Dear School Families,
It is with a heavy heart that I am writing to announce the news that we may have been anticipating, but which we were hoping would never come: our dear school campus will remain closed until the end of the current school year.
Tomorrow, May 2
nd
, was meant to be our May Day celebration and Spring Fair, one of the most joyful of our yearly community celebrations. It is a day usually spent dancing round the Maypole, scrambling up banana-poles, pillow-jousting on a balance beam, and watching a mob of ankle-deep students cheering their boats along to the finish line of our regatta. Instead, we will be celebrating spring at home with our families, hopefully enjoying a rare rain-free day.
It is easy to focus on all the friends, end-of-year events, and opportunities that we will be missing. Please note, however, that while our campus is closed, our school faculty will continue to work hard to do our best to provide our students with daily and weekly rhythm, artistic opportunities, and as much of our beautiful curriculum as we are able to deliver. I hope you have all gotten a chance to read through our past few newsletters to see a sampling of the activities that have been happening in our school families’ homes all over Columbia County. Thank you, dear parents, for your continued support of our Hawthorne Valley School Community.
We are aware that these uncertain times make it difficult to plan for our future. At the same time, we look forward to being able to come together again in the fall. In acknowledgement of the unusual situation brought about by Covid-19, we’d like you to know that we have decided to alter our school contract policy to reflect the emergency status of our current age. Families will now have the opportunity to withdraw their 2020-2021 school contract for any reason, so long as they do so by Friday, August 14. We hope that this temporary provision will help you feel more comfortable in submitting your contract for the coming 2020-2021 academic year. Only by having a clear sense of our enrollment numbers will we be able to effectively plan our programming for the coming year. At this point, all our classes, throughout the levels, look robust—no classes have been particularly hard hit, though there will be some losses here and there. Our hope is to maintain our school community to the greatest extent possible.
We are happy to report that HVA is among the small businesses in the State of New York to be approved for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. Our selection to receive this stimulus loan package reflects our good standing in the community, and will help us to better weather the storm ahead. We have re-instituted our faculties’ full salaries for the two-month period covered by the PPP and will reevaluate what measures will be needed to ensure the financial health of our school at the end of this term. Although a portion of the loan may be forgiven, it does not begin to cover the losses that have been created across our organization from the outbreak. We are relying on tuition payment and your support of the Annual Fund in order to keep our school viable and our teachers employed. Thank you for your continued engagement and support. Our teachers really have been working as hard as ever.
As stated in the past, please reach out to
Irene Davis
if you are experiencing financial hardship that impacts your ability to pay your tuition. Also, please know that we are in the process of developing a protocol for re-evaluating our TA allowances for the coming year based on changes in a family’s financial status. We hope to communicate details of this in the coming weeks.
We are also working on coming up with alternative virtual yet meaningful experiences to acknowledge all of our end-of-year ceremonies and events, such as our 8
th
grade celebration, our senior projects, our 12
th
grade graduation, and 12
th
grade play. This is still a work in progress and we will keep you posted as we reach greater clarity.
Stay well and remember to connect with one another.
With love for the children,
Karin Almquist
