Mustang Family,
I wanted to provide you an update since many things have occurred over the past few days and I know you have many questions. I hope this will answer some of those. Rest assured, in the days ahead, we will have more answers for you. Remember, the district home page has a lot of Q & A documents available and you can also ask questions there too! Please take time to review the OCPS Procedures Guide.
Thank you to the parents who participated in the district survey to indicate your learning choice for your child. As you may have heard, ALL OCPS students will be participating in nine days of LaunchED beginning August 10th (which was the planned start date for the 20-21 school year.) This will give all students a change to get comfortable with the LaunchEd program, using Canvas, Skyward, Microsoft Teams and other digital tools.
On Friday, August 7, you should be able to log into the OCPS Parent Portal to identify who your child’s homeroom teacher is for this coming year. Please check to make sure you can log in at https://parents.classlink.com/ocps. The parent portal gives you access to apps like Canvas, which will include your child’s coursework, as well as Skyward, which will include your child’s schedule and grades. If you have trouble logging in to the parent portal, please email us so that we can fix the issue for you.
On Tuesday, all teachers will be emailing parents and following up on Thursday with a welcome video. Please be on the lookout for this. If you do not get this email by Wednesday morning, please email [email protected] and she will confirm your teacher’s name and provide the teacher with your proper email for them to make contact. When the teacher contacts you via email, please respond to the email and confirm your mode of learning as Face-To-Face or LaunchEd. Remember, Face to Face begins on August 21.
Our Meet the Teacher event will be held virtually this year and parents will have an opportunity to sign up for times to have a virtual teacher meeting at the end of next week. Information on this will come from your child’s teacher.
On Thursday of next week, Le Nguyen, our Instructional Coach, will be offering many virtual technology sessions for parents, including Canvas and Microsoft Teams. You will want to take advantage of this!!! She will post these on Dojo and Facebook for families.
In order for all students to be able to participate in LaunchED, each child will be issued a school laptop (grades 2-5) or an iPad (Grades PreK-1). Devices will be distributed next August 4-5 and more information will be forthcoming.
Next Monday, I will be back in touch with another weekly update. Next Thursday, your child’s teacher will include a Kick-Off to School video in their second email to you hopefully answering many more of your questions! Prior to beginning Face-to-Face, I will also be sending another informative video so participating parents will have a better understanding of how that will look.
I know this is a stressful time and we appreciate your support as we navigate these uncharted waters together. As I have told my amazing staff, Union Park Elementary will get through this because we are 1 heart, 1 family, 1 Union Park! We are #UPEStrong.
Yours truly,
Ashlynn Ramirez
Principal