by Peter Gretz Supt. Middlesex County Public Schools
I have a few pieces of new information I would like to bring to your attention. We are continuing to carefully monitor our responsibility to both meet the needs of our students and families and care for our employee’s wellbeing and safety. In the interest of maximizing efficiency and minimizing our employee’s exposure and vulnerability, we are revising our distribution of meals. We will no longer use distribution centers throughout the county, but will offer daily meal distribution by drive-through service in the Middlesex Elementary School (MES) parent drop-off loop between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. This will enable us to downsize the number of staff involved, streamline and monitor a no-contact delivery model, and improve our ability to serve hot, perishable foods (such as hamburgers, chicken patties, etc).
Important: We will be delivering meals to students whose families have no means of obtaining their meals from MES. They will be delivered on Monday and contain five days of meals. We are asking families to carefully consider whether or not they truly do not have transportation, and remove themselves from this service if they are able to get to MES to retrieve a meal.
Our intention is to strategically target those families with absolutely no way to get to MES on their own, and only deliver to those homes. If you no longer need us to deliver, please call us at 804-758-2277 and let us know. I understand this will be an inconvenience for some, but we’re moving into an emergency operation mode where only those with no means of getting to the school will be served in their homes.
Please help us with this.
We are currently building a plan to deliver instructional modules that will enable students to demonstrate learning and advance to the next grade level and/or subsequent courses in their programs of study. Part of the plan will involve delivery this year and part will involve integration of instruction into modified curriculum maps implemented next year. All will involve a mix of different delivery methods, with ever-present attention to equitable access for all students.
At this time we do not intend to adapt this year’s or next year’s calendars. We are developing a plan to make mobile technology available to those who need it for learning purposes. I will include more about that in the near future.
School offices will be operating from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. While the schools will remain closed to the public, you will be able to call the office during that time frame and reach someone.
We received guidance from the Virginia Department of Education that will help us resolve the majority of our questions related to how the closure will impact student academic progress. To summarize:
- Seniors who were on track to graduate as of March 13 will be able to graduate on time. All state requirements that would prevent seniors from graduating have been waived except for two, both of which all current MHS seniors have already satisfied.
- Seniors who were not on track to graduate on time will be given the opportunity to fulfill requirements and demonstrate learning to achieve graduation on time.
- Students in grades pre-kindergarten through 11 will be able to be promoted to the next grade level and subsequent courses, provided they participate in a documented process of continued learning (we are currently building these learning modules and intend to begin rolling them out along with our plan for continued learning late next week).
I’ll be sharing more information soon. This is just meant to let you know the status of our planning. You can rest assured the plane is absolutely going to land, we just need to finish building it first.
My strong encouragement for you here is, please don’t panic. You do not need to recreate the school year at home. We are not going to roll out a high-stakes series of task checkboxes that you need to fulfill.
We will offer you a framework of learning activity, using as many avenues of delivery as possible, that will enable you to partner with us in supporting your child’s academic progress. We’ll do this together, and your child will be fine.
More to come. Stay safe.
