Hello Pine Bush Parents and staff,

I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about our plans to return for more learning this spring.  So I want to fill everyone in on where we stand in our efforts to begin more frequent teacher-student contact.  And at the end I have something to say about spring sports.

As you know we have surveyed our students, staff and parents about their thoughts on the topic of increasing from two days to (initially) four days of either in-person or all-virtual instruction.  And we asked parents to let us know if they wanted to change their child’s current arrangement from either all-virtual or in-person to the other modality.  We now have the counts of how many students belong in those two models.  

We will stop referring to any instruction as “hybrid,” though it is true we will initially keep Mobile Mondays when we make this switch.  Mobile Mondays will be mostly asynchronous assignments for students, so teachers can focus their Mondays on efforts to maximize success for themselves and their students.  Most secondary teachers are teaching both in-person and all-virtual students simultaneously.  We call that “concurrent” teaching.  Some of our elementary teachers could find themselves having to do this, too, if they have students in their in-person class who are required to quarantine.

A survey about specific teacher needs in the areas of curriculum, technology and pedagogy will be sent to teachers either tomorrow or Tuesday.  That survey is currently being field tested and debugged before it will be circulated to instructional staff.

Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance for schools.  While we were encouraged that they lowered the distancing requirement from 6 feet to 3 feet without barriers for masked students, they also said students without masks who are eating should still be 6 feet apart. 

Despite this new guidance, we cannot complete our planning until the NY State Department of Health (NYDOH) issues its guidelines. The NYDOH, not the CDC, will determine what we can and cannot do.

I will provide an update on our Return for More Learning Plan – Spring ’21 at Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting, and a summary of my remarks will be posted to our website the next day. Right now, we are not able to say exactly when our efforts to increase student-teacher contact time will take effect, but we expect the updated guidelines to arrive soon.  If I’m right about that, we can still begin this new approach sometime in April.  I promise to keep you posted.

For our middle and high school athletes, I want parents to know that registration for spring sports is currently open on our Athletic website through Family ID.  Please be sure to register your child by Wednesday, March 31, if they are interested in trying out for a modified, JV or varsity spring sport.

I hope you are enjoying this spectacular spring afternoon!

Tim O. Mains, Pine Bush Superintendent