From the Principal…
Hello Bluff Creek Families!
Well our first week back with our students has been amazing! I want to thank parents for your patience with bus transportation issues and parent pick up and drop off. Please remember that if you plan to pick up your child at the front of the building, we do not dismiss until 3:00. Students are still attending specialists until 2:50.
Many parents have asked about when they can enter the building or volunteer. At this time, the district directive is for no volunteers or visitors in the building while students are in attendance. Our responsibility to families is to keep students as safe as possible, with reasonable physical distancing, face masks, shield wearing by staff and frequent hand washing and hand sanitizing. We hope that as we move through the spring we may be able to welcome visitors and volunteers once again.
Healthy celebrations at Bluff Creek. I know we have been away from school for a while, however, we still have procedures in place to celebrate holidays and birthdays in safe and healthy ways. Please review our Safe and Healthy Celebrations document:
From birthday parties to holiday celebrations, there are many celebrations in elementary schools. Along with the fun, usually comes food, which often mean eating sugary juice drinks, chips, cupcakes, candy and ice cream. The Schools of Eastern Carver County recognizes the link between student health and learning and is committed to providing a healthy school environment that promotes student and staff wellness, proper nutrition, nutrition education, and regular physical activity. The ECCS Wellness Policy (#533) acknowledges that offering so many treats so often can contribute to unhealthy eating habits and presents a challenge to students with health concerns and food allergies. Our Bluff Creek school community request that parents shift the focus of school parties from unhealthy food to healthy fun with a few simple changes. Therefore, food related birthday treats or other “special” food related treats are NOT allowed due to the health concerns of other students.
The Following are ideas of non-food options:
- Parents can come to school on their child’s birthday and read a book to the class.
- Provide a birthday treasure box for students with small toys, books, notepads, pencils etc.
- Allow your child to select a book of their choice to be read to the class and donate the book to the classroom or school library.
- Provide a free time activity to celebrate at the end of the special day.
- Provide a birthday bag with cake mix, frosting, napkins, and candles, wrapping paper, bows and tape to donate to the food shelf in the birthday child’s name.
- Send a collage of baby pictures for your child to share.
- Birthday Ball—parents purchase a ball, classmates sign it, students get to use it at recess in honor of the birthday student(s) and the birthday child can then take the ball home as a memento.
- Donate a game to the classroom to be used during indoor recess.
We typically do not have Valentine’s Day parties, but with Valentine’s Day arriving next week these are the recommendations from our district Health Services department:
- Celebrations continue to follow usual mitigation measures:
- Face Coverings, Social Distancing, Limit mixing of groups
- Ok to share valentines, layer with handwashing before and after
- Share treats, avoid extra time with masks off-take them home to eat treats
Bluff Creek has a special PBIS Celebration planned for the entire school during the day on February 12th!
Fastbridge testing for our third through fifth graders continues next week. The FastBridge system is a set of assessments that teachers use to measure student learning in math and reading. FastBridge scores help teachers to know what kind of teaching each student needs. For each grade level there are benchmark scores that help us to determine student achievement up to this point.
You should have received an invitation to a virtual Parent Teacher conference. These late winter conferences are 15 minutes long and are a virtual way to check in with your child’s teacher about their progress.
Thank you, parents, for your patience and support as we transitioned into in-person learning five days a week. Our students have moved smoothly into routines and we are so happy to have them back in-person at BCE!
Warmly,
Joan MacDonald
Principal