Dear NWCS Families,

Welcome to the 2020-2021 school year! We hope that everyone has had a healthy, safe, and fun Summer. Hopefully all Chinese HW was done during this time as well… Remember to hand those into your teachers for raffle tickets!

This Fall, while we had hoped to return to school in person, we felt it was safer for our families and teachers to continue on-line, given that we are coming from so many different school districts. The good news is that we are fully prepared to do so, given the hard work that Principal Rick Chan, Vice Principal Francine Fang, teachers, staff and board members had put in last Spring. They really stepped up to the extraordinary challenge of figuring out how to transition our classes to on-line classes, and successfully implemented teaching remotely for all the language classes and some electives as well. A big THANK YOU to them for all their efforts and dedication!

In addition, over the summer we’ve been able to fine tune and increase our offerings for on-line electives. A reminder that this year, electives (apart from SAT prep) are included in your tuition. Please sign up for an elective! The following are the current electives offered:

ELECTIVES:

• Calligraphy – learn the skills to create beautiful and dynamic characters.
• Chess – learn Chinese and western chess, a great way to develop strategy skills.
• Chinese Knotting – learn how to tie decorative knots, parents welcome!
• Intro to Chinese Arts and Crafts – a fun way to learn Chinese culture!
• Martial Arts and Fitness (NEW) – great for getting a workout in for the kids!
• Origami – Learn how to fold fun projects. Highly recommended by my daughter who took it last year!
• SAT Prep – extra charge, but totally worth it if your child is gearing up for the SATs.
• Sewing (NEW) – learn how to sew fun crafts, with former teacher Terry Taylor.
• Yoga (NEW) –   for Students and Parents! ($100 for parents for 14 classes, or $10 per class drop in rate)

In addition to the above, starting week 2 we will be setting up a weekly community zoom hour for parents to sign in and catch up! Until we get back into school in person, we hope this community hour can offer parents a time to get together and chat. You just have to bring your own coffee and snacks! We are also working on how to hold our Chinese New Year celebration, raffle, and general assemblies. More to come on these events later in the year. Later on in the Fall we will also be evaluating to see if we can return to classes in person in the Spring. Please make sure to read your emails for updates on these and more topics.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL: General Assembly Zoom Meeting

We will start on 9/12/20 with a ZOOM general assembly from 9-9:15am. After this, each student should sign into their respective classes. Please use this link for the general assembly.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84990147401?pwd=N0IvWWNFa294MnN2YkFKY3RjSmF3Zz09

Meeting ID: 849 9014 7401

Passcode: Ni Hao

In the meantime, please refer to the attachments for the following information:

• 2020-2021 Calendar
• Administration, staff, and board members’ contact information
• Emergency phone system sign up information

As usual, a weekly briefing email to all families will be sent out to keep you up to date with any information, e.g. school activities, updates, etc. If you do not receive this email by the start of week 2, please contact the registrar to verify your contact information. In addition, we have an emergency phone system set up, used only for last minute closures (power outages, internet issues). See attached for how to sign up.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions at any time, please feel free to reach out to any of the administration, staff or board members.

Looking forward to a wonderful school year!

Sincerely yours,

Rick Chan (Principal)

Francine Fang (Vice-Principal)

Weifang Lin, (Board Co-Chair)

David Strollo (Board Co-Chair)

NWCS Co-Chairperson, 2017-2021

I am pleased to announce the final result of Chinese school poster contest held by ACS in region II. Rebecca’s work was awarded first place in the senior student group. Congratulations to Rebecca’s hard work and creativity! We are very proud of her dedication and determination throughout her studies at NWCS.

Congratulations to Ms. Kuo and her student Samuel Othman from last week’s Origami class.

Dear NWCS Families:

What a start to the year! The ongoing news regarding the Coronavirus is definitely concerning and is constantly evolving. While there has not been any cases in Briarcliff, our host school district, there has been increasing cases in nearby areas and there will likely be more and more cases before the situation becomes more stable. Principal Chan and Vice Principal Fang, along with Dean Wang, the teachers and the board, have been in constant communication over the last couple of months regarding contingency plans. At this point, we’d like to take this time to provide an update on our efforts and outline the upcoming course of action.

1)    Initially we took an approach to follow our host school’s (Briarcliff) closures as to whether or not we will have classes. However, with the increase in cases in nearby areas, and considering our families all come from different school districts, we erred on the side of caution and cancelled school yesterday (3/7/20). Yesterday’s closure is considered a “snow day.”

2)    As Principal Chan noted previously, we started exploring various options for remote learning a few weeks ago, and at this point have identified Google Meet (https://meet.google.com) and ZOOM (https://zoom.us) as the best programs for our teachers. We have signed up for accounts as needed and are now working on training the teachers and staff in its use. In fact, while there was no school yesterday, the teachers were at school in person getting up to speed with these tools for remote teaching. (A big thanks to technology gurus Harry and Yuan Chi for helping with this effort!)

3)    Again, erring on the side of caution, we will transition to remote learning starting next week, 3/14/20. Teachers will be in touch this week regarding the platform and method for doing so (either google meet or zoom, and potentially with modified schedules), and families will need a phone, laptop, or similar device to join the class.

Please note: It will take a little transition time for everyone to get used to this, so we ask for everyone’s patience and assistance with this. However, ultimately our goal is to continue with the core curriculum for each class, with modifications as needed. We will also be asking for parent’s help in setting up the technology for their kids.  We are working to limit the learning curve as much as we can, but this will need every parent’s help and supervision to make remote learning work from a distance. If there are any parents with expertise with remote conferencing/teaching and can help, please let us know.

4)    We will continue to monitor the situation and determine when it makes sense to resume classes in person at Briarcliff. However, at this point we think it is likely that we will continue with remote learning for the month of March, and potentially into April as well. We will communicate this on a week by week basis.

Principal Chan, Vice Principal Fang and your children’s teachers will be in touch over the course of this week regarding more specifics for remote learning.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email Francine at Vice-Principal@nwcsny.org.

We have such a wonderful community of families, and I will miss seeing everyone (as well as eating rice rolls!) in the coming weeks. However, safety is our top priority, and we hope that these measures will help keep our families as safe as possible, while still continuing with learning Chinese. We look forward to seeing everyone in person again soon!

Thanks,

Wei

NWCS Co-Chairperson, 2017-2020

P.S. My sister is an integrative medicine doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. She wrote the attached article for an event at her work that I found helpful. I’m sharing it here in case others find it helpful as well.

Cold and Flu Prevention

Our NWCS former co-chairperson, David Qinn, and author of children’s picture book - Go to Sleep, Little Creep, kindly spent his precious weekend morning last Saturday and stopped by school for a visit to read his book to pre K and kindergartners at NWCS.