After 18 months of remote and hybrid learning, school is back in session, and students have questions about policies for the next stage of the school year. The ECHO’s Ryan Murphy sat down with principal Ken Proulx to discuss.
Q: How do you feel about how everything has gone in these first couple weeks of the school year?
A: The beginning of the school year has been exciting, especially since it’s been almost 18 months since we had all been together. I’m just really excited to be in-person with all of our students and staff back.
Q: Who created the lunch plan?
A: The lunch plan was developed at the school base, by myself and the administrative team, based on the science that was shared by the ABC Science Collaborative. The district gave best-practice guidelines that we are to follow to create a safe environment. All schools are different, so it would be crazy for the district to say, “Here’s how everyone is going to do lunch,” but they say, “Here are the best practices to keep our kids safe.” So, it came down to the admin team following the guidelines of the district, who is following the guidelines from the ABC Collaborative.
Q: Are there going to be any restrictions lifted for vaccinated students and staff?
A: I can’t say for sure at this point. I think that that’s part of a bigger conversation, above me, but I can’t say because I don’t know.
Q: Why aren’t seniors allowed off-campus during free periods?
A: The district made that decision before school started, trying to create the safest environment possible. It’s something that we are going to be revisiting, so I don’t know that it’ll be long-term. Although it was a district decision, personally, I wanted to make sure we had a good handle on safety, [then move on with] a plan that we could loosen up on as it went along. For example, we started with six [lunch periods], and it was my hope that very soon we could go to four. We did that very quickly.”
Q: What’s the policy on notifying students and staff about COVID-19 cases in the building?
A: Because of FERPA (Federal Educational Right to Privacy Act), we go through the school nurses, the nurse reports it to the district, then any reporting [to families] would be from the district level.
Q: A lot of students feel that schedule changes this year were more problematic than they’ve been in past years. Do you think that’s true?
A: I know that there have been challenges this year to the schedule changing. I think part of that is that being back in-person and not being here last year, I think a lot of electives filled up quickly, which kind of made challenges in scheduling and then in making schedule request changes. It’s always a challenge at the beginning of the year, especially for a high school this size and especially when, you know, you register in the spring and then you get to the fall and people change their mind. So I think that they were kind of normal challenges. I do think that there was an added layer of coming back in person and a lot of demand for electives, but our counselors do an amazing job, a Herculean task to get all students in the best spots they can.”
Q: Is there a plan ready to go for a situation where the building has to close for two weeks or so? How would that affect students/classes beyond “they are at home”?
A: We have not made any specific plans for this year to go remote. I think it would look a lot like it did last year. Since we all went through it last year, I think we could pivot quickly, quicker than we did in 2020 when it all kind of came up on us. But there have been no specific plans for the entire school to go remote.
Photo by Caroline Chen/The ECHO.
