Click to read Principal Elizabeth Cunha’s parent email and to fill out Discovery’s Second Semester Parent Questionnaire by Monday, Jan. 11, 2021.

The email below from P-H-M Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker was sent to parents on Thursday, January 7, 2021.

Back on November 18 when I notified P-H-M secondary families that St. Joseph County Department of Health (SJCDH) was recommending area school districts revert secondary students from hybrid to virtual, I explained that this would only be temporary to cover the time before, during and after Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s holidays. This was one of several recommendations that SJCDH made in mid-November in an effort to help lessen the impact of COVID community cases on our local health systems. 
 

I shared with you at that time that it was our goal to bring middle and high school students back to school on the hybrid model beginning Tuesday, January 19, pending SJCDH guidance. This week P-H-M Administration discussed secondary students’ return to school with the SJCDH and I am happy to report that they support the return of our middle and high school students to the hybrid model on Jan.19th.
 

We know that our students receive the most ideal instruction through face-to-face learning. It is in our students’ best interest for their academic success and social emotional well being to receive as much face-to-face instruction as COVID health safety precautions will allow. We are in a position to return to hybrid learning because of the following:
 

• The most common contributors to community spread are social gatherings in which COVID safety protocols are not observed.
• In recent local news reports, SJCDH states local hospitals are in a better position now than they were before Thanksgiving and that the post Thanksgiving surge was relatively modest. SJCDH is relatively hopeful that the post Christmas/New Year’s holiday surge will also be modest.
• P-H-M tracks the number of student and staff COVID cases and actively conducts contact tracing on all cases reported to us. We proactively ask students and staff identified as close contacts to quarantine. The cases reported to us are reflected on P-H-M’s COVID Dashboard; a link to the Dashboard is on the homepage of P-H-M’s district website. The Dashboard is updated daily except for weekends, holidays, and district breaks.
• Most secondary parents support their students returning to the Hybrid model for their students’ academic and social emotional well being.
• All P-H-M parents, at all grade levels, have the option to keep their students 100% virtual. 
• We expect a modest number of secondary families will choose to keep their students virtual, which will further reduce the number of students in the buildings and classrooms.

Secondary principals will be asking their parents to return a survey declaring whether their student will remain virtual or return on hybrid. If you are a parent of a secondary student, please look for that email from your building principal and return your responses as soon as possible. Click to read Principal Elizabeth Cunha’s parent email and to fill out Discovery’s Second Semester Parent Questionnaire by Monday, Jan. 11, 2021.

All COVID safety protocols as laid out in the Staff Return to Learn, the District Overview Return to Learn, and building level Return to Learn plans remain in effect. Among our many protocols, masks will still be required along with social distancing of 6 feet or more whenever possible.

Regardless if your child is virtual, in-person or hybrid, please continue to monitor your child’s health every day using this ISDH screening tool. Please do not send your child(ren) to school if they experience any of the following symptoms: fever or chills, sore throat, uncontrollable or new cough or shortness of breath or difficulty breathing (especially new onset), diarrhea, nausea, vomiting or abdominal pain, headache (especially new onset of severe headache with fever, or new loss of taste or smell). 
 

Also, please do not send your student(s) to school if they have had close contact with a known positive case, including in your own household, or awaiting test results. When you have a positive case (tested or clinical) in your household, the positive case should self-isolate away from the rest of the family members and the family should remain in quarantine. 
 

We also ask all P-H-M staff members to self-monitor their health and practice these same safety prevention guidelines. We continue to record cases of students and staff who are virtual. Therefore, parents should still report to your school principal if your virtual student has tested positive, and staff should also report if they are aware of a virtual student who is positive.

For more information on COVID-19 & P-H-M’s safety mitigation protocols, please visit our Return to Learn page.
 

Stay healthy and well and thank you for your continued flexibility and partnership as we work to provide the best education possible to your students.
 

Sincerely,

Dr. Jerry Thacker

Superintendent of Schools

CLICK HERE to download and print the secondary hybrid model beginning 1/19/21.

The Indiana State Department of Health last updated the COVID-19 School Attendance Quick Reference Guide for parents and schools on December 4, 2020.

PLEASE NOTE: For families who are not able to isolate from everyone else at home, the start date of quarantine is determined by last date of exposure to a positive or untested person; this may be after the ill person completes their 10 days of isolation.

Click the image below to download and print.

This resource is also provided in the District Overview Return to Learn Fall 2020 document, under “Important Links at the end of the document. 

On Wednesday, November 18, P-H-M announced that Penn High School and the district’s three middle schools (Discovery, Grissom and Schmucker) will return to 100% virtual learning beginning Monday, November 23, 2020 through the end of the first semester, Friday, January 15, 2021 (with the MLK holiday being Mon., Jan. 18, students would return to hybrid learning on Tues., Jan. 19, 2021). This change was brought about by the St. Joseph County Department of Health’s recommendations that came earlier in the afternoon of November 18.  Part of SJCDH recommendations to districts was to “Pause all extra curricular activities or conduct them remotely as feasible. In the event these activities cannot be paused or done remotely, limit spectators to parents/guardians/siblings until after winter break.”

Click to read SJCDH recommendations and click here to read Superintendent’s Dr. Jerry Thacker’s full letter to parents.

As a result, Penn High School and all P-H-M middle school winter athletic programs are implementing significant change to the winter athletic programs. Please see the modifications released Friday, November 20, 2020 that will be effective immediately. These modifications will be re-evaluated by Friday, December 18 (P-H-M School Corporation’s winter break runs Dec. 21, 2020 – Jan. 1, 2021).

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Dear P-H-M Secondary Families,

As reported by St. Joseph County Department of Health (SJCDH), the rates of positive COVID-19 cases in our community have been steadily on the rise for several weeks. The SJCDH is concerned that an increase of indoor family and social gatherings over the holiday period, starting with Thanksgiving running through New Year’s, will generate even more cases going through mid January. 

Therefore in a preemptive, proactive move, the Department of Health this afternoon recommended that all high  schools in St. Joseph County “pivot to virtual learning until after winter break. Depending on their circumstance, each district may choose to have middle schools go virtual as well.” Click to read the SJCDH news release. 

Because of the population size of P-H-M’s middle schools, the increase of cases also coming from this age group, and because these students are not cohorted due to course offerings and individual needs, we believe it is in our students and staff’s best interest to also have our three middle schools also revert back to 100% virtual learning, along with Penn High School.

For Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, this means all three middle schools (Discovery, Grissom and Schmucker) along with Penn High School will move to 100% virtual instruction starting next Monday, November 23 through Friday, January 15 (the end of the first semester).

Pending SJCDH guidance, we expect secondary students to return to hybrid instruction on Tuesday, January 19 (Monday, January 18, is a recess day for Martin Luther King Jr. Day). Please click here for a reminder on the hybrid weekly schedule model introduced at the beginning of the school year.

The only exception for secondary students who will not be going 100% virtual are certain Exceptional Education and Young Adult program students. These students will continue to come to their home school daily to receive their educational services. Busing and food service will be provided. The Exceptional Education Department will be in touch directly with these parents in the coming days with more details.

Penn High School students enrolled in classes through the Elkhart Area Career Center and Penn’s Building and Trades program will continue with those programs in-person. These students’ classes that normally take place in-person at Penn will be virtual. More details will be provided by Penn Principal Sean Galiher.

The virtual day for middle schools will start at 9:35, 12:30 lunch, and dismissal at 4:00 (office hours will be held in the mornings 9:05-9:30). The Penn High School virtual day will start at 8:55, 11:45 lunch, 3:17 (office hours will be held in the mornings 8:25-8:50). Building principals will be in touch with parents this week to provide more details about the school day schedule.

Secondary students who will be in-person through Friday should plan on taking home all personal items. For those students who are unable to do so, school principals will communicate arrangements for pick-up days and times.

While schools themselves are not superspreaders, people are becoming infected at/through social activities taking place outside of school, thus bringing the virus into the school setting. According to SJCDH, the best way to divert a surge in cases and reduce the spread among this population is to put safeguards in place for two incubation periods, which is 28 days; hence the timeframe of our virtual instruction period through the end of first semester.

The rise of community cases correlates with what we are seeing within P-H-M. An increase of cases mostly at our secondary schools and the residual impact of close contacts in quarantine has had a reverberating effect on staffing. Our middle and high school cases are double that of elementary cases. Click to see P-H-M’s cumulative total of cases since July; click to see our cases over the previous 10 days. Making a move to 100% virtual at the entire secondary level will help to alleviate some of the staffing challenges we are currently experiencing. This will free up some people in critical roles, such as substitute teachers and bus drivers, who can then help out at the elementary level.

The hybrid instruction model we’ve been using at the middle and high school has incorporated live virtual teaching for students who are home on their virtual days. Now that all secondary students will be home, students will receive live teaching every day for all class periods. Teachers will continue to use the virtual technology tools and methods they have been using since August when the school year started virtual. This has been very successful and provided students not only with quality education, but also invaluable social emotional learning opportunities.

This change to mandatory 100% virtual instruction only affects secondary students (grades 6-12). PreK and elementary students/families will remain as previously established. If your elementary student is in-person, they will remain in-person. If they are 100% virtual; they will remain so. If you have a desire to change your elementary student from in-person to 100% virtual for the second semester, we are asking that you indicate that on the survey that will be sent out to parents Monday, December 7th. We ask that elementary families wait until that time so that staffing changes can be made for the second semester beginning January 19th. 

If your middle or high school student tests positive for COVID during this time of virtual learning, we still ask for parents and guardians to please report these cases to us. We send these statistics to the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) which they publish weekly on the ISHDH COVID School Dashboard. No identifiable, personal information is shared with the state, just the number of cases. We are also reporting this data daily on the P-H-M COVID Dashboard. 

Please continue to use these valuable tools to monitor COVID symptoms and to follow isolation and quarantine protocols:

• ISDH Symptom Screening Tool 
• COVID-19 School Attendance Quick Reference Guide
• CDC: Duration of Isolation and Precautions for COVID-19 Positive Cases
• CDC: When to Quarantine, When to start and end quarantine, Timeline Scenarios

We have more information on COVID-19 and P-H-M safety mitigation protocols on our website at https://www.phmschools.org/returntolearn.

Principals will be sharing information in the coming days on Food Service distribution of meals for secondary students. This information will be posted on P-H-M and the schools’ websites, as well as also coming from your building principal.

Per the St. Joseph County Health Department’s recommendations released today, extracurricular and co curricular activities should be paused or go virtual as feasible. “In the event these activities cannot be paused or done remotely, limit spectators to parents/guardians/siblings until after winter break.” More details will be shared by the middle and high school principals over the coming days regarding extracurricular and co curricular activities.

The P-H-M Board of School Trustees and I realize this is yet another change for our families; it is not ideal and we know that this impacts our families and students in a number of different ways. However, the health and safety of staff and students is our greatest responsibility. We follow ISDH recommendations and the guidance of local health authorities who have oversight over the school district. The best place for our students is in our schools; short of being able to do that because of the pandemic, we will continue to provide stable, quality education and SEL support to our students by every means possible.

Any family or student who is in need of social emotional support, please reach out to your school principal, assistant principal, dean or guidance counselor. All secondary staff will continue to report to their buildings during this time period and will be available during the school day to assist with problems. For after hours help, a listing of community resources, ranging from suicide prevention and mental health resources to dealing with COVID anxiety and stress, are on our website at this link:  https://www.phmschools.org/parents/social-emotional-learning. 

As we approach Thanksgiving, I hope that families are able to celebrate in a safe and responsible manner. Whatever we do now over these next few weeks will determine our course over the next few months. We want everyone to be healthy and do their part to reduce community spread so that our students can have a normal end to the school year. Please let’s join together as the strong P-H-M Triangle of Success to make this happen.

Sincerely,
Dr. Jerry Thacker
Superintendent of Schools

Today the last group of our secondary students came back to school on the Hybrid model (students last name M-Z). The students are adapting well and everyone is happy to have them well. Check out how today went for Discovery and Grissom Middle School students …

Monday, August 31 the P-H-M Board of School Trustees unanimously approved a “Return to Learn” plan to bring students back to the classroom in phases, for those families who want to return to in-person learning, starting in two weeks:

• Mon., Sept. 14, In-Person Learning for Elementary grades, PreK – grade 3
• Mon., Sept. 21, In-Person Learning for Elementary grades 4 & 5 
• Mon., Sept. 21, Hybrid model, a blend of In-Person and Virtual, for Middle and High School students (grades 6-12) 
• Parents at all grade levels will still have the choice to keep their students 100% Virtual if they so choose.

Parents are asked to complete the “Intent to Return Questionnaire” by this Friday, September 11. If you have students at other P-H-M schools, please complete a form for each student at each school. Please reference the emails from those principals shared Wed., Sept. 9 or the school’s website. If you have any questions, please call the school.

Click here to read the Principal’s newsletter that contains the following information:

• Detailed description of the 100% Virtual plan
• “Intent to Return Questionnaire” due Friday, September 11

• Transportation needs & a link to infoFinder to look up your child’s bus stop information if they will be riding the bus

• Before/after school childcare – Kids Club Registration

• "Return to Learn" District Overview for Parents

• Videos highlighting P-H-M’s COVID safety procedures and protocols:

  • Transportation cleaning & safety protocols

  • Cafeteria COVID safety precautions

  • Custodial COVID cleaning protocols 

Last night (Monday, August 31) the P-H-M Board of School Trustees unanimously approved a “Return to Learn” plan to bring students back to the classroom in phases, for those families who want to return to in-person learning, starting in two weeks:
 

• Sept. 14, In-Person Learning for Elementary grades, PreK – grade 3
• Sept. 21, In-Person Learning for Elementary grades 4 & 5 
• Sept. 21, Hybrid model, a blend of In-Person and Virtual, for Middle and High School students (grades 6-12) 
• Parents at all grade levels will still have the choice to keep their students 100% Virtual if they so choose.

All students and staff will be required to wear a mask while at school.

Click to read P-H-M Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker’s full letter to parents that was emailed Tuesday, Sept. 1.

Below is a graphic of the detailed schedule with school day start and end times. You can click the image below to print it off.

Please click here to review Discovery's "Return to Learn" plan prepared by Principal Elizabeth Willkom Cunha in response to the coronavirus pandemic. This is a working document and updates could be made depending on the latest COVID-19 health and safety guidelines.

P-H-M Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker sent a letter to secondary parents on Feb. 4, 2021 notifying them of the District’s phased in approach to returning Secondary students back to In-person learning. Click to view the Return to Learn Transition Plan.

Frequently Asked Questions and other helpful information for P-H-M families regarding the 2020-2021 school year can be found on the P-H-M website at www.phmschools.org/returntolearn.