I am hoping you are all faring well with managing this challenge. The staff at HCA are all missing our daily contact with students, and we are so grateful that so many of them are able to participate in our live online classes. We also appreciate how much you are doing to support them at home with their learning. Thank you for that. This week, Maine’s Commissioner of Education and Governor gave the recommendation for districts to begin planning for not returning to our school buildings for the remainder of the school year. In light of this, HCA will not be returning to our buildings this school year and will continue our remote learning and online classes through the end of the school year, which is Thursday, June 18th.

Next week, teachers will be meeting to plan the details of what this extended time of remote learning will look like. Please look forward to next Friday’s newsletter for details on this. Here are some broad strokes of what this means:

• We recognize that everyone is doing the best they can to minimize the negative impact of this.
• Our closure will not negatively impact any student’s opportunity for passage to Division 2 or Division 3, or for graduation. Our seniors and 8th graders have had their graduation plans and passage contracts in place for months, and any adjustments needed for these can be made individually. For our 10th graders who may be eligible for passage to Division 3, please keep an eye out next week for an email to those parents.
• Our staff and students are in conversation about how to honor the hard work of our seniors. Stay tuned for information on graduation and other related end-of-year events.
• Students who are working remotely right now will get credit for the standards they complete. Students who are not able to work remotely right now will be expected to complete those standards next year. We will offer lots of support and opportunity for that.
• We do not yet know how this will impact our summer programming. We will have a decision on this by May 15th.
• If students have any items in their building, please let crew leaders know. We can coordinate for items to be picked up at one of our Wednesday Drive-throughs at Division 2/3.

Thank you, again, for all you are doing to keep your student’s learning in motion during this time. Please let us know if we can do anything more to support this.

Take care,
Scott
sbarksdale@harpswellcoastalacademy.org
(207) 833-3229 x103