I would like to address some concerns that were raised today and clarify information in regards to our policy related to students being picked up from after school care, evening events, and sporting events and practices.

I'd like to share some history first. Over the past few years, we have established a before and after care program in the Elementary School and developed a variety of extracurricular student activities. The goal has been to help parents by bridging the gap between work/personal schedules and our school schedule, while also providing activities that students would enjoy beyond what we are able to offer during the school day.

Even with the success of these programs, we found that we had an increasing number of older students who were arriving very early or remaining on campus far longer than the school day. We wanted to make sure that these students had somewhere safe to go with people who knew who they were and would care for their well-being. We are now providing a safe place for these students: we have a staff member available to supervise students before school and one who supervises a study hall for Middle School and High School students after school until 6:00 PM.

With this, and the growth of our social activities and athletic program, comes the need to establish clear policies and procedures for our staff who are supervising students, and then communicate those policies to parents so that everyone understands.

A few weeks ago, we shared our student pick-up policy in the newsletter. Please know that this policy was developed with research into best practices and the advice of professionals.

I want to go over the last step in the policy, which takes place when a student has not been picked up at school, the parents have not contacted us, and we have not been able to reach either the parents/guardians or their emergency contacts after a reasonable amount of time; our only available option is to call protective services to ensure that the student is safe for the night.

As you can imagine, when faced with this situation, we cannot ask our staff to take a student home with them for the night or conversely sleep in one of our buildings with them overnight.

This phase of the policy is something that is only for last resort; we hope to never use it and will exhaust all possible options before we do.

Our hope is that you can all rest assured that in the case of an emergency you know your child will be safe and looked after. Please ensure that your emergency contacts are updated, and as a community we all need to look out for each other and the safety of our students.

We will respect your time by ending practices and events as scheduled, and we ask that you work with us in a spirit of mutual respect to ensure that students are picked up on time and taken home safe and sound!