In has been a few months since my last newsletter. In those months, Patrick Henry has seen a lot of changes! We are acutely aware that these changes, not necessarily by choice, impact our students, staff, parents, and community. We are not alone as every other school district in the world is dealing with the same questions/situations. Fortunately, at the time of this newsletter, we have also been able to provide face-to-face learning for our students!

Recently, we conducted a practice remote learning day, the goal of which was to help us be better prepared if we ever needed to switch to remote learning in the future. While no one is even talking about or even wanting to switch to remote learning, we owe it to our students, families, and staff to be as prepared as we reasonably can, which exemplifies our commitment to our 3 pillars!

On top of remote learning day, we also recently decided to conduct Parent/Teacher conferences virtually! While this is a change that we are all still becoming more comfortable with, we do believe that positive things can come out of it that may help us better serve our parents in the future and we are looking forward to those conferences.

Having said that, it became very apparent to our technology department that we needed to provide more resources to parents, to help everyone navigate all of these technological changes. We have been working hard, and we are finally ready to launch our Parent Tech Corner website, which was created as a first step to filling that gap. The goal of the site is to provide resources that offer a general overview of the technologies parents might see our students using at home with the hopes that it can increase parent comfortability and therefore parent communication and help at home! We also posted all of the Parent/Teacher conference information on it to provide a one-stop shop.

As an extra bonus, the Ohio Department of Education had been simultaneously working on their own project and recently announced their RemotEDx initiative, which includes a free resource to families called the Connectivity Champions. Connectivity Champions are men and women who have been hired through a grant by MCOECN to help families (parents/students) solve home internet connectivity problems and/or find internet service. From my perspective as the CTO/Director of Technology, this is a great service to our families as our department couldn't possibly provide this level of support and complete our daily duties. We posted all of the Connectivity Champion contact information on the Parent Page of our website toward the bottom called Home Internet Resources. Feel free to use them as I already know families who have benefited from those services!

In closing, if I can encourage anything, it would be to keep doing what you are doing (keep your circles tight, wear masks in public, wash your hands, take care of yourself, etc.) and hopefully we can continue to stay the course we have set! Sign up for those parent teacher conferences and review the Google Meet resources that we curated for you on our Parent Tech Corner. Stay safe and stay #PHStrong!