West Potomac High School Weekly News

 

Happy Friday West Potomac!

 

I hope you all are well and your children are settling in to the routines of school.  You all should have received an email from me earlier today alerting you of positive COVID cases.  I will send that same letter on Fridays.  The letter will cover any positive cases from the week.  We will no longer send letters for every individual case as many parents across the county reported confusion with all the multiple letters.  Please take a moment to read the letter so that you are familiar with the language and definitions of close contacts.  Essentially the process for confirmed positive cases is as follows:

 

  • Student/Staff/Visitor/Health Dept reports a confirmed positive case to the school
  • School administration is responsible for determining if the person(s) were infectious during the last time they were on school grounds
    • If they were not infectious no further action needs to be taken as a spread would not have happened
    • If they were infections the contact tracing begins
  • School administration determines any and all close contacts and officially reports all information to the FCHD via the Redcap reporting system
  • School administration contacts parents of all close contacts to temporarily PAUSE their school attendance (a pause letter is given to each close contact explaining the process for being cleared to return to school)
    • Most close contacts who are asymptomatic and are fully vaccinated have been able to quickly (within a day or two) be cleared by the FCHD to return
  • FCHD reaches out to all close contacts to determine IF quarantining or clearance is the next step

 

We continue to encourage you to keep your children home if they are not feeling well.  This will make sure that any illness is not spread to anyone else.  This is crucial to West Potomac staying in-person and not having to pause or quarantine individuals, classes, or the entire school.  We have to be in this together or it will not work.  Our students continue to be mindful and cooperative regarding their proper wearing of masks which has drastically reduced large scale pausing due to our positive cases. 

 

I am sure you have heard from your students how difficult it is since construction to move around in between classes within the 8 minutes of passing time allotted.  As a result, we looked at our bell schedule and was able to take some time away from our breakfast break in the morning and redistribute it to passing time.  We did NOT take time from instructional periods.  The bell schedule below represents 10 minutes of passing time.  We will begin this new schedule starting Monday September 20th.  We will be messaging this out to kids throughout next week so that they can begin the following week.  We are hopeful that this will take out some of the stress in getting from one class to the next for students and staff.

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Have a great weekend,

Ms. Millard