BY DR. BRIAN GRASS
Principal
Mountain Elementary School

I’m writing to report that Mountain school is now very near 5% of our school population (students & staff) having tested positive for COVID within the past 14 days, Mountain Case Count.  Under the current NMPED guidance,  a school must enter “Temporary Remote Learning” for 10 CALENDAR days when the positivity rate reaches 5%. We discovered two additional students and one adult were positive today, which brings our current number of positive students and staff to 24. The district leadership, and I agree that our 5% number (27) will most likely be achieved in the next day or so. Additionally, our increased staff absences due to quarantine, makes moving to remote a logical next step.  The superintendent agrees that it would be wisest to begin our 10 calendar days after tomorrow, Friday, January 14.

Mountain will enter Temporary Remote Learning on Tuesday, January 18, 2022 beginning at 8:30 am, extending through Monday, January 24, 2022.  All in person classes, meetings, or activities, must be held remotely, be rescheduled, during this window, this includes after school clubs and YMCA. 

My aim at Mountain has been to communicate frequently and clearly about any COVID cases, and many of you have been following the daily totals.  Through daily emails and frequent announcements, we have given our school community a heads-up that this could be on the horizon.  Based on experience from last school year, many of our staff continue to use Google Classroom as an integral part of their classrooms and are ready to quickly transition to using these as their primary teaching platform.

Here’s a summary of the logistics for this transition:

• Your child’s teacher will communicate with you their daily expectations regarding online engagement and work. 
• All students will stick with the same daily schedule that they maintain while in the building.
• Your child will bring home everything that they will need, tomorrow, Friday January 14, after school.

This will be a temporary foray into remote learning, and keeping the same schedule helps make sure that everyone’s lives (students, staff, etc.) continue functioning on a schedule that will allow quick and seamless transition back to in-person learning.  With remote learning happening on a school-by-school basis, it also allows the staff we share with other sites to adhere to the same bell schedule so they can still meet their responsibilities at those sites.

Some things for students and parents to think about:

• Do you know how to log in to each of your teachers’ Google Classrooms?  Email your teacher if you don’t.
• Does your child have all of the items they may need from their locker, their teachers’ classrooms, etc?  If not, please have them gather these items tomorrow before they leave.
• If your student is not at school tomorrow, or is not able to collect their items tomorrow, please call our front office at 505-663-2325 beginning tomorrow morning (FRIDAY 1/14/2022)  to make arrangements.

Thank you for your flexibility and support,