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Middle School News From Mr. Garber

By Garber, Andrew on April 07, 2020

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Dear Parents and Students,

I wanted to reach out to you during this time of crisis in American history. As a rural community, we are more used to “social distancing” than our fellow Americans in larger metropolitan areas although it is strange not to be around people. I hope that your children are continuing to work on assignments that teachers are sending out through Google classroom. It is important that we do not have a large educational regression as we are forced to stay at home. I suggest that you have your kid(s) spend a minimum of 1 hour daily working on homework and reading. If they are in the band they should spend some time practicing their instrument. I would suggest they also get an hour of exercise daily.

We do not know how long we will be out of school and are exploring different scenarios of what the end of this year and the start of next year will look like. It is a possibility that we may have to use the grades from the 3rd quarter as students’ final second-semester grades. With this in mind, I am allowing students to improve their grades if they had a D or F in the third quarter. These assignments will be graded as if they were a late assignment, meaning the maximum possible grade is 75%. The third quarter grade can only improve with the completion of these assignments, it cannot get worse. Teachers can be contacted by email with questions regarding these assignments. The teachers’ email addresses can be found on the school website. Middle school counselor, Mrs. Fleshman, and I will be calling about students with failing grades in the next couple of days.

We have set up an internet hotspot in the high school parking lot if you don’t have internet access.

We hope that you are staying healthy and active while the nation battles this pandemic situation. We greatly appreciate all you are doing to keep your child from regressing during this unprecedented time. We miss our students and want to get them back to school as soon as possible, but in the meantime want to stay connected with our community. I can be reached at agarber@putnamcountyr1.net . I am also usually in the office daily from 9 am-noon.

Please read the April edition of the Middle Years newsletter in the following posts.

Stay well,

Andrew Garber 

Putnam County MS Principal