The University School of the Lowcountry (USL) recognizes that grandparents have a tremendous influence in our students’ lives. Here’s what USL has been up to over the last couple of months.
Safely operating during a Pandemic and advocating for students across South Carolina
University School equipped our indoor classrooms with state-of-the-art air purifiers that clean the air to levels near those found in hospital patient isolation rooms. In addition to the requirement to wear masks in interior spaces, air purification and extra ventilation make USL a safer place to learn. Faculty and students must wear a mask at all times when they are indoors, and students have daily PE, lunch/recess, and snack breaks outside. We opened in mid-August for a week of orientation so that students could get acclimated and engage in important emotional and social activities with their classmates and friends. We operated continuously since then and just concluded our First Semester.
“The tents allow us to take a mask break and feel more normal in these abnormal times. I am enjoying learning outside.”
-Will Courtney, 12th grade
Developing active and informed citizens
On November 3, students engaged in on and off-campus activities for Election Day – serving as poll workers, watching election coverage from an array of sources, and safely interviewing voters. This was a culmination of civics lessons throughout the Fall that included presentations by candidates from the four major parties (Democratic, Green, Libertarian, and Republican) and experts from the College of Charleston and the League of Women Voters.
Huge kudos to our high school students who launched a program to help attract, train, and support poll workers so that precincts could remain fully-staffed and open. We secured 30+ poll workers for Election Day 2020; this represented over half of all of the youth poll workers in Charleston County.
Wishing you s’more holiday cheer!
We had fun toasting marshmallows, enjoying hot chocolate, and making S’mores on this chilly day – aspects of the Holiday Lights that we were not able to do at James Island County Park this year!
Here’s to 2021!
Thank you, Grandparents!
Did you know that grandparents have helped to chaperone LOTCs (Learning Outside the Classroom experiences) — through our traditional weekly field trip program?
Did you know that grandparents and other family members/special friends have attended programs and events at University School?
Did you know that extended family members have hosted students for job shadow days, served as guest speakers, and helped arrange field trips for our students?
There are many activities at USL that are perfect for grandparents to take part in to learn more about their grandchild’s school and community and to lend their time, support, and expertise. We wanted to be sure and share these with you so that you know. You can be thinking about them and hopefully we’ll be resuming these valuable activities with the involvement of grandparents later in 2021.
If you’d like, you can choose to support University School in other ways in the interim. This includes financial contributions through our Annual Fund to sustain our program for curious, smart, empathetic, hard-working, empathetic, and kind students who will uplift the communities in which they are involved.
These quarterly newsletters are sent to grandparents whose emails we have on file. If you would like to be added to the email newsletter list, please contact Judy Hubbard at 843-884-0902 or by emailing jh******@us**********.org.
