Reminders Regarding Health and Safety for School Reopening

Dear McMillan Families,

With the reopening of school to all students on January 10, there are a few things you should be aware of. This past week, teachers and the rest of our school staff were busy make adjustments to classrooms, and planning for some changes to our routines that will hopefully help keep us all healthy and in attendance.

When school starts on Mondays, these are the changes you or your child might notice:

-where possible, student seating will be arranged in a forward facing, spaced manner

-clusters of students will be avoided for now, such as when seated on the carpet in whole class arrangement

-grade 5 monitors are paused for now 

-students will be reminded regularly regarding mask wearing, and all students without exemptions will be expected to wear their masks as much as possible

-regular handwashing will continue

-we will continue to have two outside lunch time breaks to reduce the number of students on the playground, and we will do the same now for morning recess.

-we will emphasize and remind students to enter and exit doorways in an orderly, patient way that minimizes crowding. The same is true when in the cloakrooms

-sick children will be sent home. They will be asked to wear a mask while waiting for pick up

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances, we need to put a pause on PAC activities such as hot lunches for the month of January. Similarly, volunteers in the classroom will be limited to only those that are essential to the program, and student learning. We do hope to recommence these as soon as possible.

You can help us from home by being extra vigilant with your daily health checks, and by keeping your child at home if they have any cold symptoms at all for these next few weeks.

Please also have a plan in place for picking up your child should they become sick at school. You can also help by ensuring that your child brings a mask to school each day. Labelling the mask will help ensure it finds its way back home at the end of the day. We do have disposable masks at the school for those emergency moments, but as you can well imagine, we are going through them rapidly, and they are littering our playground.

Finally, in the event that your child's class, or worse case the whole school, needs to move to remote learning due to a functional closure, please be prepared by having communicated with your child's teacher regarding any needs you may have. Teachers will be connecting with you this week through email and will provide a link to a survey. This should be completed in a timely manner so that we are aware of your needs.

All the staff at McMillan thank you for your support during these times. We are looking forward to better days in the very near future!