From the desk of Andrea Chevalier, DCA’s Head of School:
Dear Families,
After much prayer, discussion, and reading through research from the CDC, TPSA, TEA, NAUMS, and other reputable news sources given for next year, DCA has developed a plan for the 2020-2021 school year. Although we plan to stick to this plan as closely as possible, please know that if Governor Abbott hands down new guidelines for private schools, we are obligated to follow them.
The fall semester will begin as originally planned on Monday, August 17, for secondary students and Tuesday, August 18, for elementary students. We will continue with on-campus, in-person classes for the entire fall semester unless orders from the Governor’s Office put us in lockdown once again.
We are also taking measures at the school to ensure that we are providing a safe, healthy learning environment for our students, faculty, and staff. These measures include:
1. We will have hand sanitizing dispensers in every classroom in the school. We are also encouraging every student to keep hand sanitizer in their backpacks.
2. We will encourage and remind students to practice good hygiene, including handwashing for an appropriate amount of time.
3. We are asking every student to bring one container of Clorox wipes so that we can keep the classrooms wiped down during the day.
4. For the fall semester, we will do temperature checks on students, faculty, and staff at the beginning of the school day using touchless thermometers. Anyone with a temperature above 100.3° will be sent home. (We will evaluate this practice in December to see if we need to continue it in the spring.)
5. For the fall semester, we will ask parents to sign a waiver stating that if their student has the symptoms of COVID-19, they will not bring the student to school.
6. For the fall semester, we are asking parents to notify the school if their family travels outside of the United States. The students from that family may be asked to quarantine from school if they have the symptoms of COVID-19 after traveling.
7. Students, faculty, and staff will be allowed to wear a personal mask if they would like to do so. (DCA will have a few masks on hand for emergencies only, so masks will need to be brought from home.)
8. We will practice social distancing guidelines where possible. This includes, but is not limited to, classrooms, class change passageways, and lunchtime.
9. For Family Orientation, we will modify the schedules for Thursday and Friday to be split into morning and afternoon sessions to ensure that we can practice social distancing at these events. We will send out more detailed information closer to those events.
10. All students will be assigned to the same online learning platform across all grade levels K-12 to help streamline online instruction should we need to go into full-time distance learning again.
I pray that you will find these measures safe and practical as we move forward for a successful fall semester. I will assure you that we will continue to monitor and adjust these measures as the fall semester progresses to ensure that we are keeping our students as safe as possible in this new time. If anything changes, we will pass this information along to you.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me.
Thank you for your continued support for our school!
Andrea Chevalier
Head of School, Denton Calvary Academy
