Dear Parents / Guardians,
I hope you and your families are all well at this time. Please find attached a really important document – our Bunscoil Bhríde Covid-19 Response Plan. It is vital that all parents / guardians read this document and familiarise themselves with its content. This plan maps out how we will safely return to school and what daily life in our school will look like.
A tremendous amount of work has gone in to this document and has involved input from the staff, Parents’ Association and Board of Management, all of whom I wish to thank.
I am acutely aware of the fact that parents have lots of questions / concerns at this time and I hope that this document will provide clarity to you all. I know parents may be particularly anxious about the formation of our class pods. I want to assure you all that teachers will make every effort to keep children with their friends. While all classes will be seated in pods within their classrooms, they will be treated as a class bubble and will be able to play together on the yard as a whole class. In addition to this, there will contacts between pupils outside of school, that as a school, we can’t control e.g. child-minders, the creche, cousins, the bus children, neighbours etc. We can only control for contact within the school. As such, individual requests for who children are seated with or placed with within pods cannot be facilitated.
As you will see from the document, there is a lot of specific detail within the Plan and a lot of new procedures, which we are asking you to adhere to. There will be some aspects of the Plan that may not suit every family. This is the price we are asking you all, staff included, to pay for the safe re-opening of our school. Our collective goal is to get the school opened and to keep it opened, and to keep our entire school community safe in the process. We are all in this fight together. We must protect each other. We are asking you to be flexible and patient with us as we try to implement all aspects of the Plan to the best of our ability. We cannot do this without your support and cooperation.
The entire staff and I are so looking forward to the school re-opening and having children learning in their classrooms with their friends again.
I hope you all enjoy the rest of the summer holidays.
Le gach dea-ghuí,
Maria Rogerson