Happy Thursday Everyone!

I hope everyone is doing well this rainy Thursday. As you probably saw, we posted an COVID outbreak notification for the whole school. The classroom that has the outbreak in it was notified as well. Please note at an outbreak is defined at 3 cases of COVID within one group within a 14 day period without another known exposure.

We have also seen an increase in covid-negative respiratory illnesses within our population. Please remember that the best way to keep our community healthy is to stay home when sick. We also ask for clear communication when communicable illnesses are diagnosed by physicians, as we have notification guidelines for communicable illnesses in addition to COVID. We have plenty of at home COVID tests that we can provide to families, so please continue to use those as a screening tool.

Vaccination remains our best defense against serious illness caused by COVID. Everyone aged 6 months and up are encouraged to get fully vaccinated and remain up to date on their vaccines. There are immediate appointments for the bivalent booster available at My Doctor’s Pharmacy in Herndon. If your child has been vaccinated against COVID and we do not have a copy of their card, please email it to us at info@commongroundchildcare.org.

Fall Flu Shot Clinic

We finally have our fall Flu Shot Clinic scheduled! It will take place on Tuesday, October 18th at 5:30pm. CVS will be on site and can give flu shots to anyone aged 4 and up. This clinic is open to students, parents, and community members, so feel free to share the information far and wide! You can sign up here or we can accommodate walk-ins as well! You will need a consent form that you can download here or fill out on site.

We encourage everyone within our population to get a flu shot as children younger than 5 years old– especially those younger than 2– are at higher risk of developing serious flu-related complications. Please see this CDC page for more information about the flu and how you can help protect our community!

October Saturday Hours are almost here!

Make sure that you sign up by Monday, October 17th for our Saturday hours on October 22nd!

We love being able to provide these for our parents. Our kids love it, our teachers love it, and we hope that you love it too!

Sign Up here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70a0f4faca723abff2-october

And make your donation here: https://paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/1778362

We have a few re-scheduled events:

• curriculum night is being re-scheduled as observations will be done this month as well, so we’d rather not over-load our teachers during this time.

• the love bugs pumpkin patch field trip is being rescheduled for 10/19, since it is raining today

Teacher Bonus Fund

We are starting to plan for our Holiday Bonus for our staff. Please remember that staff are not allowed to accept gifts from parents other than small homemade food items. Instead, we ask that you donate to our Bonus Fund. Common Ground matches parent donations ‘dollar for dollar’ to make this bonus extra meaningful for our teachers. You can see the details here and make your pledge here.

External Observations This Week

As part of our participation in the VQB5 program, all of our classrooms are observed by certified CLASS observers from our area and certain classrooms are also observed by external observers from Teachstone, the company that created the CLASS observation tool. This week several of our classrooms had an external observation. This observation gives us valuable data about the overall quality of the interactions within our program.

Over the next month each class will be observed, some classrooms for a second time by our local observers. After local observations, teachers will have coaching sessions based on the observations.

Pizza, Pizza

We have a pizza kit fundraiser during the month of October! Please order some pizza kits and share out this link to help us with our fundraiser! You can read about our day long pizza party last year on our blog.

You can order pizza’s here: https://fundraising.littlecaesars.com/fundraisers/support/533cc6b5-12c3-4f82-8d89-4db230d53715

Or sign up to be a seller and order your own through your own link here: https://fundraising.littlecaesars.com/login/join-fundraiser/be7d51b2-f939-4b22-8925-6e5c27fe16e8

The parent that sells the most pizza kits gets our eternal gratitude AND a free Saturday!

Thanks for reading our newsletter!

-The CG Team