Raggant Standard

Letter From The U.H.

Hello, ECS families! It's hard to believe that our summer vacation is nearly behind us and school will start next week. It has been a very eventful summer! I wanted to give you just a few updates, with more information coming next week in a special, Back-to-School edition of the Raggant Standard.  I'll fire them off, in no particular order.

As you may be aware, our Conditional Use of the Trinity Evangel Church building (as a school accommodating up to 210 students) from the City of Marysville was placed on hold until we could secure approval from the state Board of Education to operate as a private school.  After considerable counsel and deliberation, the ECS Board decided to pursue state approval.  

Presently, after many exchanged emails and hours of back-and-forth between the Board and Olympia, we are being recommended for provisional "approved" status as a private school in Washington State.  The provisional status is due to some pieces being in the works that are necessary for state approval, but that we do not have just yet. For instance, two such items are reports from inspections by the Health Department and the Fire Department.  

You may also be aware that we were pursuing exemptions on the matters of 1) State Certificated Teachers, and 2) Instructional Hours.  The state said they cannot grant these exemptions and recommend approval of any sort (i.e., provisional or otherwise).  Though a number of our teachers are formerly Washington State Certificated, one (Mrs. Sarr) has a current certificate (at least for the next nine months!) and will be our certificated representative.  We are in communication with the state regarding some long-term solutions to this calculated deviation from the standards.

On the matter of Instructional Hours, approved schools must have a calendar of 180 instructional days, or 1000 instructional hours.  The calendar we distributed at Orientation represented 174 instructional days and about 960 instructional hours. Again, after deliberation and debate, the Board agreed to try to squeeze 180 instructional days out of the published calendar (i.e., without lengthening the school year).  So our first day will still be Tuesday, September 6, and our last day will be Thursday, June 8. 

However, our school-at-home days meet the criteria for "instructional days," so the easiest way to increase our instructional days total was to start there.  As such, we have added six additional school-at-home days.  Hopefully most families will realize no significant inconvenience related to this, and the teachers will work to be measured (read: "light") on those additional days at home.  They include...

• the Monday designated for teacher training (October 24)
• the three days prior to Thanksgiving (November 21-23)
• the Monday prior to our return from Christmas break (January 2), and
• the Friday that was formerly Mid-Winter Break (February 17, the Friday preceding Presidents' Day). 

Again, these are school-at-home days, and the families will have discretion on how (and where) to conduct them, though we needed to include these in the calendar in order to get to 180 instructional days. This also means that any school closures (e.g., snow days) will necessarily shift to school-at-home days in order to be at 180 days without going past June 8.  

Going forward, we will probably lengthen the school year on the front end, starting school the week prior to Labor Day in order to relieve some of the pressure during the school year.  Your input on this is most welcome.  

Though it may not seem like it, I've tried to be brief here, omitting lots of details and context in the interest of brevity.  So if you have more questions, I'm glad to help answer those.  In the meantime, the next domino to fall is an inspection by the Health District on Friday morning (September 2) at 10:00am, so please pray that it goes well!

Risus est bellum!

Jonathan Sarr, the U.H.