Dear YCS Families,
Yesterday morning, Mayor de Blasio announced that remote learning will continue until the end of the school year. Shortly afterwards, Governor Cuomo indicated that no final decision has been made regarding statewide school closures. Between these two statements, one thing we can confidently infer is that remote learning will continue into the foreseeable future. While I am incredibly disappointed about the news about not returning to our school building, this decision allows us to move forward with our remote learning plans.
We will continue our Spring Break activities as planned, starting tomorrow April 13th. During this upcoming week, school staff and administration will be developing plans for sustainable long term remote learning. Our goal continues to be to provide our students with meaningful instruction that is engaging, relevant and encourages skill development.
There are many questions we need to answer about grades, graduation, screen time, workloads, and more. Moving forward, we hope to be able to focus on receiving more information from the DOE and developing answers to all these questions.
I also want to assure our fifth graders that your teachers and administration are already thinking about ways to celebrate your graduation!
Last Sunday night I shared that the DOE received requests to “credential” Zoom, the platform many schools, including ours, have been using to video conference with students. They permitted us to continue to use Zoom, as we began our transition to the just recently approved platform, Google Meet.
This past week we have been working on the transition to Google Meet so that it is up and running for Morning Meetings. While similar to Zoom, there are some differences, which we will do our best to walk you through, if you are navigating this system for the first time. Consider the week of April 13-17th Morning Meetings a test run of the new platform- we will work together to ensure students will be prepared for formal instruction which resumes on April 20th.
Accessing a Google Meet meeting:
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Students must be signed into Google Classroom
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Go to Classwork
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Go to the Google Meet Folder under All Topics
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Find the meeting you are looking for
Go to meet.google.com and join the meeting by entering the code/nickname needed to enter the meeting
Ex: Please Go to to meet.google.com to join our Morning Meetings:
Use the Meeting Code/Nickname “___” to join the meeting
You can also get to a Google Meet meeting by:
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Students must be signed into Google Classroom
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Find the Google App Icon in the top right corner of the Classroom- 9 grey dots in a square
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Click on the Meet Icon in the drop down
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Join the meeting by entering the meeting Code/Nickname found in the Google Meet folder on Classwork page in Google Classroom
*See this document, “How To Find Google Meet and Join Your Class Meeting”
Things to know about Google Meet:
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The Chrome browser must be used to access Google Meet.
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Students using iPads MUST download the Hangouts Meet app.
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Students must use their Yorkville email/domain to access a Google Meet meeting, (outside email addresses will not be allowed in to meetings)
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The Chat function can not be turned off by a meeting host. Therefore, we expect that our students DO NOT utilize the Chat during video conferencing unless otherwise indicated by the meeting host.
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Students are expected to maintain online behavior that supports a positive and productive learning experience. Inappropriate language and/or gestures will not be tolerated.
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Teachers/Meeting Host has the right to remove a student from a meeting if their behavior violates online behavior expectations and/or directives established by the teacher/ meeting host.
There is a chance that Zoom will be approved, in that instance, we will transfer back to that video conferencing platform.
As always, we are here for you and we will continue to work together to support your child(ren)’s success.
With gratitude,
Your YCS Family