Happy New Year, Hill community! We are excited to welcome all of our students back to learning as we begin the spring semester.

Dr. Elizalde announced this week that we will follow our planned calendar and schedule this week for the district. Students will return to school on Wednesday, January 6th. January 4th is a student and staff holiday. January 5th is a staff professional development day and student holiday.

Our campus will be open on Wednesday for face to face learning for students of families that have chosen that method and communicated it in December. As our superintendent stated this week, virtual learning will still be available the rest of this school year for families who choose it.

As we reopen our physical campus, we do encourage families to continue to be as cautious as possible at school and outside of school. We are confident Hill is a safe place based on our protocols and the dedication of our amazing staff. We also recognize that with Austin-Travis County being at COVID-19 Stage 5, we must all be even more diligent to keep everyone safe. Thank you for avoiding large gatherings and close contacts with people outside of your direct household that could lead to direct exposures. If you have any concerns from the winter break, we encourage families to take advantage of virtual learning out of caution. We are a strong school community. We thank you for your support of keeping our school open for learning as this pandemic continues.

We will see everyone on Wednesday. Have a great end to the winter break!
Principal Drummond

Dear Hill Community,
As we end our semester, we want to wish you all a safe and healthy winter break with your families. As a reminder, our campus will be closed for the next two weeks with our office scheduled to reopen on January 5th with our staff participating in staff development. Students will return to learning on Wednesday, January 6th. As we did with the Thanksgiving holiday, we will alert you all to any changes that may take place to this plan.

If you have not done so already, please be on the lookout in your email for an individualized link to send in a picture of your student to Balfour so they can be present in our yearbook! The process is fairly simple but does not work well using a mobile device. Thank you for ensuring your child is represented this year!

We truly appreciate all of the support and kind messages this week for our staff! Take care and happy holidays from Hill School!

Principal Drummond

Dear Hill Community,
We look forward to a fun and engaging week of learning with all of our friends at Hill School as we wrap up an unforgettable semester. We will miss some of our traditions from this time of year but appreciate all the effort our teachers and staff are putting in to ensure this week is special for our students.

With 5 days left until the winter break, we want to remind everyone of our general calendar for the next few weeks:

• Friday, December 18th: This is the last day of school for the fall semester for students and staff. Our office will be closed beginning Monday, December 21st.
• December 21st-January 5th: Winter break and no school for students. Our staff will return for professional development on January 5th but will not be instructing students.
• Wednesday, January 6th: The first day of classes for all virtual and face to face students for the spring semester. Our campus will reopen this day.

As we look to the next semester, we want to encourage all families to let their teachers know as soon as possible if they will be switching from virtual instruction to on-campus, face to face learning to begin the new semester. This information is crucial so we can ensure we plan for the physical needs of the classroom. Your teacher may be reaching out or surveying in many cases. Thank you all for helping us have the most accurate information possible!

All families should receive a survey through email from Austin ISD to gather information on their preferences if we were to need to make up time this year due to another virtual learning period or closure. This is in response to Travis County possibly moving to Stage 5 of the COVID protocol. For now, we anticipate having students report back to campus on January 6th. As we have seen this year, that could change. We will again ensure that students take their devices and learning materials home as a precaution. We will keep our community updated if we receive any information in the coming weeks.

Some of this information is covered in the recording of our Hill Principal Check-In from this last Wednesday. There is no check-in this upcoming week, but we will continue in the new year!

This is also report card time and that looks different this year than it has in the past as well. We want to ensure everyone knows how to access this information through the parent portal. Thank you for understanding report cards may not appear until early January. Thank you to our registrar, Christine McBride, for sharing this step set:

• Login to my.austinisd.org with your parent credentials.
• Click on the magnifying glass and type in “report”
• A tile called “Report Card” (yellow tile with ABC on it) should come up. Click on it.
• Click on your student name (if you have multiple students).
• A pdf should open with your student’s latest report card. It may be downloaded to your downloads directory, if you are set up to do that on your device.
• This tile is DIFFERENT THAN THE TEAMS tile where grades are.

Finally, we thought it would be fun to end this letter with some positive notes as we wrap-up 2020! Monday’s assembly video will feature an amazing 50th anniversary celebration video created by the Maestro that some of our staff and students participated in to get some good vibes going. Check out his amazing work! And a special thank you to all of our parents/guardians who supported our Families Helping Families tradition we continued this year to ensure all of our Dillos are taken care of during the holidays. We love this community and appreciate all you do!

Have an amazing weekend, everyone!
Mr. Drummond

Dear Hill Community,
Thanks for your patience and support of our students at home this last week during the all virtual period. We are so happy to welcome our students who are face to face learners back on campus for Monday. Please continue to use the Screen and Go feature on the Austin ISD app and keep your student(s) home if they are showing any symptoms of COVID-19. We look forward to a safe ten days of learning until the winter break!

We are excited to update our community that during this past week, permanent plexiglass solutions were installed in the learning spaces throughout our campus. Dillo cheer! This is such a benefit to our students and teachers. While we feel Hill has been a safe place to learn all fall, this enhancement is a welcome addition that we hope gives everyone even more reassurance.

We will have our next virtual Principal Check-In this Wednesday, December 9th, at 4:30 pm. Here is the Zoom information for anyone who can attend. It will be recorded as always.

Zoom Info
Meeting ID: 950 6040 0852
Passcode: dillos

With the holidays coming up, we wanted to ensure that all of our families are aware of support in our community, especially regarding food resources. Please see the post below for more information. Please contact administration or our counseling team if you have other questions. We want to thank these amazing groups for all they do to support our Hill community!

Have a wonderful weekend and Dillo Cheer for the safe return to campus!

Dear Hill Community,
As was stated in the recent communication from Dr. Elizalde, Austin ISD will only be offering virtual learning next week from November 30th-December 4th. Hill School will be closed for face to face learning on campus. All families should make arrangements as needed to ensure students can access our virtual curriculum on Monday.

Prior to leaving for the fall break, our staff worked to ensure all students brought home their needed learning devices and materials to ensure we were prepared for a situation like this. Please know that if needed, devices that were left at school can be picked up beginning Monday if you call ahead to our front office so we can prepare for your arrival. We want to ensure all students have what is needed as some were absent toward the latter part of the week.

Staff will communicate with families as needed by Sunday night to ensure students, parents, and guardians have the necessary information to access virtual learning on Monday. In many cases, nothing will change as the majority of our students are already learning virtually. Where that is not the case, we are working to ensure we have as few disruptions as possible to keep routines with virtual learning only being anticipated for this upcoming week based on the district communication. As always, we appreciate the understanding of our community as our staff is on break and this transition is a big one for some classrooms. There will be some bumps as always with a big shift like this taking place. Your grace is appreciated, especially on the Monday coming back from the fall break.

We will keep our school community updated as we learn more. We appreciate Austin ISD prioritizing the safety of our students and staff. We also acknowledge the hardship this creates for many. We look forward to the return of face to face learning on December 7th and seeing many of our Dillos on campus again. Enjoy your weekend and thank you again for your support this upcoming week!

Jack Drummond
Principal

Dear Hill Community,
Time has flown by this semester as the fall break is now one week away. Please note there will be no virtual or face-to-face classes for the week of November 23rd-27th. We wish you all a special time with your families. We also encourage everyone to be as safe as possible in terms of avoiding large groupings. We appreciate as much caution as possible to support a safe re-entry to school for the weeks to follow.

That being said, we are so pleased that at Hill and around the district so far, community spread within schools has not been evident. Still, rest assured we will continue to be vigilant. We are pleased to announce that COVID-19 testing for our students will now be available through our health room. This will be a phased-in approach that began with students on campus during the day who began to show symptoms. You can find more information here.

These topics were among the discussions during our Hill Principal Check-In this week. Check out the video if you were unable to attend. We will not have a check-in this upcoming week.

We also wanted to follow up with a few notes on dismissal. Please know that at school, we are now discussing ways to improve our practices for a smoother end to the day. If you are utilizing the car line for pick-up, one huge way to support a timely dismissal is to have a paper/poster with your student(s)’ name and classroom teacher. We appreciate this addition if you are not already doing so. While we had originally floated a number system, we have decided it would not be feasible or useful. Lastly, our crossing guard at Cima Serena and Tallwood asks that parents/guardians please don’t take a left turn onto Tallwood if coming east. It is actually illegal with a sign stating so. Thank you for planning your route to queue appropriately facing west on Cima Serena. Please also be mindful to not block our crosswalks in that area! Doing so will not get you through the line faster and puts safety in that area at risk. We appreciate everyone’s diligence in making our community a safe place for pedestrians!

Don’t forget to support our Hill Virtual Book Fair that ends next Saturday! And thank you to Lara Farahani, our library staff, and other volunteers for their amazing annual work on this support of our library. Again, have a wonderful fall break!

Dear Hill Community,
What an amazing weekend celebrating the 50th anniversary of Hill School! It was so fulfilling to see our community together in one place.

For those that didn’t hear, Mayor Adler and the City of Austin proclaimed Saturday, November 7th, as “Hill Elementary Day” in celebration of 50 amazing years of educating students. We want to give a special thank you to the office of Council Member Alter for supporting this honor. Throughout the week we had some of our assemblies focus on our Hill history and the Hill sisters. The car parade yesterday was the perfect way to cap the week. One last special thank you to Liz Neff, our volunteers, our staff, and our sponsors for organizing this special event. Thank you to all of our community members and special guests that brought their Dillo Cheer to the parade yesterday. These will be great memories we can add to the legacy of Hill!

Be sure to tune into our Wednesday assembly video this week as we honor our veterans with a special guest presenter (and veteran) from our Hill staff. We thank all of those who have served this country through the military and hope you have a well deserved day of recognition on Wednesday, November 11th. The video can be found in our normal assembly video slideshow.

Our next Principal Coffee will be this upcoming Wednesday, November 11th, at 4:00 pm. Here is the Zoom information:
Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 813 2206 6151
Passcode: dillos

We are excited to announce that our Hill Virtual Book Fair begins today! It is different this year with no physical items on campus. We are also working with Book People, a local Austin company! Below is the URL and the code to use to ensure that your purchases go to supporting our Hill library. Be sure to utilize this code at checkout. The book fair will run for two weeks until November 21st. Thank you for your support and this is a great way to do some holiday shopping! Also notice that we have teacher wish lists which we appreciate support on as well for the classroom.
Bookfair Code: HILL20
Coupon URL

Whether it is through the virtual book fair or nominating our amazing staff for an Austin ISD RAVE Award, thank you for all the support right now. We look forward to an excellent 10 days of learning before our fall break. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and happy day after Hill Elementary Day!

Principal Drummond

Dear Hill Community,
We hope everyone had a safe and fun Halloween if your family took part in festivities. Here is a picture of our Charlie Brown at home. Enjoy this beautiful fall weather!

We wanted to update our families on several things for the upcoming week to be aware of. By now, if anything has changed for your students’ class(es), you should have been notified. This week, please note that Tuesday, November 3rd, is a student holiday. Our staff will be participating in professional development that day. Also this upcoming week, our Essential Area classes will move to an ABC schedule. What this means is that synchronous instruction will be taking place each day for all students daily (outside of staff absences). Teachers will still have 30 minute synchronous lessons followed by 15 minutes of asynchronous work. It will be an adjustment but our art, music, and PE teachers are looking forward to the extra face time with students. For face to face students, please also note that our PE teachers, Ms. Perry, and Ms. Herb will begin utilizing their classrooms for instruction with safety protocols in place. There will not be shared materials and spaces will be cleaned after each rotation, as some other schools have been practicing. Finally, there is no more asynchronous Wednesday beginning this week. Wednesday will now look like a regular instructional day as we have been messaging for a few weeks now.

Be sure to check out our Principal Check-In from this past Wednesday. We will not have one this upcoming week as we have quite a bit going on around campus!

One discussion point on Wednesday was the carline and Hill traffic pattern now that we have seen what it looks like with our phased-in group. For arrival and dismissal, thank you for queuing for the carline down Tallwood toward Cima Serena. Please do not take left turns into our front driveway! This is actually illegal during these times and an existing city sign is being relocated to the new entrance. Do be aware, however, that our teacher parking lot now shares that same entrance. You may see staff needing to pull in to park, and we appreciate everyone keeping that space open where the double arrows are so teachers can pull past the line to prepare for the day. Families have also shared that pulling around the car line is tough right now at the Cima Serena/Tallwood intersection. If you want to park and walk, we recommend using Hyridge as the corridor to make your way to campus. Thank you all for supporting safe traffic and queuing around Hill! And please utilize our crosswalks to avoid jaywalking.

We are now one week away from our big Hill 50th Anniversary Car Parade and cannot wait to see our community come together in this special way on November 7th! The parade route and all of the information is linked here. Please check out the Dillo Details as well this week for any updates and comprehensive information. One last big Dillo Cheer to Liz Neff and our volunteers/sponsors who have made this possible. Have those pom poms ready and show your Hill pride on Saturday morning! We will also have a fun announcement for Friday’s assembly so tune in…

Our Hill childcare is still looking to fill positions. More information was in our letter last week and you can call the school for more information. Have a wonderful week!

Principal Drummond

Hello Hill Community,
This week, we are excited to welcome back all the remaining students joining us for face to face learning on campus at this time! Thank you for the patience you have shown during this process. If you are returning to on-campus learning for the first time this week, you can refer to my letters from the last few weeks for the details on what you need to know.

Following this final phase-in week, there will be changes at certain grade levels that may affect teaching models, scheduling, or some other aspects of the day. In most cases, the grade level teachers will be communicating anything new to be aware of as most adjustments will not cause classroom teacher changes. In larger cases where that will take place, we will be in communication as administration. Kindergarten parents, for instance, are receiving a separate letter today from me with more information. We know transitions right now are not ideal but please trust that all were done with a lot of forethought and planning using community feedback to create the best possible learning environments for all of our students. Lastly, if you don’t hear anything from your teacher(s), you can assume that there are no changes taking place to scheduling or the learning environment.

We also want to update everyone on campus safety during this continuing pandemic. In many classrooms moving forward, six foot physical distancing will be a challenge or no longer feasible as all students who would like to return to campus can with five days notice. As of Friday, our campus has now been measured to receive plexiglass solutions in our classrooms for increased safety. As more students return for face to face learning, we are confident that this will create an extra layer of protection for our students and staff. We have highlighted our addition of air purifiers and window screens in many of our educational spaces in the past weeks. We appreciate the support of the district and our Hill community as we continue to welcome students back to the classroom.

Also this week, we want to let everyone know that Hill After School Childcare will begin again on Monday, November 2nd! We do have space available for students who will be on-campus learning and would love for our families to take advantage of this wonderful program. Pricing is hard to beat with a $100 registration fee and $300 a month care from 3:11-5:45 PM on weekdays. For more information and to enroll, please email Lucy Chu at lucy.chu@austinisd.org or call our front office. First come, first serve!

Our Hill Principal Check-In this week will be Wednesday, October 28th, at 4:00 pm. Here is the information for those who would like to attend live:
Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 851 6570 1669
Passcode: dillos

We are now down to a two week countdown to the car parade celebration of our Hill 50th Anniversary! Check out the information in the Dillo Details. As we celebrate our history, it is also so much fun right now to see our future campus progress. Attached below are some updated pictures of our current construction for those who have not been by campus recently. Also, we have some pictures of Hill Harbor to see the additions there.

For our new Hill families, please know that with Halloween coming up on Saturday, we will not allow costumes at school on Friday. Instead, we will have dress up days several times this year with certain themes. Thank you for understanding! Have a wonderful week, everyone.

Jack Drummond
Principal

Dear Hill Community,
We hope your weekend is off to a great start. This upcoming week, we look forward to welcoming back some of our 3rd and 4th grade students in week 3 of our phase-in plan. For families coming back to campus for the first time, I have again included the information from prior letters below to support the transition.

As always, we want to share the recording of our Hill Principal Check-In from this past Thursday. Obviously one of the main talking points during the update was the confirmed positive COVID-19 case we had on campus. As stated in the letter that went out Thursday to our entire community, we will always ensure that contact tracing and notifications happen in line with our Austin ISD safety protocols if we have confirmed or presumed positive cases on campus. Our custodial team is trained to sanitize the affected areas appropriately. For more information, please reference the Austin ISD COVID-19 Dashboard and the District Open for Learning Plan to see statistics and protocols. We take this situation very seriously and will continue to ensure Hill School provides the safest possible learning environment for all of our Dillos.

The other big discussion point was our post phase-in planning. Currently we are meeting with our grade level teams to discuss how our blended learning model is working for our students and staff. We would also like to get the family perspective to see how the current learning model is working. We encourage all of our families to complete this Hill Phase-In Parent/Guardian Feedback Surveyto get your feedback. We do anticipate that there could be changes at different grade levels in our learning model to best support everyone. Models may look different based on safety, student groups/learning needs, campus staffing needs, teacher feedback, logistics, and other variables that may affect our decisions. Please know that if your student(s) grade level does move to a different plan (for instance having some teachers instruct only virtually or only face to face) and it affects your student(s), that will be clearly communicated. With any change, we will work to mitigate students moving from their teachers but this could happen in certain circumstances. Again, we will work with your individual family in these situations with early messaging. Further communication will come when it is ready. We are still evaluating our practices and utilizing feedback to make the best possible decisions.

On a few other notes, we wanted to alert 5th grade families that Ms. Cotten is currently teaching virtually so if your students return, they will be in-person with Mr. Wilder and Ms. Salome. There was a great question Thursday about older students walking home from 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. This is of course okay, assuming the plan has been communicated to teachers for returning students. If parents are walking with them, they can wait for dismissal by the ramps for their students. For our 4th graders, this can be by the stairs on Cima Serena as well. Thanks for prepping your Dillos for dismissal.

For parents who paid for Hill after school childcare registration fees in the fall, please let Lucy Chu know (if you haven’t already) if you are interested in care this fall. Soon, we will be opening up registration (details to come) to fill any remaining spots with the hope to begin on November 2nd. More information to come!

Enjoy this beautiful fall weather while it lasts! Have a wonderful day.

Principal Drummond

(Click on dates for previous Principal letters from October 4 and October 11)