MVCSD News Letter from Doug Tuetken 4/14

Maquoketa Valley Parents, I truly hope that all of you are healthy and well. I wanted to reach out to provide you with a brief update.  As you are fully aware, after receiving guidance from the Iowa Department of Education, our Area Education Association, and with our Administrative Team and Board of Directors, our district approach for our students learning is to provide academic engagement activities tied to new learning.  Although this learning approach is voluntary, we highly encourage all of our students, families, and other caregivers to take advantage of this learning while students are at home.  I wanted to again reiterate, if you have any questions about the process or need suggestions to help engage your child, please do not hesitate to reach out to your child’s teacher(s) or to one of our Principals (Ann, Brenda or Troy).  Please know that we are here to help you. I also wanted to let you know that Governor Reynolds is expected to make a statement later in the week regarding school closures.  As you may expect, she will either reopen schools on May 1^st, extend our closure for another 10 to 14 days or possibly close our schools for the remainder of the year.  If a decision is made to extend our closure or close schools for the remainder of the year, I am certain we will receive additional guidance and/or directives from the Governor and Department of Education on how we will be expected to continue educating our students.  Shortly after this information is released, I will communicate to you what our next steps will be. To finish up, just a couple of items that we have discussed:

• Once the Governor makes an announcement:
• Decisions will be made regarding prom, fine arts, athletic and Booster events.
• We will develop possible options for graduation, Dollars for Scholars and Academic Excellence.  Input from students, parents, teachers and the Board of Directors will be solicited to determine our best course of actions.
• Please remind your students that when they do get together to practice social distancing protocols and keep their groups to no larger than 10.
• If you would like to participate in the lunch program, please contact Laurie Kramer at lauriekramer@maquoketa-v.k12.is.us.
• If your family or if you know of a family that may need food assistance, please contact Delaware County Pay it Forward at 563-447-0099.

Finally, a HUGE shout out goes to all of you, our teachers, support staff and our administrators for the work that everyone has been doing for our kids.  This is a team/community effort and without all of us working together and the adaptations that had to be made quickly, our transition to this new learning would not have been as successful as it has been.  But again, this just reinforces why we are MV!!! Please know that I will be reaching out later in the week or the first part of next week to provide you with an update based on our Governor’s recommendations.  As always, please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions. Doug