American Academy is Returning.

    Earlier this week, the American Academy leadership team from all three campuses met for three days to discuss next year's contingency plans. They discussed how students would return. After the recommendation of keeping students in cohorts, meaning that there will be groups of 20 students or less in each classroom. This also means students must stay in assigned groups and cannot mix. 

    The leadership team discussed how returning to school would look like. What it would be like for the staff, teachers, students and even parents. A big topic that came into conversation was the idea of still challenging every student to their own best ability without the ability of integrating between classrooms and groups. 

    They decided in order to accomplish this, they will incorporate more differentiation in daily instruction. This would mean that they would create smaller groups from those main groups. This would give students an opportunity to get more individualized help and be in groups that are at their same leaning level. 

    For other subjects like science, history and literacy, the leadership team had to make decisions regarding how to incorporate these other subjects. They decided that teachers will now be teaching in the children's classroom rather than the children walking to another room. This will provide the students and teachers a way to stay in their groups and avoid cross contamination. 

    They also discussed providing a hybrid model for students. This is directed towards families that feel uncomfortable to send students back to school. This will allow the student to attend American Academy, but still remain at home. This will only be for a small amount of students since the school is expecting the majority of students to return. This model will provide an easy transition should the COVID-19 cases increase and students must go back to remote learning. 

    American Academy also discussed polling families and students at least two times before opening campus back up. This will be in order to get opinions of the decisions that were made by the leadership team. This allows AA parents to have a voice and express their concerns before setting anything in stone. The meeting was all based on contingency planning and trying to solve the new coming problems that may arise after COVID-19 made it's appearance. 

    There will also be a new schedule being put into place. This new schedule will include specific lunch and specials times so that cohorts do no mix. Students will still attend lunch in the lunchroom and travel to their music, art and P.E. classes. Because of this, it is important to ensure that no cohorts mix, so the leadership team decided that it would be easiest and best to change the schedule. 

    Although there is no telling what the future holds yet, all three American Academy campuses and getting prepared to open again in the fall for the 2020-2021 school year. Although the campuses decisions seem to be set in stone, things may change depending on what is to come with the virus and with the families votes.