Click here for Printable Letter from the Superintendent
July 22,2020
Dear Pirate Family,
With the school year fast approaching, we have been working diligently to stay on top of this ever changing situation. Last week, we released the two learning options for the year: Traditional face to face and Asynchronous (At-Home/remote) learning. At the end of last week, the state gave us an option of starting our school year being fully remote for four weeks. After talking and surveying the teachers, we believe it's in the best interest of our staff, students and community that we begin this year fully remote. Going fully remote allows for a few things. First it allows the teachers to focus on asynchronous learning. Asynchronous is a completely new concept for driving instruction. Our faculty believes it is crucial that we have four full weeks with students working remotely. This will help us troubleshoot areas of need quickly. We understand this is a challenge for you as a family too. We have chromebooks available if anyone needs a device. If connectivity is an issue, we have a number of hotspots on order and hope they will be here before school starts. TEA is helping districts across the state to expedite these orders. In the event you don’t have connectivity, or can’t connect with the hotspots that we provide, your child may have the opportunity to start school on campus to access their instruction. Your child would receive an alternate remote learning schedule that lasts a full school day and would allow teachers to fully plan for Asynchronous (At-Home) learning. We also know there may be other extenuating circumstances that lead to your child needing to attend school with a remote learning schedule, beginning on the 13th. If that is the case, please contact your child's campus principal to work through that issue. Secondly, we know the virus is continuing to spread, and we hope that remote instruction will better protect our faculty, students and potentially prevent more community spread.
We have made a couple of operational changes for this year, to adjust for the issue at hand. Spurger ISD will move to a 9 week grading period. After a discussion with the teachers, it was unanimous that 9 weeks would work better for all learners given this ever changing environment. Parents will continue to receive progress reports every 3 weeks.In a 9 week grading period, you will receive 2 progress reports before the report card. This will provide the students more time to adjust if they need to. Also, the district will begin school at 7:40 and dismiss at 3:38. The elementary campus will dismiss a little earlier to accomodate for car riders. This will add 20 minutes to our day. The additional 20 mins a day will allow us to pick up a total of 10 extra days. In the event that we completely close this year, these additional days will hopefully keep us from having to go into the summer months.
The requirements and how we execute these plans are ever changing. I know many of you are anxious and so are we about what school will look like when we begin school. Sometimes these changes can be hourly. In this plan alone, it was changed 3 times last week. We know that major changes are a possibility before we start school. Our desire is to be able to present something to you all with some assurances that it will not be completely changed before we begin school. Being anxious in this environment is understandable. We don’t want to add mass confusion along with this already tense situation.
We ask that regardless of the option you choose for your child to receive their education, that you please register online by July 30th through the parent portal. We need an accurate account for all returning students to Spurger ISD.
Sincerely,
Morgan Wright
Superintendent Spurger ISD