Dear Families,

I hope you are all safe and well. These past several months have been filled with many unknowns and much uncertainty for us all. During this period, our Early Head Start/Head Start program has continued to provide support and engage with children and families in virtual, creative ways. Our goal throughout this COVID-19 pandemic has been to continue to be there for our Head Start families despite the physical distance.

With summer coming to a close, I want to provide you with an update about this fall. We have been working to plan what our programming will look like for children when we start back up this September. Our main goal is to ensure the health and safety of our children and staff. This requires a great deal of modifying and adapting of our current practices and policies to make sure they are in alignment with New York State Department of Health’s Interim Guidelines for Child Care Centers, guidance from the CDC, and our health care consultant.

At the moment, we are in the process of collecting survey data from families and are working diligently to finalize our plans. Once we’ve finished this analysis, we will reach back out to all of our families with a comprehensive overview of our fall programming (both center based and virtual programming options). We anticipate being able to share this information soon, so that our families have the information and expectations needed for their own planning purposes.

We sincerely appreciate your patience, understanding, and flexibility during these times. I can assure you we take our preparation efforts very seriously and want to ensure that we have we everything in place that is needed to ensure the health and safety of our children and staff.

If you have any questions please contact the Early Childhood office at 518-272-6012 ext. 272.

Sincerely,

Tia Nunziato

Early Childhood Service Director