Dear Parents/ Guardians,

By now, you may be aware that the PHO and MoE for BC held a press conference on December 29, 2021, indicating a phased re-entry to January schooling in order to buy time for schools in BC to plan for more health and hygiene protocols given the wide-spread and contagious nature of the Covid-19 variant Omicron.

For most students, school will resume on January 10th, 2022. While schools will be open on Tuesday, January 4^th, 2022, it is only for students of health care professionals, vulnerable students, and students with special needs. The remainder of the school population will return on January 10^th, 2022.  While Dr. Henry and Minister Whiteside originally used the term essential service workers, they later clarified they meant health service workers. For consistency, we will use the term Essential Service Workers.

The YMCA will be offering before/after for those three groups of students

This delay will allow all schools in BC to meet with their District Management Teams and Health + Safety Directors to adjust already existing school safety plans to meet revised Provincial criteria.

School Administrators have a Monday am meeting with the VSB DMT and H+S officers to review criteria/ protocols and revise school safety plans accordingly.

Once our plans are approved, we will be sharing them with our school communities.

As Minister Whiteside noted in her remarks, regular programming at schools is suspended from January 4-10. Therefore, families are not to expect regular school programming should they decide to send their children to school during this period. This also means that schools will not be providing an online learning program in lieu of Face to Face instruction. However, school staff will need to provide supervision and adapted programming for all students who report to school during this time.

Morning routines remain the same for now. Drop off by 8:55 at the entrance you normally drop at. Pick up will be the same at 3:00. REMINDER DO NOT SEND SICK KIDS TO SCHOOL. THEY WILL BE SENT HOME.

We will share updates and more details as they become available. For now we will have to wait until we can meet with VSB Management and be given direction how they would like schools to proceed. We anticipate this happening on Monday and Wednesday this coming week.