Good afternoon all Pine Bush parents of high school students,

A district Task Force has been designing our Return to Learn plan for the Pine Bush schools, and I want to give you a high-level overview of this plan today. It is based on what we learned from our parent, staff, and student surveys earlier this summer and the extensive guidelines provided by health experts and the State Education Department.

Here is our tentative Return to Learn plan:

Pine Bush High School – All students in grades 9-12, will begin the year on Tuesday, Sept. 8, in an all-virtual environment. Learning will be different than it was in the spring, because we are working to have more opportunities for direct contact with teachers (synchronous instruction). The high school students will follow their regular schedule of classes each day, but assignments will be spread out to make the work more manageable. Students will connect to their classes via Google Classroom. Attendance will be tracked and reported daily.  BOCES C-Tech students will be attending those programs in person every other day (an A day, B day schedule).

We were forced into an all virtual solution at the high school level because we simply could not effectively maintain social distancing in that building. Even with an every-other-day schedule, there would be more than 800 teens changing classes each day, and that just wouldn’t work.  When we are able to bring high school students back to the building, it will most likely be phased in by grade level, beginning with freshmen. 

Elementary and Middle Schools – Our kindergarten through grade 8 plan will be different. Students will either be attending their schools in-person on an every-other-day schedule, learning from home on the day they are not in school. Or their parents can choose an all-virtual option for them.  Either way, all those students will follow an A day, B day schedule, seeing their teacher every other day and working independently on the other day.  We plan to make sure that students in the same family follow the same days to be in school.  At the K-8 level we can maintain the proper distancing in the classrooms with half of the students attending each day.  On the days when those students are in the building, they will be given their assigned work to do for the following day when they are learning from home.

Parent surveys coming your way for the Return to Learn plan

To make this all work, we need to hear all of you.  Mr. Hopmayer will be notifying you about your access to a survey that will be sent to each student’s Pine Bush email address. Parents or their high school student must complete the survey. I’ve attached a pdf of it to the email version of this message so you rmay eview in advance.  Please note: we need to have a responses for every child in the district.

Surveys must be completed by next Sunday night, Aug. 2.

This coming Tuesday, July 28, I will be outlining our plans in greater detail at our Board of Education meeting scheduled for 5 p.m. It will be live streamed, and you can find the link here.  We also record all of those meetings so you can also view it later.

We also have designed a form so that we can take questions and comments from the public in real time during the meeting.  The link to that form is here and also on the district website on the main page and the board of education page..

As always, we thank you for your input and cooperation in these challenging times. Please know the well-being of our students and staff will always be at the forefront of our decision making.

Thank you,

Tim O. Mains, Pine Bush Superintendent