August 20, 2020
Fort Lewis Mesa Families,
I hope this finds you well and excited to return to school. We miss you! While our new normal might look and feel different, we welcome the opportunity to create a safe and happy learning environment where our students thrive. With this new normal, there have been changes; I appreciate your grace and patience as we map out these shifts.
Our Team
Since last year, there have been multiple staff shifts. Over the last few months, we said goodbye to different staff members for various reasons (e.g. retirement, moving schools, staffing allocations in our school). Yet with these farewells, we also get to say hello to our amazing full time social worker, Amy Hackmeier. With her many years of experience across many settings, we feel lucky to add her to our team.
Our Learning Models
As many of you know, the district offered three choices for learning models for the 2020-2021 school year: In-person, blended, and remote. Even though we value providing our families with choices at FLME, we realized that our school would best support our students by focusing on two models, not three, given our student numbers and current staffing. Therefore, FLME will be offering in-person and remote learning. Like the other elementary schools in our district, providing these models caused us to shift our current learning structure. Therefore, we will be moving to multi-age classrooms (combination classes) for most grades; this too is common across the district. As mentioned previously, we are doing cohort style learning. FLME students will be cohorted with their class; this cohort will learn, eat, and recreate together. Cohorts will have contact with 4 or less adults per day. Here is how our structure looks this year:
Kindergarten-Ms. Qualls
1st/2nd- Ms. Harris
3rd/4th-Mr. Servais
4th/5th-Ms. Clements
K-5 Remote Learning-Ms. O’Buck
What Can We Expect?
As we move forward, you can expect to have a teacher and a school community that remains committed to the growth and well-being of your child! Our remote learning cohort is part of our larger Fort Lewis Mesa community and we are thrilled to have all our families as part of our team. With this, please keep an eye out for more information about our Meet The Teacher event. It is tentatively planned for Friday, 8/28 and more details will be shared soon.
Over the next week, you can also expect to learn more about how our school plans to keep our students, staff, and families safe as we return to in person learning. We are drafting a Fort Lewis Mesa operational plan, extending from the district’s Return to Learn Plan, that details our daily protocols and procedures across the school. With this, please note that cloth face coverings are required for all staff and students.
You can expect to become very familiar with itslearning, our shared learning management system. While this will serve as the main platform for remote learning, all teachers will be using itslearning to upload their plans, instructional videos, tasks, and other resources to support your child in their learning and acquisition of new skills.
Again, be on the lookout for more information from me as well as your child’s teacher! Keep reaching out with your questions, feedback, and/or concerns. We are here to help you navigate this time of educational change. Don’t forget that school starts Monday, 8/31 at 7:30 am!
Best,
Jenny Imel~Principal
