September 2021

Dear Weedsport Families,

As the 2021–2022 academic year began, our District wholly accepted and stated that our main goal was and continues to be to keep our children safe and healthy. We were committed to do such by combining best practices for maintaining public health and affording students the opportunity to be in school every day.

As you are well aware, the past few weeks were our educational community’s first opportunity to have all of our students in school since March of 2020 although the conditions for doing such are much different than before March of 2020. Complying with public health best practices dictated by local, state, and national health organizations due to the pandemic has been an ongoing learning experience and challenging at times to be quite honest. Just like a student’s schooling experience, we, too, are learning from these challenging times and growing. Our growth experience from the past few weeks has resulted in the following:

1. We have posted our updated guidelines for keeping school open on the school website which includes the Cayuga County Quarantine rules to promote widespread understanding and application of the guidelines.
2. Teachers have made seating adjustments so students are at least 3 feet apart. This will help reduce the amount of students who are subject to quarantine.
3. Principals have worked with teachers to shift classrooms to another location to create spacing of 3 feet or more.
4. Spacing at the Jr.-Sr. High School and the Elementary School in the cafeterias has been extended to 6 feet when eating. This will help reduce the amount of students who are subject to quarantine.
5. When eating in classrooms at the Elementary School or during mask breaks, the Principal and teachers are strategically alternating students who are eating or taking a mask break to have a 6 foot space allotment of physical distance. This will help reduce the amount of students who are subject to
   quarantine.
6. Teachers are making instructional adjustments in their classrooms to lessen close contact (less than 3 feet) to less than 15 minutes.
7. The Transportation Department has adjusted where students sit on the bus. We are populating the bus to limit time seated with another student unless they are family related. For example, we are seating students one per seat until no longer possible. This will help cut down the amount of time students are
   sitting together on the bus.
8. The Transportation Department has been enforcing assigned seating. Since contact tracing can include multiple days we want to limit the amount of possible quarantines.

While many of the aforementioned approaches will improve the likelihood of students remaining in school rather than being quarantined, we are still prioritizing adherence to public health safety measures. We hope that you will remain our partners during this time and support the above while also emphasizing with your child(ren) the importance of proper and consistent mask wearing.

Respectfully,
Shaun A. O’Connor