An Update from Principal Drummond

Dear Hill Community,
We hope you are enjoying a relaxing three-day weekend as we look ahead to our first day of school on Tuesday! It has been a team effort in our school community to rally and get to this point. While it is not the typical start to school we would love to see, we will ensure this is the best possible experience for our Dillos.

For next week, our virtual classes will begin on Tuesday, September 8th, at 7:45 am. All students will begin the day with classroom community meetings, then follow their normal Tuesday virtual schedule. If you feel unsure on what to do, always begin with your teacher’s BLEND page as everything can break out from there. More information on BLEND support is shared below. Also, be sure to reach out to your teacher with any questions to ensure a successful start. Our school day will end at 3:11 pm for all but our Pre-K students.

We do want to note one change to our normal schedule for week one. To ensure that we start the year with consistency and momentum for our students and staff, this Wednesday will not be an asynchronous day. Please treat this Wednesday as if it is a normal Monday! Students will have synchronous time for classes as if it is a Monday. They will see the essential area A day class synchronously they would normally attend on a Monday. We hope this lets everyone get further connected week one. Thank you for being mindful of this. In the weeks following during virtual learning, we will get back to our published, normal schedule.

To begin each day with our students, we also hope families can tune in to our virtual asynchronous assemblies we will continue to publish for each day. We plan to bring back some of our consistent traditions, including our Dillo Best student awards on Friday! These can be viewed prior to 7:45 am if you wish or at any asynchronous time in the day that works for families. We hope this further supports our students feeling connected to Hill School while not there physically. Click here to find the consistent link for our Daily Virtual Assemblies. The Tuesday video will be ready to go soon.

The Virtual Principal Check-In was pretty short this week with many great questions. Be sure to check it out. One statement I made was that I thought a new parent survey may be going out this week to see family plans on learning once the return to in-person is available. It looks like that is on hold so my apologies. No survey will be coming out quite yet. Our next Principal Check-In will be this upcoming Thursday, September 10th, at 4:00 pm. We hope many of you can join us as our counselors will be sharing resources for families this week for a nice change of pace.
Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 844 8826 6009
Passcode: Dillos

This week, Austin ISD shared a really wonderful resource for our families to support BLEND and Seesaw. Please explore this Parent Handbook for BLEND & Seesaw that is also available on our Hill Community BLEND page under Tech Resources. We hope this helps support you in supporting your student(s).

We want to share our first working draft of our Hill Reopening Plan. This is similar to the Austin ISD plan but will have more Hill-specific information. Schools worked off of a template to support consistency. Please know this will be consistently updated in the coming weeks and is a living document. For now, it focuses on virtual learning but please know we will be adding in-person learning sections as well once we feel that is ready to share. Hopefully most of the information is review and presents a good overview of all of our basic information right now. Please know we will be seeking feedback from different groups on campus soon to ensure our community input is present.

Don’t forget to visit hillelementary.com as our Online Open House for PTA ends Monday. We wish you all a fabulous first day of school! Thank you for being flexible and understanding as we put our schedules and platforms into practice. Please know we value your feedback and will work as a community to keep making the best situation we can for our students in the coming weeks.

Principal Drummond