Community Connectivity through School-Home Communications and during the Pandemic: As part of the Strategic Plan of 2019, the school invested in a new Learning Management System – Schoology - in order to provide parents with the full suite of curricular, homework, student progress, student assessments, school calendar, plus video and links to numerous school program and curricular resources. We have checked in with our parents from time to time with communication surveys to learn what we can be doing, how our parents are receiving our communications, and what needs improvement. Our weekly e-Newsletter, delivered to our full community each Thursday afternoon, represents that main source of school event, calendar, and information of interest throughout the greater community. We also re-issue links to recent, significant school communications in our e-Newsletter. All teachers deliver regular weekly updates and previews to their students’ parents. During this past year of the pandemic, our school remained opened, according to our original school calendar, and while particular grades had to quarantine here and there, the school never shut down a division or never shut its doors. We continuously offered virtual instruction to any family choosing to be home or needing to be home due to a period of quarantine or isolation. All along, we moved forward with all of our customary live programming—our Judaic ceremonies; national holiday programs; Grandparents and Special Friends Days; and our Friday Shabbat ceremonies - through virtual productions, live streaming, and video-recording strategies so that our students would still be able to perform their traditional productions for their parents and relatives around the world. Of course, keeping our community informed about any COVID developments or new protocols became a high priority, and the school issued frequent messaging from the Head of School on these important community notifications. Also new in 2020/2021, the school began a monthly broadcast, hosted by the Head of School, called “Live Levine Update,” whereby the school Head shared information, data, and graphs on the school’s COVID developments, including developments throughout Dallas County. “Live Levine Update” soon expanded its programming in the late fall of 2020 by way of including special guests from the medical field to report on various aspects of the virus and the pandemic. Such guests included Dallas pediatrician Dr. Blankson; the Chief Advisor to the Dallas County Health Department Dr. Huang; UT Southwestern pediatric pulmonologist Dr. Afolabi; and CNN/MSNBC medical advisor and Professor of Emergency Health at Brown University, Dr. Ranney. Inclusivity Project: In December of 2020, Levine contracted with Campus Outreach Services and its founder, Katie Koestner, to help facilitate a series of admin team, faculty, parent, and student engagement workshops on the topics of respect, bias, discrimination, inclusivity, and harassment. The aim of this project, which is intended to be a multi-year project, is to elevate the community’s standards of respect and inclusion. Inclusivity was one of the four main pillars in the Board’s 2019 Strategic Plan. The administrative team and the entire faculty began this
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