Dear Burgundy families,

Hello. We hope you’re doing ok! We’ve been working hard here this week and want you to know we’re thinking of our parents and our faculty and staff along with our students, first and foremost, and recognizing that this is an enormously challenging time for everyone. 

The news from the Governor that we’re not going to be back on campus this spring hits us all hard. There is grief and sadness and natural frustration at the situation. We have to acknowledge those emotions and at the same time remember that we and especially our children are more resilient and resourceful than we sometimes know. We will summon the courage and ingenuity to get through this tough time together. 

We have no choice. Fear and frustration may overwhelm us at times, but we have the strength and courage and the creativity—and moreover, the community shared among us—to make the best of this situation. 

We know that other communities, whether in times of war or natural disasters, have faced even worse. Some of us may have direct experience to draw on or share. Please reach out. We can and must and will work together to come through this intact….as a school, but also as a faculty and staff, as families, as individual people. And we actually will be stronger, more resilient and more balanced for it, once it’s behind us. We firmly believe this. 

Personal touches and listening and empathy along with problem-solving are going to mean a lot. In that vein we are hoping to begin offering Zoom meetings for parents. For more personal issues we can offer Facetimes or Skypes or good old-fashioned phone calls. We know our teachers and staff along with you parents will be working in parallel on the various ways to keep connections and community among us.

Some of our administrative priorities for the moment include holding sacred the following: 

1. Community – keeping a sense of closeness. Nothing will help us more.
2. Clarity – for instance, managing expectations; delivering the best we can, recognizing some limitations; sharing our learning as we go.
3. Candor – acknowledging the challenges, being honest about what we know or can control and what we can’t yet know or control.
4. Empathy – understanding among us that this is a time of great mutual and individual challenges; we’re all going to do the very best we can in support of Burgundy’s children.

Elizabeth and Jared and their teams are working to process the abundant feedback on our four-day pilot of remote learning, which is such a big part of how we get through this difficult time together. That feedback will be summarized and shared with parents prior to our returning to remote learning on Tuesday. (Remember that Monday is a day for us to process the feedback with teachers and plan and prepare for adjustments going forward.) One broad piece of feedback that we’ll share right now is that many parents requested that there be more synchronous learning and video instruction provided. Rest assured, this will be part of the plan going forward.

Until we speak to you again, linked here is a Q&A with some updates. It may help you understand our current thinking on some timely matters. This is a very dynamic situation, and the ideas shared here are representative of our thinking on several but not all currently relevant topics.

Meantime, again, thank you. We hope, even if spring break plans were throttled, that you have gotten in some family time, sleep, and fun! We are thinking of you and hoping that everyone will come out of this crisis in good shape. Keep practicing CDC and local health recommendations and physical distancing. We’re in this together, and we’ll get through it together.

Best,
Burgundy’s Admin Team