Dear parents and guardians,
Last week I sent you an email outlining that there has been an easing of Covid protocols in schools and the changes that would be made this week. At this time, we are now in a position to change the current adjusted school timetable back to what it was before Covid.
This will mean that the school times will change from tomorrow and will be as follows:
School Day
In the morning – arrival time
Junior Infants will continue to line up outside of the school office at 8:40am and be collected by their teacher.
Senior Infants to 6th Class will continue to enter the school via their usual entrance door between 8:30am and 8:40am. Instead of going to their classrooms, the children will now line up in the school yard. The teachers will collect them and bring them to their room at 8:40am. The school entrance door will be closed from 8:40am.
In the afternoon – departure time
Junior and Senior Infants will now finish school at 1:20pm. – Juniors can be collected from the School Office entrance as normal. All Senior Infants need to be collected from the entrance beside Little Stars / Staffroom. This is a change for Elaine’s class.
1st to 6th Class will finish school at 2:20pm.They will continue to exit via the exits they are currently using. There will be no change to their exit door.
Lunchtimes
During the past two years all classes were kept separate from one another on the yard at lunchtimes. This had to be facilitated by running 6 different breaks a day. We will now be relaxing this and there will be four breaks, where year groups will mix e.g. all three 2nd classes can mix, and they will be as follows:
Juniors to 2nd Class – Breaks at 10:10am and 12:10pm for 20 minutes each3rd Class to 6th Class – Breaks at 10:35am and 12:35pm for 20 minutes each.
Traffic
Over the past couple of years the staggered start and departure times to the school day coincided with reduced volumes of traffic around the school. With a return to a normal school timetable traffic is likely to build once again. We must stress that the health and safety of the children is our number one priority and we ask all parents to be mindful of this fact when dropping off and collecting children.
The school car park is for staff parking only and there isn’t even enough space for all the staff. If people are parking (or double parking on some occasions!) in the car park it is going to cause huge issues for staff getting into work.
In addition, there is no drop down area in the school and our advice is to park in a designated area near the school and walk to collect your child. Alternatively, there has been a huge increase in children walking and cycling to school over the past year and we would encourage this to continue.
There will be more changes to come over the coming weeks and months and we will be considering opportunities to invite parents into the school to look at the fantastic work being done once we have settled into a new routine. We realise that there are parents who have never had an opportunity to visit the school since their child enrolled with us and we want to change that.
Kind regards
Tim