001send me a thumbs up when ready to go good evening everybody this is dan donovan principal of danbury high school i hope you're all able to get on and watch this as we go through and welcome back all of our about two thousand uh nineteen hundred students that will be joining us in our hybrid model starting february for fourth first with the blue team and then february fourth with the orange team first i'd like to start off by thanking and introducing my administrative team uh they could unmute themselves and say hello starting mr davidson good evening everyone ms daniels good evening it's dr roy hi everybody mr larosa good evening everyone and miss pereira hi everybody good evening um mr miller's on there because he's the one running the uh youtube live so hopefully it's
002all working well mr salvatrini's coming on right now he'll be on to talk about athletics and how that's going to work a little bit as we go through and dr martens will be jumping in and out uh as she starts going here so i hope you can see what i've shared on my screen here uh it's just a welcome back and our our goal for tonight is just to share some information with those parents uh that are sending their students back into hybrid um let you see what we've done to the building and how prepared we are we think as an administrative team we're in a very good place uh right now um you know we were in a pretty good place in october and i think we're even in a better place now so
003we're gonna show you what we've done hopefully that'll ease any of the anxieties that you may have uh and then we're gonna do the same thing for the students when they come in uh so with that i'm gonna go to hello mr salvatrini you wanna say hello quickly oh and dr martin's got kicked out too she's back in okay it's not so what we have to go on here these are how the cohort numbers actually came out uh what's pretty interesting is how uh evenly matched they pretty much are for example uh we knew when we were dividing the alphabet that they were going to be pretty even so if you look at grade nine and the blue courthou cohort there was 450 in the orange cohort there was 476 but then you look at
004the the blue cohort who chose to go on dl and the orange who chose the co-indian there's only a 10 student difference so it's pretty interesting now these numbers maybe there's a cohort c that we don't have in here right now because it was uh just a little number of students that we took out um so we'd have to go through and explain that part but you'll notice that they're they're pretty even as you go through uh in the blue cohort right now there's a thousand students who'll be coming in in the orange cohort there's about 900. now those numbers have been fluctuating daily uh up and down uh for it's we not every student jumping out to dl there's a lot of students that are feel good and are coming back in and want
005to be part of hybrid because the dl part's not working um working for them hello mr uh is not working for them so they had to go about and do that but you'll see that they are pretty even as we go through first thing we did was we made a video that mr larose had put together uh with a cameo from myself and dr martins in the beginning uh we're going to play this now we're going to be showing this with kids and as we go through in our mentor flex for the first week and we'll explain what that is in a little bit uh hopefully this works and uh the technology will show it but it's just a quick little video welcoming our students back and showing highlighting some of the changes we've done
006to the we just want to building back our patterns that are coming back into hybrid starting on february 1st which will be the start of the second semester when you come in the building you're going to notice that there's a couple of things that are different including some stairwells that are one way a whole lot of hand sanitizer stations so remember practice your social distancing and always wear your mask let's go take a look inside [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] my [Music] i hope to see you soon remember keep your maps on use the hand sanitizers and practice your social distance have a great day thanks again to uh mr rosa for working on that and making me do my cameo in one take appreciate the efforts there um we're gonna go over
007a couple things just to talk about the different levels of the building uh one of the things i forgot to mention with the cohorts is probably the average um class size coming in in a cohort is about seven uh there are some that are like two and there are some i think our largest one is around 15 kids uh in one class just because of the way it's split up on that one class on that one given day um so you know the average is about seven uh for for kids per class so we um this is kind of the stuff we're going to show the students when we hit mentor flex uh there's some part important parts to it that we want to show we'll go through it kind of quickly um level one
008whether it's g level one or or d level one we talked a lot as an administrative team for trying to come out we did this early in the summer with one-way hallways as well as certain one-way stairwells uh down and up stairwells um we couldn't we could figure it out but it was uh really daunting for a student if they had to go from one place to another and when you have connections like this it was difficult to to have them one way our hallways are far enough or wide enough that students can pass comfortably as long as they're not gathering the other thing you have to notice is um grab-and-go meals that we'll talk about in a little bit but coming in right from outside the gyms where the parent drop off and pick
009up will be over here there's going to be a grab-and-go station both for breakfast and for lunch any dhs student can grab a breakfast on the way in go to their room put up their shield and eat their breakfast if they would like and on the way out they can any student can grab a lunch coming right through this gym and out to their car to drive home or getting picked up by their parents so we encourage all the students to grab one on the way out even if you're not going to eat all of it that day you know it may have some nutritious snacks in there for you to have so grab something on the way in and grab something on the way out that's level one oh nice shot john it's animated
010uh the gym entrance where they can be dropped off grab-and-go meals level two uh we have grab-and-go meals at the black box for any student who's driving and is parked on the black box side along with our mini buses who'll be dropping off there uh they can come in and grab a meal uh on their way in and on their way out at the black box entrance the cafeteria with the big x on it is closed uh the vending machines are not operational so there's no reason for students to go in there there's a couple of things going on in there one it's where we stored all of our extra chairs and desks that we pulled and file cabinets that were pulled out of teachers rooms to make room to separate the desks are down
011there it looks like a huge garage sale and the cafeteria staff basically for the district is preparing lunches they have a whole assembly line that they do the lunches for the district right now and put them on many and send them out to families that need them so the cafeteria is closed before during and after school level three uh it's the same way that we talked about as i mentioned earlier these hallways being one way but there was no way to get people out of here and coming around quick enough without having them walk nine miles a day so we decided with the hallways being far enough that they could go traffic could move smoothly both ways again this is how our students will be entering through the front where the buses are going to
012be dropping off and picking up so grab-and-go meals will be available right here on the way in or the way out there's also another entrance over here with no grab-and-go meals but right here there will be cafeteria staff handing out meals on the way in you want to grab a breakfast go to your for the first week your mentor flex for the rest of it your block one class sit down before 7 put your desk shield up and eat that is fine and at the end of the day at dismissal walk right out this door grab your stuff find your bus which we'll talk about in a little bit uh and don't eat on the bus but find your stuff on the find your bus go home and eat when you get home we don't
013want to make messes on the buses and you have to keep your mask on level four there's only two of them uh for d and c uh what's going to be interesting is i think a lot of kids don't even know that this uh students may have never been in this stairwell before but this is going to be the up stairwell coming through here and a down stairwell going through here on the front so if you're going to go to c you're going to go through this stairwell in the back you made it one directional and then you can come back if you are looking for uh d5 c5 is the same thing you can go through the up stairwell and then down here freshman on your way in i will tell you this there
014is no d5 and there is no pool okay so don't go looking for they tell you to go to d5 or try to find the pool there is no pool at danbury high school do not buy a pass for the pool do not get a discounted pass for the pool there is no pool okay that's just a little tip from mr donovan here our water fountains are currently shut off but the bottle filling stations are open uh so if you have dr martin's hold up your water bottle i just saw you take a nice if you oh it's a bubbly i didn't see that it's a if you have a water bottle that you would like to bring in these are there it is filtered um water stations that you can fill up your uh
015their sensor you don't have to push anything you can fill up your water bottles here i recommend that everyone bring in a water bottle uh and use those filling stations they're located all through g uh they're down uh some places around the building they're not everywhere though but g is the one that has them the most okay stairwells as we mentioned in that you saw in the video are one way this is the main one that comes in right off the bridge and it's that the down stairwell we're doing this because we felt that it was important for um the traffic to go one way in the stairwells uh you know when we have everyone in those stairwells get crowded especially this one because everyone uses this stairwell so if we have just a down
016sterol and i think it'll take everybody including our seniors who have been here the longest to try to figure out ah this is only a down stairwell uh oh i'm gonna just go up one flight now we're gonna try to make it so that they it's one way so you're not passing other people uh on the stairwell going the opposite direction we're gonna see how this works for a while and we're going to go with that there's the one-way traffic signs the down only on the floor it tells you which way you're supposed to be going in or out you'll also notice that they're the blue arrows throughout the school uh tell you to keep right during while you're in the hallway flow with traffic uh try to stay as far off to the sides
017as you possibly can look out for the hand sanitizers and i will give you a heads up about this one the pumping station on the hand sanitizer is like that long and if you put that all the way down into your hand you will have enough hand sanitizer to last you for a week so you only need to do a little bit of a squirt and rub it in because if you push it all the way down it's going to go all over you so be mindful of that if you're using one of those our mask policy dps the board has a mask policy that you can go look at i didn't want to print it all up here it just basically says that all students and staff must wear face masks at all times
018while it really doesn't indicate what they are if you want to wear a face shield you have to wear a face shield and a masks the mask is the big part you just can't wear a face shield if you want to wear both you most certainly can't but you have to have masks on at all times the only ones that are not allowed are masks with valves on them they are not allowed to be worn into the school so masks on at all time from the moments you get on the bus until you come in to the moment you get off you know there's a lot of discussion about mass brakes and depending on the word you're going to hear the most is density and depending on the density of the classroom a mass break
019can actually take place in the classroom especially with the shields and if people are working quietly but mass brakes will be given throughout the day if a teacher feels it's going to be there up to them if they think hey we need a mass break we've set up tables outside in the courtyard i know it's cold but if everybody wants to go out and get some fresh air they can take a little walk out there again remember we're dealing with numbers in a classroom of like seven so uh a lot of these can take place in there when you have your shields and your your um at three feet apart our with the shields and all of that we were rated at about your average classroom i think it was 24 kids could fit into
020it because all the stuff we pulled out so now we're talking seven so i think they're gonna have assigned seats they're gonna you can use their shields and they're gonna be spread out through the classroom so if you're working there a teacher can say put your mask down uh take a couple of breaths because sometimes they do get a little uh you know they do start to irritate a little bit but that will be up to the teacher it was kind of impossible for us to come up with a schedule of who needs a mass break and when because of the fact that i don't know when the class needs a mass break the teachers know better if they've been doing a lot of talk and they may need one if they're just sitting there
021they can pull their mask down so one of the things we're going to be talking to the kids about how to wear your mask it's not just good enough to have a mask masks must be worn properly it sounds kind of ridiculous that we have to go over this but this is how a mask should be worn uh not like this and not definitely as under the chin this is for not only your safety but everyone else's in that's coming in the building so wear your masks and wear them properly please whoops the self-assessment part this is uh where we need help from the students and and parents you know we are not going to be uh temperature checking people on the way in there's been a lot of back and forth about that but
022uh our medical staff does not believe that that's going to be helpful to us so we are not going to be temperature checking so you we're asking that parents and students do a self-assessment oh where'd the self-assessment go oh john my self-assessment disappeared well the self-assessment anyway talks about everything that you've heard before it's not anything new you know if you feel that you have a fever chills cough shortness of breath fatigue anything like that it um you know stay home and it doesn't mean that you have covet it doesn't mean you have to to to run to the doctor immediately but you have to stay like that uh at home for at least 24 hours after the symptoms have stopped if you call your doctor and say any of those symptoms they're probably going
023to send you to get tested at this point but you know it's up to you as parents and students to say yeah i'm not feeling good i think we're going to stay home today which leads us to an attendance question that people have if my son or daughter was scheduled to come in for a hybrid wasn't feeling you know we did the right thing here and we said hey we're going to stay home because they're feeling a little bit and they go to school remotely does that count as an absence no it does not the teacher will just tag them remotely what we do need is we need the parent to notify the school we need to notify that the the student who's supposed to be in hybrid is not going to be in today
024you know you know and may be working remotely the teacher will code that correctly but we want as the school to know because if you happen to be at work and they stay home you may not have known they stayed home and you're not going to get the the robo call that you would normally get for an absent because we are treating the remote present as present in school so if they're not feeling good it's no penalty for it just stay home uh give us a call and just say hey you know we did the right thing we're keeping them home for uh you know today tomorrow whenever uh but they're gonna be on classes and uh we'll be grateful if you could do that because that would be a big help to all of
025us if that could happen uh classrooms some of the stuff we've done there's our our favorite senior mr larosa who did graduate from here but many years ago uh we got these deck sheet desk shields uh there's enough for each student that will be in the class so if the largest number in that classroom is say 16 students at one time the the classroom has 16 deck shields you know we felt this was better than giving each one each student their own and have them walk around with it bring it home and bring it back it's only made of corrugated cardboard and a little plastic shield we figured that they would break up pretty pretty much um pretty easily so what we're trying to do is just preserve them as long as we can so
026they're going to stay on the desks and when kids come in and out they can do that cleaning supplies as you saw in the the video each room has a tub of wipes right now paper towels and a spray the spray is a spray that can be used in school without gloves it requires one minute of contact so if you spray a desk down um you can wait one minute and wipe it up you're good to go we can ask any student that wants to do that if they want to come in and spray their desks down teachers to spray their desk downs and then have students wipe them down in between classes it's just one way to make you know take another precaution there so we're going to be doing that it's students safe
027we don't have to worry about using those chemicals in school the bathrooms we have extra custodians on during the day that will be cleaning them regularly we have a sheet that they uh check out that they've cleaned that bathroom so we can monitor if they've been cleaned you know we are gonna monitor the bathrooms for density it's a word i said uh again so we're not hanging out in the bathrooms we're going into the bathrooms we're doing we have to do we're going to wash our hands and then we're moving along so we're not going to close certain bathrooms we don't like to do that uh and you know make kids go to because then we're gonna have a more density in the bathroom but we are gonna tell students come on let's go let's
028move along don't hang out in the bathroom but that's so we'll try that part of it so what happens if you are ill during the day you notify your teacher uh your teacher is going to call down to the nurse's office the nurse will meet you either at the nurse's office door or direct you to what we call the coven room which is located across from the nurse's office attached to the media center they will do their assessments they will do what they have to go through and from there they'll make a determination if you're going to stay in the covered room or if you're going to go into the nurse's office the reason for that is a lot of students go in and out of the nurse's office every day for reasons that aren't
029coveted like medicines and things like that so we didn't want to contaminate the nurse's office so there's a separate room where kids can wait and uh within 30 minutes we're hoping a parent can come pick them up or whoever can come pick them up so um the less time in the school the better and then from there we go through contact tracing uh you know as you saw they were closing down classrooms and if you've read anything this is our first time coming in but you've seen you know new fairfield brookfield newtown going in and out of school it's going to be the same thing so you're you know you may have to check your emails and listen for those robos that come out that uh your son or daughter uh through contact tracing was
030in a room with someone who may have tested positive and we will look at things like that so the contact racing begins at that point that'll be done with the administrators and the nurses at danbury high school all right so the first week we're coming back we are going it's a little change of a schedule we are going into mentor flex from 7 20 to 7 55 each morning for the first week 7 20. so when you come in you're going to mentor monday monday it's a whole term your mentor flex from 705 till 7 20 but if you get here at 7 20 it's no problem but you cannot get in the building until that's when the buses are gonna let go like 703 to get in because we don't want students hanging around
031there's no more cafeteria we don't want uh students just gathering in the hallway so you immediately come in you grab your breakfast on the way in you go to your mentor flex room which will be open at 705 you stay there from 7 20 to 755 and then if you are on dl or the opposite cohort you go from at eight o'clock you will join your block one class and then when we go wednesday thursday i mean thursday friday the orange group's coming in and going to their mentor their mentor flex and and things like that so the first week we start on 2-1 this is the schedule we're going to be running so why are we doing this because this is the first time for many of our students they're stepping into the building
032we have a you know a whole freshman class that have never been in this building and our sophomores left here in march so there's a whole you know and they were in g most of the time so now they're out in a different place so the first thing we're going to do is they got to greet each other they're going to want to see each other this is their mentor flex with their mentor teacher it'll be new for our our freshmen and somewhat of our sophomores but for our seniors that which have been with their mentor flex for uh you know four years now possibly that you know they're gonna have some time to talk and greet all the people that are in there with them we're gonna hand out ids we're gonna take some
033tours you know we weren't able to do tours before um this time we did it in october we couldn't get it done this time so you know the the either on a one of the days that the cohort is in the teachers are going to be taking their mentor flex on a tour of the building uh to show the up down stairwells where things are and so forth we understand that there's a group that have not been in this building yet so we want to take it a little slow we got to go over our procedures and protocols a lot of the stuff i said ids again um procedures and protocols that you saw uh the sign in and out to rooms if you're in one for more than half a second you got to
034sign in if you're not supposed to be in that room and things like that what the mornings and hallways and then finally how to find your bus at dismissal we got to go over that on day one or we'll have a whole bunch of kids because this is new for every student all the buses are up front and they're double lined which is going to be new for every student at dhs so it's important that that's gone over in the flex mentor flex on day one after the first week we're back to our our normal schedule 705 to 720 you arrive go to your block one 720 you are uh in your block one class and if you're in the blue team on monday and tuesday you're sitting in the desk at 7 20 ready
035to go we're going to be pretty vigilant about students hanging out in the hallways and getting to class on time so you know by 7 20 you'll hear the sprint bell at 7 19 and you're ready to go the big thing is the change in the afternoon in the afternoon our orange team and our dl students your job is to go to flex you should be in your flex classes you had four flex classes this day you should be in four flex classes in the afternoon if you didn't have one then don't go to it but if you did you're supposed to be in these flex blocks right here to make sure that you have an understanding of what happened in class today you know from where we stand we believe our teachers are getting
036very proficient in the distance learning part now coming back to hybrid is throwing a whole new curveball at the teachers so there's going to be some difficulties managing the in class and the at-home students whether they're dl or a different cohort because what we don't want is we don't want it to come in and have our students just sitting on a giant zoom but they're in school we want them to interact with the teacher when they're in there we don't want it to be just a zoom so it's important that um we understand that that we want them to go but there's going to it's also important to understand that there's going to be some you know implementation type dip of the strategies that are going on and all of a sudden the echo in
037the room is too loud so there's a lot of things that we're going to have to work through but it's very important that the opposite cohort go in the afternoon so that teacher and those students have an understanding that okay you got it and it may not take all the 20 minutes it's there if they walk in in mr davidson's class and john shows up and he says yep i'm good i understood what you were doing okay man just checking in see you later but it's very important we do that mentor flex is always uh the same everyone should be in their mentor flexes this is very important not only for the social emotional learning part of school but this is where they get to see the other cohorts and things like that in different
038people so the mentor flex is important for everybody and then on thursday friday when the orange team is in the blue team uh goes to their flexes in the afternoon uh parents if they tell you uh i have nothing to do you always first word out of your mouth flex ask them where they're going what they're doing do you have a flex yeah you should be in a flex you know you have an 89 in the class well guess what you have a 90 if you possibly go to flex so let them go to flex let them get their extra help there let them do what they have to do during this flex time that's why it's there it's built in for that purpose so they can get a smaller more individualized understanding of what's
039going on buses mr larosa you're right you're going to talk to this one i'm tired of talking i got a drink of water what does the front look like hi everyone we changed things a little bit this year um to try to accommodate the large number of parent drop-offs that we anticipate we've moved all of our bus drop offs to the front of the school so you can see they're going to line up in two rows in that front driveway alternating so that there's space between each bus for students to safely pass between the buses to get to the outer row mr davidson made a great video that mr donovan's going to share in a moment that shows students how to read the bus list that you can see here on the right side each
040day that's posted out front and that helps them find their bus use it utilizing the stop signs that are kind of marked on the sheet and then also on the driveway every day the buses don't come in in the same order so learning how to read the sheet is extremely important because when you come out of the main entrance of the school and if you have to catch your bus which is in the very front that's a good 200 meters so you can't run down there and see if your bus is there and if it's not then run back to the back you need to know where you're going and mr davidson made this excellent video that hopefully will help everyone find their bus quickly mini buses will still be in the same spot they
041always are which is down by the black box area and parent drop off and pick up is going to be off of beckerly street at the athletics entrance so here's mr davidson's video [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] thank you mr davidson for putting that together one of the toughest things we have is that first week of school trying to find their buses so if your your child is a freshman or has never taken the bus before uh tell them that a lot of teachers are outside we're all outside we'll help them we hold the buses a little bit extra on the first week just to make sure everyone's going but that's usually when we're dismissing about 3 300 kids and this time we're only dismissing a thousand at a time so we should have no
042problem getting them out there so if you're going to arrive by car you are uh going to get dropped off at the gym entrance as we call it which is off of beckerly street which is down here we're trying to keep the buses and the cars separate from each other because it kind of causes some problems what we don't want is another problem is do not drop off on field road this is a sometimes we have police officers here we don't have crossing guards sometimes there's a police officer here and sometimes they're not which makes it very difficult it's a very very busy road in the morning for anybody that traveled it the front will be shut down from 6 45 until 7 15 every day if you're arriving before or hopefully not before because
043you'll be staying outside in the cold for 20 minutes uh but you're arriving after that then most certainly you can use the front but during our drop off and pick up times uh please parents use this area uh we do not expect our um our student parking lot to be as crowded as it normally is um if we looked at the number of parking passes that we've sold already and divided in half it's probably about 100 110 of them for 300 spots so you can pull in here and just text them and say hey i'm in the second row come in and uh come on out and i'm straight ahead after they do what grab their grab and go lunch and walk out the door so um that's where we would like parents to drop
044off in the morning you come in this one beckerly drop them off and come right back out don't have to worry about the buses breakfast and lunch we've talked about you know grab a fruit on the way in uh your milk and then if the first week you're going to go into your mentor flex you can eat it there after that'll be your block one until 7 20. if you show up at 7 20 and want to start eating your breakfast your teacher may have an issue with that because class is going to start so if you want to eat breakfast make sure you're getting there with into class with enough time to do that lunch looks like this it's on the way out it's right by the doors all you have to do is
045just grab it as you go by and you can take it on that bus or you can eat it before you have to come back for practice but there is no eating on the buses and it doesn't become it's a nice little snack for you right before you have to go out and do whatever you do in the afternoons mr salvatrini would you like to talk about what's going on with athletics yes mr donovan thank you very much and welcome to everyone uh just we're going to talk just a little bit about athletics normally uh by this time probably late january early february we're about three quarters of the way through a normal winter season but uh far from normal this year as everyone knows uh we're just starting up our program we're actually taking
046baby steps the state gave us the okay january 14th to start winter sports and the school district gave us the opportunity to follow that and last week we started virtual classrooms practices and virtually and for the next couple of days we are going to be outside conditioning as best we can with the with the weather teams are open i suggest to the parents if you are your child is interested or freshman out there go to the danbury high school webpage it's right up there right there you want to look for your coach the coach of the team that you're interested email that coach and we'll certainly uh get information to you about where to go who to be and the times again it's a little different uh school we don't start practices this year until
047three o'clock uh there a reduced schedule as an example basketball we normally play 20 plus games they are probably going to play 12 this year uh we actually we have swimming we're running virtual swim meets uh we have boys and girls indoor track outdoors so they're working outdoors with the hope that we may have some indoor track mates outdoors so that's how we're gonna attempt to do that we have boys and girls basketball wrestling and cheer are going to practice but those are two sports that were deemed high risk by the department of health they're they're allowed to practice but not compete in any activities we also have ice hockey gymnastics and uh we're moving right along on february 1st when everybody comes in for the hybrid uh we're going to begin afternoon practices at
048the high school uh all athletes wear masks all the athletes have check-in we have self-check-in monitored by our two athletic trainers and it's similar to what mr donovan said at the beginning of the day we're just checking athletes anybody has to answer some questions they don't feel well etc we're going to send them home we did pretty well in the fall we uh we almost made the full season we had a couple of issues near the end and a goal our goal this year of course with winter is to do the best we can to get the kids an opportunity to engage with their coaches and their classmates i can't tell you how excited our coaches were today to actually meet some of their athletes again for the first time in months so it went
049well today we had a workout outside today in 30 degree temperature we had about 140 kids and we're looking forward to build on that although it's going to slow tomorrow we're told so hopefully the snow gods will stay away for a few days until we can get back him inside and do our normal things again i uh hope that you if you're interested you check on that website uh together we're going to win and we always talk about that as athletes so together as a high school we're going to beat this and we're going to get back to normal as soon as we can so if you're interested in sports give us a call we'll get you involved as best we can mr dominic thank you sir appreciate that i appreciate all you've done trying
050to manage this ship and keep it going in the ever-changing world that we have going on right now but i i do appreciate on behalf of everybody all of your efforts this year trying to stay stay with this so thank you all right school closures uh what will cause it to happen obviously a snow day which i put in there uh you know that will cause it to happen but when we're talking about covid and uh things like that what will cause the school to close well we've done a lot of work with looking at our substitute numbers and our staff numbers and trying to come around how many teachers could be quarantined before we would have to close school or if we have a spike in numbers or something like that before we'd have
051to shut it down each night we're going to be monitoring that activity to see where we are and we're close contact with our staff with regards to what's going on with them but there's definitely a number when we come back we're taking this risk uh that it may be shut down again at some time we are not doing what the middle schools are doing where they're staying in their classroom um you know for the day and but they're in school but they're staying in one classroom we're going to switch classrooms the administration and i had a lot of discussions about this and just felt that you know the getting up and moving and the socialization part is um is good for the kids and that's why one of the main reasons that we want them
052back in here uh is to to get them to see other people and get out walk around even if it's just waving to a friend in the hallway so we're gonna go with that but with that puts us at risk for more teachers being into quarantined uh which could cause problems for coverages and things like that there are some teachers that are out uh that have uh some medical maybe conditions or some condition that won't allow them to come into school at this time so what we're going to do is we're calling it a virtual classroom in reverse in which the students will go to d360 like it's you know 3a block and the teat will have another teacher in there and their classroom teacher will will google me in and be projected out so
053so they can do work so for that class they'll be on all distance learning um it's not a large number of teachers in our school it's less than five percent um but just so you know that it does happen and if a teacher is out sick that's how we will cover it in class we even if it's asynchronous we will have teachers or substitutes or whomever go in there and monitor the classes while they're out um miss daniels would you like to talk about peer tutoring sure mr donovan um hi everyone my name is ms daniels i'm a level 2 assistant principal um essentially uh we have a history at danbury high school of trying to support our students through tutoring programs and allowing students to connect and so we didn't want to lose sight
054of those opportunities for students to connect during the pandemic and also uh receive supports um as they may be struggling with distance learning due to whether it's lack of sleep or just looking for extra help or a way to connect with a student um we came up with the idea as a group to do the peer tutoring program which is virtual and online students have the opportunity to go into a google classroom using the code sign up to meet with another peer and they essentially connect to work on academic coursework so we have opportunities for students to receive supports in math english their course subjects they can also do just a group study and we are also looking to increase the translation support we have translation services for our students as well at the time
055we had um 164 students signed into the google classroom we're now at 179 and we have about 20 pairs of matchings matches between a student to student um for the tutoring program we are hoping to expand uh this has only been our third week i think of opening or trying this out so um we have been seeing some growth and we hope that you would encourage your child um to join us if they are struggling and would like to receive support um the times are monday through thursday three to eight pm um however students sometimes might schedule out outside that time frame which is also available if they'd like to work on the weekend but that's um a little bit about our peer tutoring program thank you ms daniels excellent job in getting that up
056uh parents that can be found um you can be found there's a google classroom for it and all the teachers have posted it so they should be aware of it if not they can just ask their classroom teacher because it was all posted uh through their google classrooms but excellent job and trying to support our kids once again some important up upcoming dates tomorrow is the psats and we're going to have it snow is not coming to later please not till later so we're going to get our about 400 juniors coming in to take the psats so for the rest of the school it's an asynchronous day which means that they will have work to do they will have to answer the attendance question but there's no live meets or instruction like that our teachers
057are going to be proctoring a large part of them and for the rest of the time of the day they are going to be in um working to set up their classrooms to make sure that they're all ready for the virtual part and the in-school part and checking everything so that they feel ready to go when we start this friday uh january 29th semester one ends we're halfway through the year which was the reason why we waited uh until february 1st to have our students come in you know the district decided they were going to do a roll out starting with elementary then middle and they asked if we wanted to come back in on the 25th we didn't think it was smart to bring our students back in uh to meet their you know
058especially a lot of them half of them are semester classes for one week and then switch classes all over so we said we'll later one it out for one week more and then we can start fresh semester two uh that being the blue cohort uh february 4th the orange cohort first day is coming into the building we're starting with mentor flex for them so they can get the tours and the ids we bought blue lanyards for the uh the blue cohort or orange lanyards for the orange ones the staff have all white ones so when we all get back together hopefully very soon we'll have a nice orange white uh and blue lanyards coming around the school that so and we're going to want and expect students to wear their ideas once we get them
059all out to everybody uh dl students we will set up times in the near future or have them up front uh on their lanyards you're just you're a cohort as well so if you're in the blue cohort but you're on dl you're still in the blue cohort so we will have that that you can come pick things up like that also uh if you need to pick up materials for your second semester or drop off materials you can do that with the safety advocates in the front of the building more information about the dates and times of coming out can be found in a letter that was sent today even a nighttime pickup for the for if you have to get materials or things like that please come in and get them so you can
060do it we're looking for a march 1st virtual spring conferences and school fair this just believe it or not is to start letting our the 8th graders in danbury know what danbury high school is about and i think it'll be very very beneficial for our freshmen now at that point to see what offerings we have at the high school so they can start picking their classes as we go forward uh and march 8th is the snow date for the virtual conference that we'll have there where we will have teachers available to to talk to in conferences but we'll also set up times with dhs to talk about curriculums and offerings within their departments you know pretty much in closing i'm going to look at the additional question sheet i did answer them three that i
061have that are new are all blocks of flex now mandatory and both in person at home days not in person days if you are on an in-person day and you're feeling really good about what's going on then you don't but we really want the at-home students and the other cohort to check in with their teacher like i said it may be just a five-minute check-in just say i'm in a good spot with their teachers you know it's tough to say the word mandatory we'd use it don't tell them but um you know we can't make them go there's no grades involved with it but it'll help them get a better understanding of what's going on so i think if using the term mandatory and mr donovan said it helps you get them on because we
062really can't do it then i suggest that we do that how do students get extra help when they don't understand something that's the first place they go is flex first place they go is contact the teacher have them sign up for flex sign up for the teacher's flex and then if not uh they couldn't get in there and stuff there's the peer tutoring miss daniels just mentioned there's two great avenues that you can go down but flex is the number one time that you should be able to go there you're talking about half the kids okay um our students allowed them in-person meetings for extra cooker clubs robotics and math teams the districts coming around that we did use we had robotics up and going i don't see clubs like the math team are are
063probably going to stay virtual but something like robotics that has to actually build robots we're going to look to get back up banned things like that as we get going here uh in the second semester as far as the buses how will the seating be spaced uh is it one student per seat families can be together um you know they try to go every other end diagonal it depends on the number of bus but if everyone's facing the same way i the windows will probably be cracked if not opened a little bit to get an airflow uh and masks much stay on must stay on they're gonna try to space out students on the bus from my understanding our numbers are very low on buses uh so they'll be able to space them out pretty
064good and they're going to have the bus drivers please have your child just listen to where the bus driver tells them to sit because they're not doing it to be mean they're doing it because we need a specific spot for them to go like i said as a one student per bus hopefully now it is but families can sit together so if you're a brother and sister or coming out of the same household you can be in the same seat as somebody else uh with that the last part i'll talk about is expect the unexpected you know we get it with wi-fi outages whether it's stamber high school danbury xfinity or google they're going to happen and we're there's no reason to panic we all know what we're going to do with them we all
065figure out what's going to happen if it happens at denver high school and we don't have wi-fi then if you're at home you know your son or daughter may be sitting there going you know hey i can't get out i can't do this and if it continues to happen and if it's a big problem then you're gonna get uh notification from the school that it does one of the coolest things that that we look at is if you can just google it it's it'll tell you when google's down or google's having issues so if your son or daughter can't says i can't get on then you can just go google that and say yep you see a big spike that says they're running into error error problems and can't get on then yes something's up
066it doesn't hurt for you to try to send an email to the teacher to ask if this class was down but you know just expect that we're going to have the tech issues we're going to have quarantined staff which means that the students are going to be back to virtual teaching just like they are now like i said earlier we're getting good at it we're getting much better at the tools that we have for it i think our teachers are doing a great job with that so uh expect that to happen snow days i had a question about snow days before i'm not sure what's going to happen i think the district is not going to give any more snow days now i think we're just going to go remote and uh i don't know
067about tomorrow but uh it looks like there's something on the horizon for sunday so we may be able to try that out on monday uh and lastly and kind of what i'll close with is communication's key if you have uh a problem or a concern or a question reach out to the counselor reach out to the administrator reach out to the teacher you know we ask that you go to the teacher first uh before you just come straight to the administration not because we don't like talking to you it's just that i don't know what happened so then i got a back trace to the teacher so try to resolve whatever the question or or maybe with the teacher and then bring it to administration or the counselor uh just because it'll save us all
068time we can get the resolution to it a lot quicker but communication is key feel free to email your child's teachers at any time if you have a question about something they said or something that's going on and let us know and with that did i make it i was trying to shoot for under an hour and it looks like oh we did it we just got there you know it's a lot of information that we went through rather quickly and i'm sorry for that um but if anybody has any more questions or anything like that you can always reach out like i said to everybody else with that i can't wait to see some of my juniors here tomorrow to take those psats get to bed early bring your calculators and pencils uh and
069for the rest of the hatters that are coming in i'll either see you on the first or the fourth and