(email sent 4/13/2020)

Hi All,

It still counts as a Monday Memo even if it's 11pm, right?
I hope you all had some calm moments over the weekend, and that your homes (and power) faired well in the storms today.  I wanted to start by thanking you for taking the time to respond to our survey.  It was extremely helpful to get a sense of how our efforts are meeting your needs.

I am happy to share that for most of you, Gan Shalom online is aligning well with your needs for you and your children (all considering).  I will be reaching out this week to anyone who shared specific comments or concerns to see what adaptions we might be able to make to help you further.  There were a few notes that appeared in several responses, so we are taking steps to improve in those areas now:

Starting next week, we will have a selection of "special zooms" that you can opt into with your children.  Some initial plans we are working on include yoga, music, cooking, and art.  We will try to schedule these offerings for the afternoon, as many of our classes have morning meetings and individual calls in the earlier part of the day, and we know many older siblings have school commitments earlier in the day as well.  We will plan to put out a schedule by Friday of the days and times "special zooms" will be offered for the next week.  We hope you join us!

Another piece of feedback involved the individual FaceTime calls.  While 50% of you like signing up as you go, 50% of you would prefer a standing appointment.  That made a "majority rules" decision difficult!  Accordingly, we will try a combination of the two going forward, and hope that we can navigate it for everyone without too much confusion.  What we ask:

If you would like a standing appointment created for your child's teacher call, please email Rhya, ganshalom@rsns.org, by Wednesday morning.  Please DO NOT email your teacher, as we want all the time preferences to come to one email address.  I will then, on Wednesday, try to create a system for standing appointment times, leaving the sign up sheets with open appointment times for anyone wishing to choose a time as they go.  Hopefully, we can meet everyone's needs this way.  PLEASE PROVIDE 2 CHOICES for your preferred time, or a WINDOW if you can, so that we can try to match everyone's requests.  This system will be put in place Wednesday (for use going forward), and an email will go out that day when sign-up sheets are open for non-standing times.

Just a reminder, there will be no Gan Shalom offerings on Wednesday, in observance of the Passover holiday.  We will resume on Thursday as usual.

For those of you who inquired about UPK, I did receive a communication from the district requesting our current qualifying enrollee information, as well as the information for those enrolled with paid deposits for next year, so it does seem that all will be proceeding as planned on that front.  When I receive any additional Information, I will be sure to pass it along.

One last reminder request, if anyone has familiarity with online raffle/auction type offerings, please let me know.  We want to make sure that we find a way to put all the efforts of those who obtained items from local businesses to go use.  There are some great baskets!

I wish you all a healthy week... and I hope your houses aren't going too stir crazy.
Rhya