Back to School Tips #2

Rhonda: Hi guys, it’s Ronda with Kentucky SPIN, I just wanted to come to you just to kind of talk about a little bit about the announcement that Governor Beshear made yesterday, on August the 10th, where he is recommended that all schools, not start back in person classes until September the 28th. This doesn’t mean that they won’t start school before then, but what is being recommended now is that all the schools start on the NTI, the non-traditional instruction. And, and then the hope is now, again, things change, we know they change daily, hourly. But the hope is September 28th, that then we would be in a good enough shape to where a school could go back in person, at some level. Now it may not be completely and there may be different options in your district. But what I wanted to come to you about today is not only to talk about that, but it is very critical, if you have not heard from your school to contact them, especially, because things have changed since yesterday. And in the Kentucky Department of Educations’ press release following that yesterday, which you will find all of these press releases on our website under our COVID page, there’s a specific education spot that you can find all of that guidance that’s been issued or press releases. In that, commissioner Brown stated that they do believe that all districts will follow it. Again, it is a recommendation, not a requirement, but all districts have followed suit previously when recommendations have been rolled out from the Governor. So yeah, this changes things. If you had been planning to, even if you have had contact with your school, if you had been planning to do the in-person and your district may be offering an alternate AB schedule, or if you had decided that your child would do virtually here’s what’s important, contact the school, have the communication so that our children can hit the ground running. What was already planned was the third week of August schools wouldn’t start back till then. So what’s critical is contact your district, find out what the plans are. They’re probably going to be starting all students on the non-traditional instruction, virtually. But what we got to find out is what do you need? What do you need for your child? What are the plans? How are they going to communicate with the teachers? So contact them, especially for children who have IEP or 504 plans, we need to be having even more in depth conversations with the school. So how are we going to ensure that the services are delivered and what is our game plan? So it’s only going to help our children to be more successful the more we communicate. But please, even if you already had had communication with your district, things have changed right now. So we need to make sure that all families are receiving communication and are in contact with their school and with the teachers, administrators so we know what to do best for our children. So please contact your school regardless if you had had communication before or not find out what’s going on, what the game plan is and how we can hit the ground running so our children are successful. I hope y’all are doing well. Love to you all. And don’t forget to check out every Tuesday, especially right now it’s going to be, the topic is going to be related around COVID, is our Tuesday tips, webinars at 11:00 AM. Some may be one or two hours and then also we have standing Thursday webinars that we have on a variety of topics. Check out our website, www.KYSPIN.com. You will find the information on the webinars available and also you can sign up for our e-news that we send out, but love to you all, stay safe and I hope you’re doing good and we’ll talk soon. Bye bye.