Dear Lincoln County SD Staff and Board,

I have several important pieces of information to share with you all:

1. The district will be moving to a different Student Information System. This new system called Synergy (by Edupoint), is used all over Oregon and the US. It will streamline the way we do student information and make it so MUCH BETTER to review and use student information. The roll out for this new and amazing student information system is July 1, 2021. PD will be planned and provided and you will be ready for it. I used Synergy in my last district and it is even more amazing now than it was back then. They make improvements all the time and we get to be in the driver’s seat when requesting and designing new data reports. Stay Tuned.

2. The Governor and ODE Deputy Superintendent have provided school districts a waiver to serve students in person that have been affected by wildfires. We have over 100 kids that have no homes and no wifi access due to the fires in Lincoln City. We will be bringing students on to our campuses to teach them. We will all follow covid safety measures. We will let you know which schools will host the displaced LCSD students when we figure it out. I wanted you to know this up front. We are not held to any particular hours of instruction, type of instruction or how long we can educate the displaced students. We will be choosing CDL style. I assume that as they find new homes with internet access and can access education from their own home, they will no longer be served under this ODE waiver. This is not happening until at least Monday Oct 26. Maybe later.

3. Future Grades to Start: On Monday Oct 26 we will be bringing back First Grade and Future Bound at NMS. First Grade is brought back under the K-3 Exception (uses a hybrid model) and Future Bound under Limited In Person Instruction (2 hours a day and continues CDL). We will also be bringing back some extracurriculars and we will make sure you know which ones they are in advance.

*** Note: If our numbers stay low on covid and our trends stay fairly flat we will be planning on bringing back Grades 2 and 3 on Monday Nov 9th. After that, we don’t know yet.
There is a high metric standard of low numbers of covid in order to bring back grades 4-12 in the All Hybrid model. If we get to that point we will be going into an All Hybrid model K-12 for the whole district. As far as I can see, this is not happening any time soon. We are going slowly on purpose.
The district will be monitoring our schools closely. We will follow all of the required guidelines for action. Use all of the required covid safety practices at all times please. Done correctly, they can keep you safe. If you are curious about how different scenarios of covid carry out, you can go to the ODE web site and review their Covid-19 Scenarios in Schools Toolkit that provides information about a number of different scenarios. It’s very useful.

Thank you all very much,

Dr. Karen Gray
Superintendent