First official Headmaster Email of the 2020-2021 school year!

Welcome to the first official Headmaster Email of the 2020-2021 school year! To our new families, it is my goal to send a weekly email with important information for our school community. This year, I have decided to divide the emails into a "For Action" section that will include items that need some sort of response/action from you and a "For Information" section that are simply items you need to be aware of. I hope this helps streamline communication. For Information: Yesterday I submitted FBCA's Restart Plan to the Ministry of Education and hope to receive approval next week. After approval, I will share the full details with you, but in the meantime, I wanted to answer some of your frequently asked questions:

1. I've heard about learning groups, what does this mean for our school? Our students and staff will be divided into two learning groups, Kindergarten through Grade 3 and Grade 4 through Grade 7 (I refer to these as the Latin and Greek groups, based upon which language the class is learning). Among other things, these groups will have separate places to store their backpacks and separate break times or locations.

2. When does school begin? We will have half-day student orientation on September 8th. Students in Kindergarten through Grade 3 will attend 8:30 to 11:50 and students in Grade 4 through 7 will attend 1:00 to 3:05. More details will be sent out next week.

3. Will we have a parent orientation? Yes! We will hold an evening of worship and prayer for parents on Thursday, September 3 at 7 PM. This will also include an orientation and Q & A session. The evening will be live-streamed on our Facebook page (and available to watch afterwards, if needed).

4. What about masks? Masks are not required for elementary students or their teachers. Students in grades 6 to 7 and their teachers are only required to wear masks when they are closer than 2 meters to individuals outside of their learning group. For our school, this will be fairly rare. As Dr. Henry says, masks are a personal choice, and as such, your children are welcome to wear them. We will be providing each staff member and student with two reusable masks.

5. Will we have homeschool cohort students? Yes! We are delighted that we are able to continue this program. Homeschoolers will join the Kindergarten to Grade 5 classes on Monday and Wednesday afternoons and the Grade 6-7 class Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

For Action: Prepare your child: September will be a transition time for all of us! Here's some tips for how you can begin to prepare your child:

1. If your child has a sibling or close friend in a different learning group, begin to explain to them that they unfortunately will not be able to interact at school as they have in the past.

2. Practice good hand hygiene! Students will be expected to wash their hands at several points in the day and the more well-versed they are in proper hand-washing, the better. There are many great videos online that can be fun ways to demonstrate it to your children.

3. We are just a few weeks from school beginning and it may be time to begin adjusting sleep schedules to accommodate the school routine.

Consider joining the Facebook Group: We have a school family page on Facebook for informal communication among parents. If you are not already a part of the group and would like to be, add any parent (or myself) as a friend and we will add you to the group. Uniform Orders: Submit any remaining French Toast uniform orders to Shanti at fbcauniform@gmail.com by August 31st. We are truly blessed with the greatest school community and I am thrilled we will be together once again. As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer! In Christ, Kyla