limit attendance at those activities to keep everybody safe so like tonight we have a football game at wellington and each of our participants got two bracelets so
006if you do not have a bracelet that has the clearwater logo on it for tonight unfortunately you won't be able to attend that game our games will be live streamed and i want to thank heath elliott our assistant principal at the high school for making that happen if you need that information reach out to our high school or to me and we will get you that information about how to view our activities remotely this year one thing that you may have heard of the usda announced this week that they're going to continue the summer lunch feeding program which we are still working through to try to figure out exactly what that does mean and our director of food service brenda hastings has been in many meetings and many phone calls this week to try to
007get that all figured out what it looks like is that sometime soon maybe as soon as september 14th we'll be able to provide our meals to all students free this year and that has been extended through december until or until the money runs out which i can't predict when that would be but i want to let everybody know that that is very likely coming but i also want to emphasize that it is important that we still get the applications for free and reduced lunch because those applications affect other parts of our budget so if you're considering applying for a free lunch if you've had an economic change because of covet or not because of cobit if you could fill that out and go ahead and get that to the school it is important for us
008and we'd appreciate it if you would do that lastly i want to say be safe out there this labor day weekend enjoy family the outdoors it's going to be hot and windy which is not unusual for kansas the first of september so a typical labor day weekend i'm hoping to get down to the home place where i grew up not far from here over in cedarvale this weekend and enjoy some of the outdoors would would hope that we can all enjoy some things and not cause any more spread of kova that would put us in jeopardy of not being able to have school sometime soon so i've appreciated this week getting to see all the kids has brought new life to our district in many ways and we hope to be able to continue that's
009all i have for today i look forward to meeting those of you that i haven't and getting to know more and more about this wonderful community of clearwater have a great safe labor day weekend you