Children also don’t share devices or school supplies. While most children have district-issued Chromebooks or iPads, Heart also prepackaged school kits with notepads, paper, pencils, pens and crayons labeled with a child’s name and only that child is allowed to use that supply kit.
“No one is sharing or mixing their supplies or anything like that,” Pinto said.
Students in grades 3 and older are required to wear face masks except during snack breaks and lunch or if they have an exemption from a physician. Custodial staff will be sanitizing and cleaning door knobs, bathrooms and water fountains and entire classrooms at the end of each day. Pinto said some facilities agreed to provide custodial services for a fee, school sites have their own staff and other sites required ProYouth to contract for its own janitorial services.
Visalia Unified day camps start with AM schedule students getting logged onto their classroom Zoom meetings while PM schedule students work offline on assignments and then switch after lunch. Pinto said this allows students to meet online with teachers without overloading the bandwidth capacity at the site. While most of the sites already had wifi, Pinto said HEART did purchase wifi hotspots to boost the signal in rural areas like Strathmore or in basements that have been converted to classroom space.
“The smallest site has 30 kids so we need enough capacity to have half that many online at any given time,” Pinto said.
From 3 to 6 p.m., Heart reverts back to its enrichment activities commonly seen in classrooms and cafeterias across the district. These activities center around Heart’s main afterschool programming of art, agriculture, computer science and health science.
Entire school sites are assigned a Heart location, such as all Riverway Elementary students attending the day camp at St. Paul’s, to keep siblings and cohorts together. Pinto said this was intentional to allow for a smoother transition when students return to in-person instruction and will have to be bused between the school site and the day camp.
“Anymore than that could be chaotic,” Pinto said.
As of Monday, Heart had received applications for 330 kids and a waiting list of 130 kids in Tulare and Monterey County. That number does not include day camps in Ivanhoe and Goshen that have not yet begun. Pinto said she has already identified a fourth site in Visalia, which would drastically reduce the waiting list, but Heart is still in negotiations with the new facility.
In order to accommodate expanding its program from four hours after school to an 11-hour day, Pinto said Heart has tripled the number of positions providing two staff members per room per day, one person for the first six hours and another for five in the afternoon and evening. The organization now has over 300 employees and is looking to hire more. Anyone interested, can go to proyouthexpandedlearning.org and scroll to the bottom and click the “Tulare County” button in the “Enjoy where you work” section. The link will take you to EdJoin.org where you can apply for open positions. Even after schools reopen, Pinto said Heart won’t be scaling back because they will still be providing an 11-hour program to accommodate Visalia Unified’s AM/PM schedule.
“We are feverishly recruiting and always looking for good people,” Pinto said.
"all day" - Google News
August 26, 2020 at 09:21PM
https://ift.tt/2YAQWH6
ProYouth expands from afterschool program to all-day camp - Foothills Sun Gazette
"all day" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35pEz2D
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "ProYouth expands from afterschool program to all-day camp - Foothills Sun Gazette"
Post a Comment