March 23, 2020
Parents of WDCSD:
As a district, please be reminded we are not leaving you in a lurch when it comes to the education of your child. The direction we are taking is to continue to provide you with an ever-growing list of choices, suggestions, and resources via The Hub (District home page > look under the slide show > click the orange HUB button).
Our FAQ section on our website: Coronavirus Information Updates is also a great resource page with all of our communication and additional information related to our schools during this time.
A specific addition to the FAQ is suggested schedules/routines submitted by our teachers. There is a wide-variety of suggestions, and you will see that as educators, and parents, we don't have all the magic answers, but we too are doing the best we can during this time.
Our continued priority is for our families to take care of their emotional well-being. Lessons of gratitude, empathy, resiliency, grit, compassion, kindness, and understanding can go just as far during this time than any academic lesson suggested to you. How to handle feelings of sadness, being scared, newly found boredom as their busy schedules came to a halt. Additionally, the reality is, we also need to be preparing to help our children understand sick family members, friends, and neighbors in the possibility of lessons with death and loss.
There is so much pressure on parents right now to figure out how to navigate daily lives, feeling like they are not doing enough for their children educationally because they haven’t logged on to some online lesson is not one that would serve our society well during this time. This isn’t based on a feeling, this is brain research, resiliency and trauma research, and research in the difference in how people thrive during difficulty compared to those who do not. Our children need us to keep our perspective, model kindness, patience, and calmness. They need us to slow down and talk to them. Whenever they come back to us, we will continue the academic lessons with all the rigor and authenticity in which we are trained; for now, you do you…and be a parent.
Educational resource suggestions: The Hub
Continued communication and FAQs (newly added suggestions of schedules/routines): Coronavirus Information Updates
Posted: Monday, March 23, 2020