Dear Tiger Community,
I have been encouraged by the outpouring of support from you, our HF Tiger Community. I’ve read your posts on social media offering to drive students to school. I appreciate the number of families in the community who jumped in to get our students here to learn with us. And most importantly, I’ve seen classrooms full of student laughter and learning at all our buildings today.
While I’ve been so encouraged by all of your efforts, we still remain in a staffing shortage. At this time, we can not resume our regular transportation plans.
As of this writing, with the staffing shortage we face, we cannot transport every child to and from school safely. As of right now, all buildings will be open to students on Wednesday, November 17, but we will not be able to provide transportation for our in-district students. This also means that there will be no before or after-school activities for UPK- 8; these will resume when busing resumes.
Some building hours have been adjusted, please check your building’s arrival and dismissal times on each school’s homepage.
Please note, for pick-ups, we cannot send students home with adults who have not been previously authorized for pick-up. The process for parent pick-up (for grades UPK-3) will still include positive ID. To authorize another adult to pick up your child, please send in a note.
If you are unable to find transportation to school, your child should participate in remote learning for the day. These plans can be found on our homepage. Both students that participate remotely and in-person will be counted as present for attendance purposes. If you have any technology needs, please contact our IT department via phone at (518) 681-4357 or via email at help@hfcsd.org.
Buses to Prospect, Sanford Street, Washington Street, Myers Center, SAEC, and SUNY will still run. CTE and SUNY buses will leave and return to the high school at their regularly scheduled times.
While we do our best to get everyone to school safely, if your child has even one COVID-19 symptom, even mild ones, please keep them home. We’ve got a list of COVID-19 symptoms on our website. What we’ve heard from our partners at the Washington County Health Department is that the positivity rate in our county continues to climb. If you need to find a COVID-19 testing site, check out the state’s test site finder.
I am grateful for your partnership. It remains our goal to keep our students in school. We will continue to do our part in doing everything we can to keep our kids in our classrooms; thank you for doing yours!
You can expect an update for Thursday to be communicated by 3 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.
Thanks for all that you do to show your #HFTigerPride.
Sincerely,
Dan Ward, Superintendent