Important News

Message to Families - January 2, 2021

 
Christine Knapp
Message to Families - January 2, 2021
by Christine Knapp - Sunday, 3 January 2021, 11:02 AM
 

 

January 2, 2021

Dear Parents, Guardians and Students, 

Happy 2021, Claremont!  You have no idea how excited we are to say this as we all look forward to the new year ahead.  Here are some important points of note as we start this coming Monday:

  • 5 Week Flip:  Please note that after our break, we will be entering into our last four weeks of  Quarter 2.  Blk 1 will switch to the ‘every other day’ (A/B) model and Blk 2 will be full time, ‘everyday attendance’.  By now you should have received an email from your child’s Blk 1 teacher outlining which group your student will be starting in on Jan 4th.  


  • Health & Safety:  While it is encouraging to see that the process of Covid vaccinations has begun across Canada, we still need to be focused on the health of all those that work and learn in our building.  Please continue to access the Daily Health Check on the front page of our website and ensure that students are symptom free before they return to school.  Similarly, please note that after the break there will be some new routines to consider: in order to avoid larger congregations of students eating lunch in our hallways (which creates issues with mask use/non-use in close quarters with others), we are going to promote eating in classrooms near the end of Block 1 so that students can eat and be without masks with their cohort. This will mean that students will not be eating or without their masks in the hallways during lunchtime. For those that don’t have classes in the mornings, please encourage your students to eat lunch at home before coming to their Block 2 class.


  • School Bussing:   Our lunchtime school bussing has now changed over so that students are picked up near their homes and delivered to school for 12:30pm (Blk 2 class starts at 12:45pm).  Please check our most updated schedule:  New Mid-Day Bus Schedule for January 4th - 29th


  • Grade 9 Extra Curricular Sports:   Predicting the future of school sports this year during these unprecedented times has been difficult to say the least.  To this point, the extra curricular teams that have been participating in some after school practices have only involved Gr 10-12 students who played on a team last year - this is due to the need to follow school sport Covid guidelines, especially in reference to the inability to run fair/proper tryouts at each level and safely operate within particular designated cohorts (that are organized differently at each school).  While we are happy that we’ve recently added the opportunity for all interested students to participate in intramurals at lunchtime, we know that we need to provide more opportunities for our Grade 9 students. To this end we will work on a plan to incorporate some volleyball and basketball solely for Grade 9’s in the weeks ahead, likely starting in Q3 and hopefully continuing for the remainder of the year - please stay tuned for more info.

  • Group A/B Rotation:  The Group A/B schedule for the next 2 weeks  is listed below:


Sincerely, 

 

Peter Westhaver                             Kelly de Klerk                            Aaron Buckham

pwesthaver@saanichschools.ca   kdeklerk@saanichschools.ca        abuckham@saanichschools.ca