Dear St. Anthony of Padua Families,
Welcome back to a brand new school year! I was hoping to be able to see all of you in person on the first day of school, but due to Governor Newsom’s mandate to continue with online learning for the fall, we will not be able to return to campus until further notice. The faculty and staff have been working all summer to welcome your children back and were prepared for multiple scenarios. We pray that LA County is taken off the watch list for 14 consecutive days so we can have your children back on campus with us.
I sincerely hope you all had a wonderful , safe, and restful summer, and I look forward to seeing you all virtually this week!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, 8/19, is our first day of school! The first 3 days of school Wed-Friday are noon dismissals. Your child’s teachers should have sent you information specific to your child’s class via email by now. We are excited to have a Welcome Back All School Family Drive-In Mass on Friday, Sept. 4 at 9:30am in our school parking lot. We hope to see you all there with your kids to usher in a new school year with the entire student body! Please remember to bring your masks and face shields to the Mass. We will practice social distancing, but it will still be wonderful to see you all from afar. Safety will always be our first priority.
Please mark your calendars: Our Back to School Night and first Mandatory General Parent Meeting will happen remotely via Zoom on Sept. 9 at 6:30pm. You will receive a link from me and then you will click on the links from your children’s teachers, after our all school parent meeting to see your children’s teachers in their respective classrooms and sign up for October parent conferences. Each teacher will present 2 of the same sessions back-to-back, and record one session to mail out as needed. If you have multiple children, you can attend the 2 sessions and then get the recordings for the other kids from their respective teachers. More details to come!
Our entire faculty and staff are so thrilled to be able to welcome you back to another school year! Although it’s sure to be different from any other year we have ever experienced in our lifetime, it’s still exciting to prepare for a new year of education with your children.
We will have our first of three STAR diagnostic tests administered in the next few weeks (we do this once a trimester). As you may know, we use the STAR assessments in Early LIteracy, Math, and Reading to help teachers understand what students know and are ready to learn. Students take STAR tests once in the fall, winter, and spring, and teachers typically give this test while students are in school. Because of the pandemic, and students are asked to learn from home, students will be taking the STAR test while at home, but we will need your help.
Your child’s teacher will schedule a time for the assessment and will monitor your child while they take the test using Zoom. An adult should be available during this testing time to help your child log in and ensure they are on task and trying their best.
It is so important that you please avoid helping your child answer test questions. The best help is no help, so we can accurately assess what they know and what they don’t know so we can help them progress at their pace. To ensure testing fidelity, we ask that you do not give them any answers. Thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding. We are doing the best we can under these unusual circumstances, so we depend on your partnership as we work together to help your child grow and thrive.
Many of you have come to the school this week to pick up your child’s supplies, books, and materials. It was wonderful seeing many of you back on campus!
Starting tomorrow, our normal Office Hours are 8am-4pm, and we are accepting guests (one at a time) by appointment only in the office. Ideally, all transactions will happen remotely, but if you must come to school in person, please do email our office staff to set up an appointment, and when you come, please follow all social distancing guidelines. I am also available to meet by Zoom, if you need to set up a meeting with me. As always, you can reach me at agrey@stanthonygardena.org. I am here for you to support you and be of service.
Please note that our REMIND app will no longer be used to give you parent announcements. We will be using Gradelink to email blast you and send out mass texts in the event of an emergency, so please be sure to update all your contact info (phone, address, and emergency contacts) in the office.
To communicate with your teachers, please email them, call them at school (they are working from their classrooms), or set up a Zoom appointment with them. We are currently upgrading our Gradelink school account to send out text notifications, and that will take the place of Remind for emergency notifications from the school administration, but the teachers will not have the texting capabilities.
In other news; I’m so excited to announce that our SAP School App is now live! I’m excited that you can download it onto your mobile phones now. We have been working on creating a school app for the past 6 weeks. Now that it is live, we would like you to download the app to your phone.
Just go to your App Store and look for our SAP school seal. Type in: St. Anthony of Padua-CA in the App store.
Here are the direct links to our apps:
- iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1527429263
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stanthonygardena.stanthonygardena
Once you have the app on your phone you can customize it to receive push notifications from the school for announcements. You can choose only the groups and news that you want and that pertain to you and your family. We just created the app with the company Legit Apps, and will continue to get training on how to utilize it, but we are excited to have a new app and roll it out to families to make getting information so much easier ! We hope it will be of great use to all of us. When we return to school, there is even a section for health screening, so you can answer questions via the app to speed up the process of a return to class.
Thank you so much for choosing St. Anthony’s and for entrusting us with your children’s lives. We are grateful to be in partnership with you. May God watch over us and shower us with many blessings this year. Have a great first week back!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Grey
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