written by David Núñez, Interim Head of School

Dear GRS Community,

What a tremendously supportive community we have here! Having passed the mark of 100 days on the job, I can say that I have absolutely felt welcomed into this community. We have passionate, involved, and kind families and thoughtful, engaged, and excited students here at GRS and I have loved getting to know them all.

Like last month, this month I'm going to share a little information about another one of the mitigation strategies we do in our building: we eat outdoors whenever possible.

We know that it is safer for us all to be outdoors when we are going to take off our masks and obviously you can’t eat with a mask, so our practices around lunch have been something we’ve looked at very closely this year.

This is a tricky one because we have discovered that we don’t really have enough space for all 770 students and 125 staff members to eat outdoors every day (and our ability to do this depends heavily on the weather), but we have tried to overcome those concerns in a couple ways.

First, we had students build us around 30 new picnic tables (a really great project for our kids to do) to allow for more space to eat comfortably outdoors. Then, we purchased the new tents you may have seen going up around the building to make it easier for students to eat outdoors independent of the weather.

We have to admit that we have prioritized these outdoor spaces for our unvaccinated elementary students, but we still have enough space for some of the adolescents to eat outdoors as well.

Unfortunately, sometimes eating inside is unavoidable. Whether it is because of space, a weather condition like driving wind-blown rain, or, soon, the onset of bitter cold winter temperatures, we do have students eat inside. When this happens, we work on other mitigation strategies in the classroom. We have food delivered to the classrooms each day rather than having students wait in line for lunch. If students are eating indoors we ask them to spread out and eat silently. We support this with podcasts and read-alouds in the Elementary and movies in the Adolescent program. The goal here is for them to eat without talking and get their masks back on as quickly as possible.

Altogether, I’m proud of the mitigation strategies we’ve put into place this year and I know we will continue to discuss and examine our strategies with the hope of making our school a safer and safer place.

Thanks for reading!

Peace,
David