Campus Update 1-22-2019

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Dear Families,

I wanted to provide you and update on the progress taking place on campus over the last few weeks, and about our anticipated return home. We recognize how challenging this has been on everyone and we appreciate your patience and support.

The clean up process for campus ended up being much more extensive that we had originally anticipated. During the clean-up process all of the carpets were removed, everything was taken down from the walls, cabinets were moved and much more. This meant that we needed to repaint the interior of the classrooms and install new flooring. The children sit on the ground and we made it a priority that everything needed to be safe and clean for them.

The good news is that as it stands right now, we fully expect to return to campus at the end of this month.

As of today:

1) Power has finally been restored to campus. We are now checking those things on campus that we could not without full power.

2) Phone and internet service are now in the process of being restored.

3) New sand for the playground was delivered today.

4) The wood chips are being delivered on Thursday.

5) New flooring has been installed in almost every classroom on campus, with the remainder to be completed this week.

6) The classrooms are almost all finished being painted, with the remainder to be completed this week.

7) The temporary bathrooms are being brought onto campus tomorrow.

8) Temporary fencing has now been placed on campus around the areas of the burned out bathroom and the old administrative and computer lab buildings.

9) All of the interior and exterior surfaces of campus have been thoroughly washed, sanitized and cleaned. All of the contents in the classrooms have also been cleaned and as they are being put back into the classrooms are being checked once again.

During the rest of this week, this coming weekend, and into next week the classroom items that have been cleaned and are in storage will be returned to the rooms. The teachers will be spending time back on campus putting their rooms and learning spaces in order and getting ready to welcome the children back. However, as the teachers plan and put their classrooms back, they will also be leaving some areas and spaces for the children to share their own input on how to set it up. As part of the process of going home it is important for us to give the children a chance to have ownership over their own space that they have been displaced from for these last several months. The restoration process will not be complete until the children come home and resume learning in their own classrooms.

Once we return and resume operations on campus our attention will remain on the rebuilding process, with the restoration of our permanent power building and the permitting process to rebuild the computer lab and administrative buildings.

Later this week we hope to be able to share an exact date when we will resume operations on campus, but again we are truly optimistic that it will occur by the end of this month. We are grateful to a lot of people who have worked very hard to make what ended up being a much larger and more challenging process come to a successful conclusion.

Should you have any questions please let me know.

Thank you again.

Yuri