School Closure

Good afternoon. I hope you had a lovely Christmas. You may have heard announcements earlier today regarding a delayed start to the new school term. We heard about this at the same time. Following a meeting with Minister Weir, the Department of Education and the Education Authority have today given the following guidance:

· A child of a key worker is a child for whom both parents (or a parent in a single parent family) is a key worker, with no other safe alternative. The Department predict numbers should be low.
· The Department have stated children who qualify as children of key workers will be in the school building for 'supervised 'learning'. It should be made clear to parents that this is not 'face-to-face teaching'; this is being supervised in the school building, doing the same activities as the children who are at home.
· A day has been given for schools to prepare activities. This day is whatever your school had already planned for the children to return to school. 'Supervised learning' will, therefore, begin on the following day (i.e.Tuesday).
· Any school meals/transport organised for the first day should be cancelled.
·Year 7 children should not be brought into school for transfer tuition. This would be against DE policy.
· Please continue to take every precaution.
·All previous health guidance remains in place and must be stringently adhered to.
· If the new variant of COVID-19 becomes dominant, we should expect for this situation to continue.

In consultation with Mr Eamonn Kennedy our Chair of Governors and following departmental guidance we will be open from *Tuesday 5th January* for key worker's children where both parents are in this category or one in a single parent family where there is no other childcare available for that family. As we were concerned this may happen, we sent learning packs home before Christmas and this will be supplemented with work on Seesaw the online platform the children have already been using. The teachers will also communicate with their class via Seesaw. A form will be available for key workers to complete if they wish their child to be in school starting from Tuesday 5th January. This form must be submitted by 3pm tomorrow. We have managed thus far to keep our school covid free. The huge rise in figures is very concerning but if we all work together we can keep everyone safe. We appreciate your continued support at this difficult time and pray that school will return as normal on the 11th January.
You will all be aware that decisions regarding restrictions on classroom teaching have not always been announced with a lot of notice. We will continue to notify you as soon as we are made aware of any changes and please use our school app and our Facebook page to stay up to date with any changes.
Kind regards
Oonagh