The organizational meeting of the 2021-22 Concord School District Charter Commission will take place at the Central Office Board Room, 38 Liberty St. on Nov. 16 at 6 p.m. Mask wearing is now required inside this building. Members of the committee are (at large) Bill Ardinger, Clint Cogswell, Betty Hoadley; (district A) Tom Croteau, Tracey Lesser; (district B) Bill Glahn, Nancy Kane; (district C) Kate Vaughn and Eric Weiner.
The Concord School District is holding COVID-19 vaccination clinics on Nov. 16 and 17 for students ages 5 to 11. Staff from the Capital Area Health Network with administer the Pfizer vaccine which has been approved for children 5 and older by the FDA and CDC. Further details, including clinic times and vaccine authorizations is coming soon. Parents are welcome to attend the clinics.
The Hopkinton School District is offering pool testing in the schools as an additional mitigation strategy that will allow the district to identify positive asymptomatic COVID cases to prevent possible spreading of the virus and to keep students in the classroom. This is an opt-in practice. Pool testing is for classes or groups of students (5 to 25) who are often in a classroom together all day. Students whose parents have opted-in are PCR-tested (nasal swab) and their swabs are sent by courier service to a lab outside Boston. The lab tests the group of samples together and schools get results within 24 hours. The lab is able to run tests more quickly because it is testing up to 25 samples at once. If a group, or pool, comes back positive, students in that group are then given individual, rapid antigen tests that allow schools to know within 15 minutes which students are positive or negative. The goal is to quickly identify the positive cases. For more information, visit parentsquare.com/feeds/9647089.
The Pittsfield School District is in the middle of its 10-year reaccreditation process through NEASC, the New England Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges. It is working on our “Vision of the Graduate,” the part of the process where we (the community) decide on the skills and enduring understandings that they want a Pittsfield graduate to have. A community forum to solicit input will be held Nov. 20 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Joy Church, 55 Barnstead Road in Pittsfield.
SAU 24 Superintendent Jacqueline Coe hosts Zoom office hours on the third Thursday of each month at alternating times of noon or 6 p.m. November office hours with Coe will be Nov. 18 from 12 to 1 p.m. The topic will be “A Day in the Life” with guests paraeducators Kami Ulmer (Henniker Community School) & Kristen Lundeen (Weare Middle School). To learn more about what is happening in the Henniker, Weare, John Stark, and Stoddard school districts and to ask questions, please join Coe via Zoom at bit.ly/2Yx51YJOfficeHours, Meeting ID: 821 4229 1994, Passcode: 225191 or join by phone @ (US) +1 240-623-0475 PIN: 538 949 965#.