JFK is developing its plan to be fully open for PS-8th grades in the fall. While I have mentioned in previous Principal’s Posts that our Return to Learn planning is actually three plans in one with provisions for face-to-face in the building instruction, remote learning, and a hybrid between the two, we are anticipating being able to have all students at JFK in the building in the fall.
Guiding our conversations for re-opening, again, are the following primary principles, quoted from CDC documentation:
“Promote healthy hygiene practices such as hand washing and employees wearing a cloth face covering, as feasible
Intensify cleaning, disinfection, and ventilation
Encourage social distancing through increased spacing, small groups and limited mixing between groups, if feasible
Train all employees on health and safety protocols”
A fifth area is the screening of students and employees, and the latest guidance seems to be that this task can be something that is done at home before students or staff arrive at school in the morning.
At last week’s meeting with representatives from the Scott County and Clinton/Jackson Counties Health Departments and Dr. Louis Katz, a local infectious disease expert, it was stated that we are on a good trend with COVID-19 in our area. As long as this positive trend continues, they did not see any reason why we would not be able to open schools in the fall. School practices and procedures will likely look different next year than “normal” years, but all signs are looking toward opening.
In future Principal’s Posts, I’ll share more details about what school will look like in the fall. Whatever I share will, of course, be subject to change by the time we start the school year in late August.
Please note that our conversations are also guided by the fact that we are responsible for other people’s children. What we might do within our own families may not be the same when charged with the responsibility to care for other people’s children. The conversations are also influenced by differences between optional and mandatory activities. Having one’s children in summer sports, for example, is optional. Having one’s children receive an education is not optional; education is legally compulsory. Add in that enrollment in our Catholic schools is exercising an educational choice, however, and our conversations get really interesting!
School Calendar Distributed Late This Week or on Weekend
JFK will distribute a one page school calendar summary late this week or over the weekend. The OLV/JFK board of education will meet on Thursday and consider a proposal based upon the DCSD’s calendar that was approved tonight. The proposed starting date continues to be August 24th, and the school calendar will look much like every other year’s calendar.
An Unpack Your Backpack/Meet Your Teacher event will be scheduled with families on August 19th and 20th. The date and format of Back to School Sunday/Back to School Registration typically held the last weekend in July or first weekend in August has yet to be determined.
End of the Year Drop Off and Pick Up of Items
If you still have materials that belong to JFK at your house, please return them to JFK as soon as possible. The school office is typically open Monday-Thursday from 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Summer Instructional Programming
Schools have been given guidance on how to hold on site summer instructional programming. We will be offering two sessions of Leaps & Bounds this summer. Leaps & Bounds focuses on reading and math for students currently in kindergarten – 5th grade. The student to teacher ratio is 7:1 or lower, and no more than 10 students will be in the room. Students are encouraged to bring cloth face masks each day from home and return home with them for laundering or replacement with clean ones for the next day. Face shields may at times be used and will be provided by the school. Session I is weekdays July 6 – 17, and session II is July 20 – 31. The program runs from 8:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. The cost is $190 per student per session. Sign up for one or both sessions. A minimum number of students is needed to financially support each session. Registration information was emailed. Please contact the school office or Mrs. Temming at kitty.temming@olvjfkmail.com to register.
We are also offering one-on-one tutoring this summer. Dates and times can be arranged individually. The cost is $22 per hour. Information regarding tutoring was also emailed. Contact Mrs. Temming at kitty.temming@olvjfkmail.com to register.
Registration for Next Year
The deadline for payment of the registration fee and deadline for receiving the discount is June 30th. The discounted fee is $100 per child with a maximum of $200 per family. On July 1st, the discount ends, and the fee will return to $125 per child with a maximum of $250 per family. If you turned in a tuitioncontract without the registration fee, please send us the registration fee by June 30th so you can take advantage of the discount.
If you are concerned about finishing your tuition and other payments for the 2019-20 school year, please contact Fr. Jake (greinerj@diodav.org or 563-391-4245) or Emily Sanderson (emily.sanderson@olvjfkmail.com or 563-391-3030) so a payment plan can be arranged.
Teachers will be submitting their final grades on June 8th. Usually there is a good deal of technological clean up to do before we can publish/release report cards, and we hope to have them out before the week is finished. Due to the length of our closure and how fast we had to completely create remote learning this spring, we have made some decisions that impact these last report cards:
Religion, for the 4th quarter, is blank as we did not require work to be submitted for the religious activities students did.
Core subjects have a P or an I for the 4th quarter. In order to receive the “P,” students need to complete about 65% of the required work at an acceptable level of mastery, which is also at about 65%. The 65% aligns fairly well with our normal grading scale.
Specials have a P or are left blank for the 4th quarter. With a normal twice per week meeting schedule, we are going with about a 50% completion level to receive the “P” in a special.
These final report cards also have a Year End grade. The Year End grade also serves as the permanent record. The Year End grades are based upon the letter grades for the first three quarters with a “P” in the 4th quarter considered if a student is “on the bubble.” An “I” would not be used to lower a student’s year end grade.
As we develop the Return to Learn plan for the fall, we will likely not have the same adjustments in remote learning grading as we did this spring. If we have to do some time of remote learning at any time next school year, we will likely have grades look very similar to normal grades.
Look for report cards emailed later this week.
“Closure” to the End of the School Year for Everyone
To find “closure” to the end of this school year for all students, we will be making a special video for each grade level that will be shared and posted. We’ll also have some personalized items for our students. Our distribution method will be set in conjunction with a method to distribute yearbooks and to collect Chromebooks, 8th grade ELA textbooks, JFK and AEA library books, etc.
Sixth through 8th grade messages have been re-posted with the corrections. We matched all the teachers’ video files with the right grades!
End of the Year Drop Off and Pick Up of Items
Last week, families received an email from us with the dates/times for drop off and pick up of materials and a list of many of the items that are owed from your students. Many families have JFK Chromebooks and chargers, library books, and even some textbooks to return. Some students may have books from teachers’ “classroom libraries,” and there may even be some medications in the office. There are also some band instruments to be returned by graduating 8th graders. Please look around to see if there are any additional items of the school that need to be returned.
We will also have yearbooks for those who ordered them plus a few extra for sale and a special gift for students to be picked up. Altar servers may receive their awards, if they have not already done so.
To allow for social distancing, we have assigned drop off times and dates according to the first letter of your child’s last name.
Last Names Beginning with A through L: Monday June 8th and Tuesday June 9th 7:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Last Names Beginning with M through Z: Wednesday June 10th and Thursday June 11th 7:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Face masks should be worn by those entering the building, and the number of people from each family should be limited to those needed to carry the materials to be returned.
Summer Instructional Programming
Schools have been given guidance on how to hold on site summer instructional programming. We will be offering two sessions of Leaps & Bounds this summer. Leaps & Bounds focuses on reading and math for students currently in kindergarten – 5th grade. The student to teacher ratio is 7:1 or lower, and no more than 10 students will be in the room. Students are encouraged to bring cloth face masks each day from home and return home with them for laundering or replacement with clean ones for the next day. Face shields may at times be used and will be provided by the school. Session I is weekdays July 6 – 17, and session II is July 20 – 31. The program runs from 8:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. The cost is $190 per student per session. Sign up for one or both sessions. A minimum number of students is needed to financially support each session. Registration information was emailed. Please contact the school office or Mrs. Temming at kitty.temming@olvjfkmail.com to register.
We are also offering one-on-one tutoring this summer. Dates and times can be arranged individually. The cost is $22 per hour. Information regarding tutoring was also emailed. Contact Mrs. Temming at kitty.temming@olvjfkmail.com to register.
Home & School
JFK’s Home & School is looking to “think outside the box” for activities next year. Below is something they are exploring:
In order to have anything next year, however, more committed parents and/or teachers are needed. This year, we had four key working parents holding down the fort. We really need about 8-10. Yes, there are traditional roles such as President, VP, Secretary, and Treasurer, but really what’s needed are a few more people who can commit to help organize H & S events. It’s a great way to meet and get to know other parents and staff and get to see a little behind the scenes! This committee has the potential to do great things, such as bringing an event like seen in the video to JFK, but it will not be successful without you.
If you are interested, please email our H & S by June 5th at JFK.HomeandSchool@outlook.com or contact one of the current officers via Facebook
—Erin Pape, President/Treasurer
—Cassandra Tatman, Co-President/Treasurer
—Kathy Knox, VP
—Allison Arlt, Secretary
Summer Communications
Normally, there would be very few, if any, Principal’s Posts during the summer. This year, however, is not normal! While I may not have new posts every weekend, look for communications to continue through posts that will be linked via email and on Facebook.
DCSD Working on a Draft Calendar
The DCSD is working on a draft calendar for next year, and word has it that it will be passed by their board and/or released around June 15th. The draft maintains the originally passed August 24th start date. At JFK, we are having discussions about how to replace a less controlled Unpack Your Backpack evening with smaller, more personal ways for students to meet their teachers and get glimpses of how things are going to look when they return. Whatever we do will likely be during the week of August 17th.
Registration for Next Year
Being able to accurately project enrollment for the fall seems even more critical this year. We will be needing to make some significant decisions such as how many desks we are really going to need if we have desks in all classrooms rather than the student tables that are currently in some rooms, how many math textbooks will we really need as we move to new/updated materials, how many Chromebooks do we really need to replace/update, etc.
Returned tuition contracts helps us plan for next year. Please return your tuition contract as soon as you can, even without paying the registration fee now. We would even accept a photo of a signed tuition contract sent to us via email. We would even accept it without payment of the registration fee right now. That can be paid later, if necessary.
As Iowa and the nation begin to re-open, we do understand the delays that people may have. If you are concerned about finishing your tuition and other payments for the current school year, please contact Fr. Jake (greinerj@diodav.org or 563-391-4245) or Emily Sanderson (emily.sanderson@olvjfkmail.com or 563-391-3030) so a payment plan can be arranged. We do not want unexpected financial barriers this year to prevent people from registering for next year. If you are concerned about how to pay for next school year, don’t forget to apply for the Family Tuition Plan financial assistance, for which the application can be found HERE or https://www.assumptionhigh.org/familytuitionplan/. Even if you need to send in the completed tuitioncontract without the registration fee yet, please do so as soon as possible.
We do, of course, need the registration fee eventually. The deadline for the registration fee and deadline for the discounted registration fee have been extended to June 30th. The discounted fee is $100 per child with a maximum of $200 per family. On July 1st, the discount ends, and the fee will return to $125 per child with a maximum of $250 per family. If you turned in a tuitioncontract without the registration fee, please send us the registration fee by June 30th so you can take advantage of the discount.
Return to Learn Planning and Guiding Principles
I was able to attend the AEA 9 superintendents’ Zoom meeting on Tuesday with Roma Taylor and Amy Thoreson from the Scott County Health Department, and Dr. Louis Katz, an infectious disease specialist in Davenport. They talked about the need to balance students’ returning to school for education while keeping them and, perhaps more significantly, those with whom they may be in contact with at schools and in homes safe. Their top priorities can be summarized in the following order:
Social distancing
Hand/face hygiene
Masks
Sanitizing
They would have had masks even higher, but they’ve found that when people wear masks they forget about social distancing, and hand/face hygiene diminishes. As you can imagine, there have been lots of conversations around the state regarding face coverings, and that one may end up in the “if feasible” category. At JFK, we should be pretty good as we have the space to do social distancing, which diminishes the need for face coverings.
We would like to thank John Stachula for his service on the OLV/JFK board of education. With his sons graduating this year and his three year term ending, it seemed like the right time to take a break from board service. Coutrney Mau will be joining the board to begin a three year term. Other board members include Ann Craig, Julaine Edwards, Chris Fox, Fr. Jake Greiner, Chad Hagerman, Tom Poston, Lucas Roth, Peter Schuster, and Lisa Snider.
Reflections on “-isms”
When I was in college, I spent my summers working in a small warehouse in the inner city of Milwaukee, which had a predominantly minority population. We supplied all of the small corner “mom and pop” types of stores and small gas stations in the inner city. Working alongside so many minorities was an eye-opening experience for me, a white kid from the working class suburb of South Milwaukee. In some ways, I was in the minority as a white person in the warehouse and neighborhoods we served, and I felt different types of experiences as a result. I, however, was never a minority; at the end of the day, I left the area and went home. Those in minority groups can’t shed that identity after work or when they move from one place to another; it’s permanent to them.
As I progressed through college, I changed my major from business to sociology. I studied racism, sexism, ageism, and probably all sorts of other -isms. I was an “award winning author” for a study I did that examined advertising in magazines and found that the language in advertising in “women’s magazines” was, basically, “dumbed down” in comparison to men’s magazines. I created and tried to sell a board game that colleges could use at orientation for students to see the intersections of poverty, race, and gender. I drove my parents nuts with my views and desire to change the status quo. I wanted to make a difference, and that desire drove me to a career in education.
Events of recent weeks have, again, caused me to examine my thoughts. I can remember thinking earlier, “It’s not enough we have to deal with a pandemic. We now have to address racism and worry about protests and violence.” I should have been thinking, “It’s not enough we have to deal with racism. We now have to address a pandemic and worry about protests and violence.” That subtle shift can make a big difference. We’ll get through a pandemic in a, relatively speaking, short time period with measured actions, herd immunity and/or a vaccine. We’ve been dealing with “-isms,” however, for far longer, and they deserve equal all out efforts.
I hope and pray that we work on all that is envisioned in the building of God’s Kingdom here on Earth.
