April 19, 2021

Dear Southgate Families

At its regularly scheduled meeting on April 13, 2021, the Board of Education for Southgate Community Schools confirmed the District's current mode of instruction, offering in-person, remote, and virtual options for all students. This decision relied heavily on our secondary instructional model, allowing in-person middle school and high school students to choose remote instruction at any time, for any reason, and for any duration of time. Our in-person elementary students were provided at option to return to remote instruction for the remainder of the school year.  In addition, all athletes, ages 13-19, began weekly COVID testing on April 5, 2021. 

Although you may be receiving periodic notices of positive cases in our schools, these are cases in which students have contracted COVID-19 outside of the school environment.  When we identify an elementary student who is positive and attended school during the window of contagion, we quarantine the students who are considered close contacts and pause the impacted elementary classroom for 14 days.  When this occurs in our secondary schools, we quarantine the students who are identified as close contacts.  These students switch to remote attendance. 

Our mitigation practices, and the safety protocols in our schools, have been effective in preventing transmissions, or outbreaks, in our classrooms.  If we begin to see evidence of in-school transmissions resulting from classroom attendance, despite our mitigation measures, we will re-evaluate our mode of instruction plan immediately, independent of our monthly process of consideration.

Thank you for your ongoing support and caution as we continue through this difficult time.

Titan Strong,

Sharon Irvine, Superintendent