20-21 School Year Updates

What's New This Week?

Over the past two weeks, we were very hopeful and excited to have middle schoolers back in our buildings for hybrid classes, and a portion of high schoolers back in remote learning centers. However, as you may have read in the news over the last couple of days, Colorado has seen our largest outbreak since the pandemic began last spring, with Denver and Adams country seeing record numbers of COVID cases.  Based on the strong urging of public health officials, with a heavy heart, we have paused our middle school re-open plans in Denver and Aurora through the end of the First Trimester (November 20th).  

We will do everything we can to safely return students to our buildings in smaller groups and safe settings.  We will proceed with opening middle school and high school in person learning centers to support students who need it the most. They will be slightly smaller in high schools than originally anticipated. We will prioritize our most vulnerable learners and students with poor internet connectivity first. These learning centers will open on November 2nd.  We will also continue with our plans to provide in-person college counseling for our high school students. Lastly, we will also be opening our Special Education Center Programs.

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.