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Dear Northern Oaks Families,
We hope your summer has been full of family bonding, rest, and rejuvenation. We cannot wait to see the students return on August 14th!
Last year during dismissal, multiple families began to use a walk-off policy that was originally intended to support students who lived within the area. More students than we had anticipated were permitted to exit campus after school and proceed to nearby restaurants or vehicles waiting in nearby parking lots or other areas. Over the course of the year, we received numerous complaints from multiple stakeholders regarding this arrangement, including our parent community and neighboring businesses, some of whom even gated their property because our families used their property without approval. Our officers shared concerns that the practice increased risk for our students and complicated their ability to manage ingress and egress from our lots, and near the end of last school year, the City of San Antonio wrote to ask us to rescind the procedure.
After much consideration and in consultation with local SAPD officers, the city of San Antonio, our Director of Safety, Bryan Cornish, and our Executive Director, Dr. William Rutherford, we have decided to end the open-campus practice. In the new school year, we will return to having a closed campus and limiting walk-offs only to families that live within a mile of the surrounding area. While this change will not affect the majority of families, we do understand that some families created routines last year based on the procedure and will need to rethink their pickup plans for this year. Please know this decision is not intended to create hardship for any family but is in the interest of our students’ safety and neighborly relations.
We are committed to doing everything we can on campus for efficient and smooth drop-off and pick-up processes. We recently created traffic projections for next year and would like to share with you the wave schedule for SY 2023-2024 below. We will continue to ask parents to pick up at their designated wave time which for families is determined by younger siblings going with the oldest enrolled student (or oldest enrolled student in the carpool). A color-coded system with placards will be used to manage wave times and indicate the time a vehicle should be in line.
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