20-21 School Year Updates

What's New This Week?

New restrictions continue to be put into place across the city, and you may have already heard that beginning on November 30, DPS will be closing all K-12 in-person programs, including Center Programs, through Winter Break. Given that we follow DPS guidelines for Center Programs, we will also be closing all DSST Center Programs through Winter Break. 

You are likely aware that this upcoming Monday and Tuesday are Professional Development days, with no classes for students either in person or virtually. This means that this Friday, November 20 will be the last day that Center Programs will be open for in-person learning. After that, all school buildings will be closed for the duration of this calendar year, and all students will participate in distance learning. 

Read the full update here.

 

Health Monitoring Metrics

In making decisions around a return to school that is  in-person, hybrid (some in-person, some remote), or all remote, we make the following commitments to the DSST community: 

• We ground our decisions in science
• We will prioritize safety to ensure we can keep the DSST community healthy
• We will consider the educational needs of our students and families 
• We will communicate transparently and in a timely fashion (giving advance notice of decisions when possible)
• We will extend grace to each other and all parts of the community as we navigate this process together

Click here to view the Health Monitoring Metrics dashboard and learn more about our decision-making process.

 

To keep our community safe, DSST will be requiring any team member or student participating in in-person opportunities to take a health screener from home prior to traveling to a DSST school, in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. This screener asks community members to take their temperature as well as identify if they are experiencing or could have been exposed to someone experiencing any other COVID-19 symptoms. This tool will save students and families time while mitigating the risk of a community spread by quickly supporting our community with wellness checks at home.