Dear parents and community members:

We collectively share this letter to ask for your continued support and cooperation during these unprecedented times of the pandemic. As school leaders, we are doing our best in partnership with our respective health departments, school staff, families and our communities to sustain in-person instruction. We commend the students we serve for their efforts and sacrifice during each school day. We all serve and support our youth, whether as parents/guardians, educators or citizens of our respective schools — your children, all of our students, will be our future leaders, service providers and citizens.

Each of our four districts has faced different, yet similar challenges — what we know is that we can’t do this alone from within the walls of our respective buildings. Your support and cooperation as both parents/guardians and citizens will be paramount in our best chances to sustain in-person instruction, through what will be our most challenging months ahead.

We know that as parents and guardians you are all under extreme stress during these times — each of us are parents and understand the dynamics of raising children and balancing work among all else in life. We only desire to support you, as we do your children, during these very difficult times. Our schools must have healthy staff members for both the classroom and all other supporting functions to keep our schools open. In our area, many school closures are typically due to staffing shortfalls and contact tracing, not student illness. If any staff are identified as close contacts or positive cases, regardless of how they feel, they cannot provide services to students for extended periods of time due to quarantine and isolation requirements

Ultimately, so much is out of our control as individual school districts. All of our preventive, proactive efforts are negated when the expectations requested from our schools are not adhered to, specifically the daily self-screening for symptoms. We ask you to diligently adhere to, and comply with, the daily self-screening for symptoms — Please, DO NOT send your child to school if they have qualifying symptoms. We strongly encourage our respective school communities to make the safest decisions you can in your activities outside of your household, understanding this will take a collective sacrifice of us all as citizens to progress through the pandemic to better days.

Each of our individual actions have implications upon others, now more than ever. We implore you to respect our school guidelines in our best efforts to mitigate risk within our respective schools, and to adhere to all recommended public safety guidelines as you go about your lives in our school-communities.

Andy Space,

superintendent,

Beecher-Dunbar-

Pembine School

District

Steve Bloom,

superintendent,

Goodman-Armstrong Creek School District

Ben Niehaus,

superintendent,

Florence County School District

Nate Burklund,

superintendent,

School District

of Niagara