The Girls Are Alwrite is a nonprofit organization created in 2018 to provide creative writing workshops to young and innovative Black and Brown girls in the Charlottesville community. The Girls Are Alwrite (TGAA) seeks to implement a platform that allows participants to create stories that are important to them. The purpose is to foster a space for girls to explore the beauty of their creativity and imagination through written expression. Through Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction workshops, participants are able express themselves without judgment and explore the world of story telling.

As you know from our Health and Safety Plan, we set a "guard rail" of a seven day moving average of 25 COVID-19 cases/100K population or a 10% positivity rate to discuss the possibility of moving into a different phase of learning. We developed this "guard rail" absent school decision-making guidance from the CDC or VDH this summer so that we had an internal benchmark for decision-making. As we have worked with the Thomas Jefferson Health District throughout the fall, we have learned that the data should not be analyzed at face value, at times, and there can be nuances in what the numbers show. They are looking at not only the data but also our ability to implement mitigation practices. CDC and VDH have now released guidance on school decision-making and both are publicly facing resources. Now that the VDH has a game plan for these conversations, we will start to rely on their guidance as the public health experts and pull-off of our "guard-rail." Now that have they have indicators, we trust that they would step in and let us know when we should be concerned about staying open given this new guidance. 

At this time, they are not recommending that we change our current status. Most of the increase in cases can be attributed to UVA and, at this time, they are not seeing community spread due to these cases. This, of course, could change, and the TJHD will share that with us. The dashboard is publicly available and you can pull data from throughout the state and in each locality. 

I will still provide updates as needed and keep you abreast of any other changes. Please know that this is not an attempt to loosen our protocols but rather to follow guidance from our local public health experts who we speak with weekly and now have guidance for these decisions. Please contact Mr. Orlando if you have any questions.

We have created a new webpage at peabodyschool.org to house all the latest information regarding the pandemic in one place.  Please click HERE to review this page, which is found in the News section at the bottom of the Peabody homepage. We hope this is a helpful tool to help keep track of any policy changes or data updates at Peabody.  Stay safe, everyone, and have a wonderful fall break! 

We strongly recommend that students do not play indoor fall/winter sports. Please remember that one exposure to a student/family from another team or geographical area can impact an entire learning team here at school. We understand the sacrifice this requires but it does help eliminate one potential exposure vector coming into our school community. We also want to ensure that we share in the commitment this requires of us all to put education first in all of our decision-making. Thank you for considering this request as we work to keep school open safely.

Yay Lunch!