Loveland Tiger Families,
The decisions we are all tasked with during this difficult time provide no easy answers. We have provided weekly updates, while increasing our understanding of how this virus spreads and how to best protect the health and safety of our students, staff, teachers and community. We have many parents who have expressed their concerns about student safety, and others who want students to have the most possible access to in-class instruction.
These decisions are not made lightly and our decision making process was developed in collaboration with outside help. This summer we contracted with LJB to gather professional health and safety expertise, work through decision-making to manage and mitigate risk, and develop a comprehensive safety plan. This plan was constructed with the goal of maintaining staff and student safety, while avoiding going fully remote.
With their guidance and ongoing counsel, Loveland City School District was able to create and maintain a healthy and safe environment for teachers, staff and students, identify any potential health and safety hazards and make appropriate purchasing decisions for materials and supplies.
Our work with LJB helped us reduce costs by more efficiently scheduling our existing staff which eliminated the need to hire additional cleaning staff. We increased face-to-face time during our hybrid plan by eliminating the full remote day during hybrid for cleaning. Our proactive health and safety measures were the primary reason we avoided many financial and resource strains when we began experiencing positive COVID cases and concerns. The benefits of this work are evident each day, and will continue serving us in the months ahead.
Our goal has been to return to 5 day, in-person learning, but only if it did not present unacceptable risk levels. So far, we have moved to bring our youngest students back to 5 day, in-person learning and are currently waiting on bringing back our high school students, because of concerns around an increasing and on-going spread that is taking place outside of school involving our high school students.
Through October 23, we have had 18 students or staff test positive for COVID-19, and that has resulted in 50 close-contact quarantines. All indications are that people are contracting COVID outside of our schools, and that because of our masking, distancing and hygiene bundle, it is not being spread inside our schools.
Now that we have made it through the first quarter, we can see that our students are learning and performing well. Our MAP fall benchmark scores for grades 1-8 consistently show that students this fall are on par with where students were last fall. The education of our students is going strong. Students are actively participating in their areas of specialty in interest beyond the classroom, with students active in fall sports, music and performing. Clubs have started and continue to work on creative ways to provide the full Tiger experience for our students and families.
