October 2, 2020
Dear Prince Parents:
We continue to take a deliberate approach to balance safety with our mission statement to ensure our students continue to reap the dividends of being in a traditional school environment. Our procedures are working; our total number of positive COVID-19 student cases to date remains at three, and we currently have no students under quarantine due to positive testing or contact tracing.
Schools in our service have seen spikes and declines in student quarantines (Prince included). One local public high school recently quarantined a large number of students due to a non-school sponsored off-campus homecoming event, and a private school in our region is unable to compete in varsity football this evening due to several team members being placed in quarantine. We want to continue to avoid these common scenarios as we move into the second quarter of the school year, and we need your continued partnership to do so. In the interest of forward planning, I want to talk with you about homecoming week.
This year's homecoming week is much later than usual and is scheduled for November 16-20 due to the pandemic's impact on another school we originally planned to compete against for homecoming. We are making some revisions to our traditional homecoming week's events to promote student safety while still doing our best to celebrate this popular week.
- Dress up theme days will continue during homecoming week.
- The on-campus homecoming parade route is being lengthened for more social distancing between students.
- The senior class (only) WILL have an on-campus evening experience (but not a traditional homecoming dance), and High School Principal Daniel Head is working with the senior class's leadership in planning that evening. There will be no evening homecoming event/dance for juniors, sophomores, or freshman this year.
- We will not hold the indoor, evening Wolverine Growl due to the large number of people we host in the gym and the high energy nature of that event.
Difficult decisions are often unpopular, and I am sorry we will not have the Wolverine Growl for all grades nor a traditional homecoming dance for high school students. Still, these decisions will reduce the risk of students being quarantined due to contact tracing and the possible interruption to academic instruction. We are requesting your partnership by not hosting any off campus non-school sponsored homecoming events that involve the gathering of students. That type of decision making has already hurt one school in our local community.
We remain thankful for our successes to date, which I continue to credit largely to our students' compliance with instructions (a direct reflection of your parenting ), and a unified, dedicated, and patient faculty and staff. We are looking forward to celebrating this year's homecoming week, and we will continue to lean forward during this pandemic to reexamine our school's social programs, which play such an important role in our school's culture.
With warm regards,
