MCA Parents and Guardians,
What an incredible first week of school! On behalf of our entire MCA team, thank you for helping make the opening of Montrose Classical Academy such a wonderful experience.
It has been such a joy getting to know your children, watching new friendships form, and seeing our students begin to make MCA truly their school. Seeing our students become comfortable in their classrooms, build relationships with their teachers and classmates, and develop a sense of belonging at MCA has been one of the best parts of these first days together.
We also want to thank our families for the tremendous amount of patience, flexibility, and grace you have shown us as we work through all of the little adjustments that naturally come with opening a brand-new school. We are learning every day, refining our systems, and continuing to make improvements based on what we see and hear from our families.
🚌 Updated Bus Routes – Effective Tomorrow
Thank you especially for your patience as we have worked to refine our bus routes. Establishing new transportation routes takes some adjustment as we learn where students are actually boarding and exiting the buses and how long each route takes in real-world conditions.
We have now updated our bus routes, and the new routes and times will be effective tomorrow.
Some pickup and drop-off times have shifted slightly because we have removed several stops where no students were boarding or exiting the buses, which has allowed us to shorten the overall route times. We have also added a few new stops in response to requests from MCA families and adjusted timing based on what we learned during our first week.
Please check the updated bus routes posted in the MCA Parent app or on the MCA Parent website tonight so that you are familiar with your child's stop and updated time for tomorrow morning.
Transportation is one of those pieces that truly takes all of us working together to get right, and we greatly appreciate everyone's patience and communication. If you experience an issue with your child's route or believe something needs our attention, please let us know.
👕 Uniform Update
We have now received approximately half of our uniform inventory and have started stocking the uniform backpacks for families who have reached out to us for uniform support.
Received so far:
- Skirts
- Jumpers
- Ties
- Headbands
- Boys' medium short-sleeve polos
Still waiting on:
- Remaining short-sleeve polo sizes
- Long-sleeve polos
- Peter Pan collar polos
- Several other pieces
We know that some of our families who placed their own uniform orders are also still waiting for items to arrive. Our uniform provider has unfortunately been significantly behind in fulfilling orders, so we want to reassure everyone that there is absolutely no need to worry about uniform pieces that have not yet arrived.
If you are waiting on an MCA uniform backpack or waiting for items from your own uniform order, please simply continue doing what you have been doing over these first two weeks. Our families have done a wonderful job using good judgment and sending students to school in clothing that is neat, appropriate, and as close to our uniform expectations as reasonably possible with the items available to them.
We will continue to extend patience and flexibility as an entire MCA community while our uniform provider catches up. This delay is outside of our families' control, and we certainly do not want anyone feeling stressed about an order that has not arrived yet.
We are hopeful that the remainder of MCA's inventory will arrive this week so that we can begin completing the remaining uniform backpacks. In the meantime, please continue as you have been and we greatly appreciate everyone's patience, flexibility, and understanding.
🍎 Breakfast & Lunch Update
The MCA Parent app and website now have our updated lunch menu available for families to view.
We are also working on a new meal-planning form that will be added to the MCA Parent app. Each week, families will be able to let us know whether they anticipate their student eating breakfast and/or school lunch the following week, or whether their student will not be eating breakfast at school and/or will be bringing a cold lunch from home.
And we have one of our MCA parents to thank for this idea! A parent reached out and suggested giving families a way to communicate their meal plans in advance, which will allow us to develop much more accurate breakfast and lunch counts. It was a great suggestion, and one we were happy to put into action. Better counts will help us make sure we have enough food prepared for every student who needs a meal while also reducing unnecessary food waste.
We anticipate having this new form available by Friday, so please watch the MCA Parent app for more information.
🤒 A Reminder: How Sick Is Too Sick for School?
As we settle into the school year, we want to remind families about Colorado's How Sick Is Too Sick? guidance. Keeping children home when they are sick is one of the best ways we can work together to reduce the spread of illness throughout our school.
Please remember:
- A fever is a temperature of 100.4°F (38°C) or higher. Students with a fever should remain home and may return once they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the use of fever-reducing medication.
- Students experiencing vomiting or diarrhea should also remain home and generally may return once they have been free of those symptoms for 24 hours.
- Even without a fever, if your child is not feeling well enough to comfortably participate in normal school activities, please allow them time at home to rest and recover.
Our goal is to keep our students happy, healthy, learning, and enjoying school. Thank you for helping us reduce the spread of illness and protect our entire school community.
💬 Growing Together Through Feedback
Finally, we want to give a special thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share constructive feedback, suggestions, and ideas with us.
The breakfast and lunch form above is a perfect example of why that communication is so valuable. We want MCA to be a school where parents and guardians feel comfortable reaching out when something isn't working well, but also when they have a great idea for how we could make something better.
We are committed to being a school that listens and continually improves.
On our very first day, for example, we quickly realized that managing pickup through radios wasn't working as smoothly as we wanted. Rather than continuing with a process that wasn't working well, we changed course and implemented an app-based system, which has already significantly improved our dismissal process.
This week, we are continuing that work by refining our bus dismissal procedures so that we can make the process more organized and ensure students are consistently getting onto the correct bus and know their appropriate stops.
There will undoubtedly be other processes that we continue to refine as we grow. What matters to us is that when we identify something that could work better, we listen, learn, adjust, and improve.
That applies not only to us as an MCA team, but to all of us as an MCA community. Your feedback helps us see things from different perspectives, identify solutions we may not have considered, and ultimately create a better school experience for our students.
So please keep communicating with us. We may not be able to implement every suggestion, but we genuinely appreciate thoughtful, constructive feedback and the willingness of our families to help us continually grow and improve.
💛 Thank You, MCA Families!
Most importantly, thank you for trusting us with your children.
Opening a brand-new school is a huge undertaking, and there will naturally be things that we continue to learn and refine along the way. We are incredibly grateful to have families who communicate with us, give us the opportunity to make adjustments when something isn't working quite right, and work alongside us to make MCA the best possible school for our students.
After just one week, it is already wonderful to see MCA becoming more than a building or a new school - it is becoming a community that belongs to our students and families.
Thank you for an amazing first and second week. We can't wait to see what next week brings!
Kind regards,
Alyssa Reimer
Executive Director