March 30, 2020 Dear Parents,
Whew! What a week. If you are like me, your heads are likely still spinning from it all. With three lower school students using Schoology and me attempting to conduct Zoom meetings, the Heil household was eating up some bandwidth!
I must offer a huge thank you to our faculty and to your children for their positive attitudes during our first week of distance learning. We have accomplished so much together already! As I talk to my colleagues around the country, it is clear that many schools had to start their programming from scratch in March. Thanks to Dave Baad's foresight and Dr. Eric Boberg's leadership in developing a thoughtful remote learning plan, ESD has had a solid framework in place since we lost a week of school due to the tornado in October. While we still had to train and operate under the current conditions, I feel good about our status heading into week two. We maintain hope that we will all be back together, physically, in the near future. However, we are busily preparing for a variety of scenarios in the event of different circumstances.
ESD remains fully committed to delivering our mission. To that end, I wanted to take a moment to share some logistics and a few thoughts: - We need to hold our students accountable for their presence during synchronous classes and have asked teachers to take attendance beginning on Monday. If your child cannot attend class, please email Ashley Little at usattendance@esdallas.org to inform her of the absence.
- Friday, March 27, was our mid-semester Check Period. By today, all your child's classes should be updated with a grade to demonstrate current progress. If they are not, please have your child reach out to their teacher or advisor.
- We have added an Advisory period to our weekly schedule. We have not determined specifically how we will use it yet, but we plan to create points of community connectivity. Advisors will be in touch prior to Thursday about the plan for that morning.
- If we continue to extend the time we are away from school, be assured that we have a team in place working to figure out how we will conduct any milestone events that we could miss.
- We are still in the early stages of navigating the application of our Academic Pledge. The goal is, as always, to remove any temptations to cheat. This task inevitably becomes more challenging in an online environment, but we ask that you reinforce with your children the value of completing their own work. Additionally, please encourage them to remove any obvious temptations from their workspace (e.g., phones, books) during assessments and remind them to follow any guidance teachers offer.
- Advanced Placement students will learn much more about their upcoming exams on April 3. Until then, they will continue to cover new material and prepare for next year.
- If, like the Heils, you are experiencing any connectivity issues in your homes, our Information Technology team has put together a list of ways you can help:
- Limit the number of simultaneous users when possible
- Make sure that your "classroom" isn't too far from the WiFi router.
- Keep video/music streaming to a minimum (Netflix, Spotify, etc.). Avoid during class time.
- Consider using audio-only conferencing when video isn't necessary.
- Change cell phones to use 4G/LTE instead of home WiFi during class.
- Reduce or disable some Smart IoT devices in home (smart speakers, plugs, toys, wearables, etc.).
- Upgrade home service speed. A 75mbps connection is a good start. (Test your speed here to see what you're actually getting)
- If your router supports 5Ghz WiFi, use that. It's usually less crowded than 2.4GHz WiFi, and doesn't get disrupted when you use the microwave. Here's more information.
- Consider upgrading home router to support AC for newer device connectivity.
- If your home router is more than five years old, consider replacing it to take advantage of higher WiFi speeds. You might also look into mesh routers if you have difficulty accessing WiFi in some areas of your house.
- If you do want to listen to music while studying, download the playlists to your device before class.
- Reduce your video streaming services down from 4K to standard.
- Finally, please continue to encourage your children to provide their teachers and advisors with feedback on their experience with distance learning. We have managed some small bumps and will surely come across more as we move forward. I am grateful for your continued patience.
In signing off, I want you to know that I miss your children. I miss my colleagues. And, I miss seeing many of you on a regular basis. In the absence of daily face-to-face connection, we are truly appreciating the value of a physical learning community. I continue to pray for everyone in the ESD community and look forward to the time when we are all back together again.
Henry |