December 30, 2021

Dear Beacon Community:

I wanted to provide some quick updates.  I hope everyone is having a good break and holiday season! 

Importance of Monitoring Symptoms

Please monitor your children for symptoms such as fever, sore throat, cough, runny nose, headache, and loss of sense of taste and smell.  If your child has these symptoms, please keep them home and consult with your doctor and our school nursing team.

Let us know if you have COVID-19

Please email me at landahl.m@beaconk12.org and Ann Marie Quartironi at quartironi.a@beaconk12.org if you have tested positive for COVID-19.  We appreciate it.

Rapid Home Tests Coming to the Beacon City School District

Governor Hochul has ordered rapid home tests to be delivered to each school district.  We are not sure when exactly we are getting them.  If we get them soon, we plan to do a Sunday, January 2 distribution at Rombout Middle School.  This is entirely dependent on actually getting the tests.  Whether we get them early or not, we will also distribute them by sending home kits with students next week from parents who request them.  We will send out a link in the next few days for people to order them.  The intent of this distribution is to make home test kits available to parents of students to use as we head back into school.

If we are able to do the Sunday distribution, I will need volunteers to help with distribution.  We plan to need volunteers from 12:45-3:15.  The distribution will be outside.  If you can volunteer, please email me at landahl.m@beaconk12.org and I will confirm.

We will send more information about this rapid home test distribution, I just wanted to start giving people a heads up that they are coming.

Limiting Audience at Home Athletic Events

For the foreseeable future, Beacon will be limiting attendees to home athletic events to families of both Beacon athletes and visiting teams.  We will send more details out about this next week but it is in line with now many districts in the area in an effort to limit crowd size at events.  We are committed to keeping the season for our winter athletes going as smoothly as possible and we think this will help.

CDC Guidance about Isolation/Quarantining

As many people are aware, the CDC has changed guidance on isolation and quarantine.  Except for some changes in New York with vaccinated employees, the New York Department of Health has not changed its quarantining and isolation guidance for students at this time to incorporate the new CDC guidelines.  We will keep you updated if things change.

Test to Stay

Just a reminder that we have been operating a Test to Stay program for the last few weeks.  To participate, your school nurse will refer you to the program so your child can stay in school as long as they keep testing negative.  

If you have any questions, let me know and if we get the tests to distribute, we will communicate in the next few days.

Sincerely,

Matt Landahl