This has been a tough year for everyone and we greatly appreciate all the efforts of our students, staff, and family members to keep moving forward in these difficult times. At the beginning of the year we determined the hybrid model was the best approach to maintaining student and staff safety while returning to the educational process.

As educators, our focus has to be on ensuring the safety of our students and staff while at the same time working to provide a quality educational experience.
In order to accomplish those two goals, we have constantly monitored the trends around COVID and it’s transmission as well as the information related to instructional best practice. As the community numbers go up and down, our school numbers continue to stay very low and our number of sick students and staff have stayed low as well. This has been a constant trend throughout other communities also. It is very clear that schools are not the source of spreading the virus but rather socialization habits in communities have been driving the spread up or down.
Although the COVID spread has been minimal at the school level, we continue to put into place several protocols to decrease the likeliness of exposure. Some of the mitigation practices we currently have in place include but are not limited to:
-Masks worn by all students, staff, and visitors
-Limiting visitors to the building
-Temperature check upon entering the bus or entering the building for non-bus riders
-Following social distancing guidelines
-Limiting student movement throughout the building as much as possible
-Sanitizer availability and encouraged use
-Cleaning areas before and after use as appropriate
-Maintaining virtual meeting as much as possible
Last week, a large number of our staff received the 2nd dose of the vaccine. We believe this will serve as another mitigation step to help decrease the spread of the virus. We are thankful to the Meskwaki Health Clinic for making the vaccine available to school staff and the many others in the community they have been able to vaccinate.
Our current use of the hybrid learning model has been another one of our mitigation strategies. Our virtual delivery model provides great opportunities for students to continue their education on the days they are not in school. Unfortunately, our student body has struggled with participating on the days they are not in school learning and this has led to a high number of students failing to complete the learning and their associated work. The continued discussions around student/family safety and student learning have been leading us to reflect on our current delivery model. If we can provide a safe educational setting and can strengthen the educational experience, we must explore those ideas. Many school districts around the state have been 100% in school all year long. As of this week, all school districts across the state of Iowa have had to allow students to return to the school 100%.
At this time no decisions have been made to allow students to return to school 100%, but we feel it is an appropriate time to explore the interest and comfort level of our families to have this as an option as well. Attached you will find a survey that seeks to identify what percentage of our families would consider sending their students back to school full time.
Please take the time to complete the survey by the end of the day Thursday, February 18th.
The survey link has been emailed and texted to the contacts we have on file and can be found on the school webpage as well.
If you need a paper copy, please call the school office to arrange to pick up a copy.
Willie Barney, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Meskwaki Settlement School