Roy and friends

Hello OCRS families,

Thank you for a terrific first day of school! Even though things were different in many ways, what didn't change was the energy and excitement of the first day of school. It was wonderful to have students back working with teachers, both in-person and virtually, and watching the connections that begin to form. The students did really well with the new routines, including wearing masks. All of this is due to the hard work of our students' families in getting your children ready for school and all of the planning our teachers and staff have done these past few weeks (and throughout the summer).

It was the first day of the new school year and we know that there were some traffic issues during arrival and dismissal, as well as some technology issues for some of our virtual learning students. The district technology staff and teachers are working to resolve the technology issues and we anticipate that those will get smoothed out this week.

As for the traffic issues, we have a very different bus and drop-off/pick-up traffic pattern this year due to the school construction. We also had well more than double the number of cars today than we would normally have during arrival and dismissal. We know that many of these additional cars are due to the fact that the district's busing capacity is reduced due to COVID restrictions. However, we are also wondering if some of the cars were just because it was the first day of school and families wanted to drop their child off at school.

I discussed the traffic issues with Mr. Mencucci, our Facilities Director, and the construction staff. We want to be careful not to make an impulsive decision and rush any changes before seeing if the issues improve over the next few days. If the issues do not improve, we have an alternative traffic pattern to try as a solution. While we know that no solution is going to magically make the construction go away, we do want to do everything we can to make arrival and dismissal go as smoothly as possible.

Thank you again and we can't wait for Day 2!
Mr. Barrette