Dear Educators,
We hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing spring break. It’s hard to believe we have just a few short months left in this unprecedented school year. As we look ahead at next year, we wanted to share with you what we know and where we are with our current planning efforts.
What to Expect for In-person
We’re growing more and more optimistic for next school year, when we hope that we’ll be able to return to a normal school experience for our students, with health precautions always front-of-mind. We are hopeful that in August, all of our schools will be able to welcome students back at full capacity and that schedules will be a lot more similar to what we’re used to.
What We’re Considering in Developing a Virtual Option
While we do hope and believe that next year will allow for a much more normal in-person experience, we also want to be mindful that not all students will want to come back to school in person. We know many families are continuing to watch health conditions carefully as they make plans for next year and we also know some families have truly embraced remote learning. With that in mind, we are currently finalizing whether and how to offer a virtual option for our students next year. As we previously shared, there are many factors beyond health conditions that go into this decision, including best practices in learning, family interest and what we learned from this year and from all of you.
We’ve heard clearly from our educators that live streaming and managing in-person and remote students at the same time was incredibly challenging. We also heard a desire to have more clarity as to which students are participating in what program so that schools don’t have to navigate students transitioning from in-person and remote multiple times. Finally, we heard from many of our schools a desire to streamline more of our remote-learning options so that schools would not have to manage multiple programs on their own. While we are still working through what is feasible and sustainable for next year, this feedback is driving many of our decisions and it is likely that next year’s virtual option will look different than what was offered this year.
We know it can be challenging to be in a space of so many unknowns, and we appreciate your patience. We anticipate being able to share more concrete information about next year’s plans, including more details on a virtual option and what that will mean for schools, within the next few weeks.
Many thanks,
Tamara and Mike
