Thank Yous and Updates

Good Evening Community Families,

It was WONDERFUL to see the beautiful, happy, and excited faces of our students last week!! Thank you, parents, for your kindness, patience, and support.

I would like to thank our AMAZING parent volunteers for helping us through the first week back to campus. These parents helped with valet, unloading buses on the upper yard, checking students in, taking their temperatures, and escorting them around campus. We could not have done this without your support!!!!

Thank you to the parents who treated our entire staff to burritos for lunch, bagels and lunch for the office staff, and a wall-mounted thermometer for our students!!

I'd like to share this thank you note I sent to the CMCS staff on Friday night. I think it's important you know how very hard they worked for you last week:

Good grief, it's finally Friday night!  We made it through this very challenging week and I am so grateful for the weekend ahead. While it was far from perfect, reopening was pretty smooth considering the many obstacles there seemed to be. It was all due to teamwork- and what an awesome team you are!!!  

So, thank you teachers, for making this such an exciting and happy week for all the returning students and for pivoting, once again, into a whole new way of teaching!! I heard from parents how happy their children were to be with you. As if that weren't enough, you gave up lunch periods to assist with valet and bus arrivals/departures, travelled home between cohorts so that students could keep the classrooms, gave up recess to supervise students, and checked in frequently to offer encouragement and support. I'm sure your students made you feel like the superstars you are! ❤️ 

Thank you, Maria, Lalita, Alice, and Xantipa, for arriving at or before 7am in the morning and staying way beyond your regular hours, for standing in the street to direct traffic, for fielding phone calls from irate parents 😑, dealing with many demands and moods with a pleasant smile, and running from one end of the campus to the other delivering supplies, finding students, working valet and buses, delivering messages, etc. 

Thank you, Sarah Lilly, for being dedicated, talented, and amazing Sarah Lilly- and introducing Lil' Dumplin' to Community at just the right time! I can't imagine how many first-day-back tears were circumvented. I saw only one crying student all week! 

Thank you, Andrew, for EVERYTHING, especially for forgiving me after I forgot to announce no snacks on the upper yard after you'd just dragged all the trash cans down to the lower yard for the hand-washing stations 😬, keeping our school clean and sanitized, prepping EVERY CLASSROOM, RESTROOM, AND THE AUDITORIUM  for reopening and just getting it all done in your quiet and sure way. 

Thank you, Nick and Elva, for preparing, serving, and delivering on-demand snacks and 3 square meals every day to the students.

Thank you, paraprofessionals and campus aides for working extra, super-hard covering supervision all day long when we received only 4 Beyond the Bell supervision staff to cover 18 cohorts, helping students with their lunches and iPads while struggling to keep them 6 ft. apart, and then asking what more you could do to help 😍. 

Thank you, Phyllis and Kathryn, for the numerous cohort/transportation/ childcare lists, schedules, and revisions, for arriving at 7am and leaving at 6pm just to keep up, for dealing with the many demands, complaints, and survey changes from parents, keeping track of each and every student each and every hour of the day, managing up to 33 buses (!!!) and keeping a positive attitude, calm demeanor and making me laugh really hard throughout the week. 🤣😂

        YOU ALL ARE THE BEST!

Request a change to cohort, transportation, or childcare/supervision

The district's program survey has been closed. In an effort to keep up with your needs, we've devised a new survey for you to let us know of any changes you need to make to your child's current cohort, childcare, or transportation. We will do our best to accommodate your requests at two week intervals, beginning May 3rd. Click here to request a change to cohort, transportation, or childcare/supervision.

BEYOND THE BELL SUPERVISION UPDATE

I HEAR YOUR FRUSTRATION! However, I respectfully and humbly ask for your patience regarding child supervision right now. I have tried to be transparent and up front about our reopening. So here it is: we have a large demand for childcare at CMCS: three AM groups and twelve PM groups of 14 students each. And this after we've had to condense the number of cohorts as much as possible to balance the supply of supervision with the demand.  The district has provided two AM Beyond the Bell coaches and two PM coaches. In addition, they have sent a small, random and inconsistent assortment of LAUSD employees and Prime Time camp coaches to fill in here and there. (I am grateful to all of them for showing up!) Our CMCS TA's have gone above and beyond providing the afternoon support needed after assisting in their own classrooms in the morning.  Phyllis, Kathryn, and I have filled in when there is no one else available. Beyond the Bell has (over)promised immediate and unlimited access to childcare for all who apply, but have not provided the staff needed to meet the demand. Those of you who attended the Tea Time Q & A when Beyond the Bell supervisor, John Han spoke about the program, heard him say that the program is intended for students who need supervision for the entire time block (8-11 or 12-4) and discouraged late drop-ins and early pick-ups. This is the policy of Beyond the Bell, not mine. This is why your child may have been placed in a different childcare group than his/her best friend(s) or why you've been asked not to pick up two hours early or drop off two hours late . . .

HOWEVER . . . 

. . . Coach K, Coach Andy, and GOT GAME are coming to the rescue!! After the Tea Time meeting mentioned above, Beyond the Bell honored my plea to outsource the Got Game program to provide the supervision we need. 😁Got Game is now in the process of hiring, preparing, and training coaches to help us with this problem. (Thank you, Laura Scott, for sending qualified applicants their way!) Give them a couple of weeks to get up and running, and hopefully all of our supervision problems will be solved! I will keep you updated!!

COVID TESTING UPDATE

Sent Wednesday, April 21 at 6 p.m.

Dear Los Angeles Unified Families,

Thank you for all of your efforts toward helping to ensure the safe return of Los Angeles Unified students to our campuses for in-person instruction. The presence of students in classrooms brought with it a sense of excitement and purpose that was sorely missed.

We wanted to share some updates about COVID baseline testing: 

After students have completed their baseline COVID test, all further testing during the spring 2021 semester will take place at school sites. Because COVID testing will be conducted at school, there is no need for you to make appointments for future COVID tests. The students participating in the school-based testing program will continue to receive a Daily Pass QR code.

As always, these services are free of charge to students and their families. If you have questions or would like additional information about the periodic testing program, please call our Los Angeles Unified Hotline at 213-443-1300.

We appreciate your ongoing commitment and support.

Office of COVID Response

click here for more COVID testing info.