Dear Future School Community:
We wanted to take this time to reflect on our first few days back at school and inform you of the current status and our plans moving forward. The first three days of school were spent in Advisory, with students participating in community-building activities and familiarizing themselves with the school. We strongly believe in the value of this experience, but we also know that it can sometimes feel unstructured or loose for students accustomed to a traditional school environment.
This week, we transitioned into our “regular” schedule with students attending academic classes. As often occurs at the first of the year, many students did not have full schedules. This problem was exacerbated by COVID-19 exposures and quarantine among staff and students, leading to delays in both processing enrollment of new students and scheduling students into classes. We’ve remained extremely short-staffed this week, and we’ve all been chipping in anywhere we can. Exposures and quarantines among students and staff came to a head yesterday, and we felt it was best to take a virtual day to regroup, fully contact trace our community, and prepare for next week.
Today we are deep cleaning the school, finishing scheduling and enrollment of all students, and making sure we are prepared for any future virtual days. You should hear from your student’s advisor at some point today. We want to emphasize that the advisor’s relationship with students and families is the “secret sauce” that makes Future School special. We hope that you’ve experienced that already this school year, but please let us know if there are ways we can improve communication between the school and home.
Moving forward, we will be increasing our enforcement of the mask mandate. Many of these quarantines could have been avoided with proper masking (mask up over the nose) throughout the day. Please encourage your student to keep their mask on at all required times to avoid quarantining due to exposure.
We anticipate returning to school on Monday. We will distribute new schedules for all students on Monday and look forward to a productive week that is focused on inspiring students to be their best selves and building bridges to the future.
Best,
Boyd Logan, Director Allison Montiel, Principal