Good Afternoon,
This is Dave Murphy, MSAD 44 Superintendent of Schools and today is Monday, September 27, 2021. I am contacting you today to seek your assistance regarding the possibility of providing an additional vaccination clinic for our eligible middle and high school students and to also encourage you to consider signing up for our pooled testing program.
We will once again have an oppoortunity to provide a vaccination clinic for those families who wish to have their eligible children receive the vaccine. You may recall that a clinic was offered last spring. At that time, we had approximately 50 students register to receive their two doses and they did so just prior to the end of the school year. We have now been given another opportunity to offer a clinic but the window for signing up is a very short one. For us to be eligible to offer the clinic, we will need to have a minimum of 40 students requesting the vaccine, with the first dose being administered on October 5and the second one to follow after the required wait time. We will need to be able to guarantee this level of interest by the end of the day on Wednesday of this week. If you have been thinking about having your child vaccinated, this clinic will allow you to have it administered at Telstar during the school day. To register, please contact our district nurse, Rosemary Wiser, at 824-2136 ext. 1310 or email her at wiserr@sad44.org.
I would also encourage you to consider enrolling your child in the district pooled testing program by contacting your school office. More information can be found about this program on the district website. Participating in this program not only allows for early identification of any positive cases but also provides an additional safeguard from students needing to quarantine in the event of most cases of close contact within the school building. Over the past month, we have seen our participation rate increase significantly with most of our schools already approaching the 50% level and Crescent Park recently surpassing 80. With the universal masking requirement now in effect in SAD 44, the combination of that and participation in the pooled testing program should significantly lessen the number of students needing to quarantine, while also enhancing our efforts to reduce the need to move to remote instruction this year. We have again been fortunate to be able to avoid the widespread number of positive cases that have been reported in many other school districts in our state so far this school year. Please be sure to visit the web site for more information about the pooled testing program or contact your child's school office.
Finally, I also wanted to provide a quick reminder that tonight's School Board meeting has been rescheduled to October 18th at 6:30 pm and the previously scheduled meeting for October 25 has been canceled.
Best wishes for a great week.