Dear CDS Families,
Zero Waste Sustainability Award
An important part of our school’s mission is to be an environmental sustainability leader and a good steward of our local environment. We are a LEED-certified campus that generates a substantial amount of our own energy with an array of solar panels, keeping our carbon footprint small, and we have many energy efficiencies built into the architecture and design of our buildings. Efforts and continued improvement in these areas have been promoted by staff and student groups, including Bandera Azul, The Sustainables, The Green Team, and Zero Waste Youth. This last group, Zero Waste Youth, was celebrated last week for their progress in helping our campus attain zero-waste status. With local and international representatives of Zero Waste, our school was recognized for being on the road to zero waste, highlighting the projects that have reduced our waste: organic waste composting, herb garden, beehive, tech device donation, book/materials recycling, single-use plastic reduction, etc. We are proud of being the first school in Costa Rica to receive this award from Zero Waste, which we attained because of the committed leadership of our HS students and student/staff participation.
Covid Status
It’s vital to keep you updated on Covid-related issues at our school, especially with the contagious omicron variant still present. Over the last two weeks (since the previous report) we had 23 student positive cases and three active staff positive cases. Like trends elsewhere, this represents infection variability, with increases in student cases and decreases in staff cases. Thankfully, nearly all the cases have presented mild symptoms, especially for the vaccinated, characterized often like a bad cold. Throughout we have maintained consistent health of our teaching staff and been able to deliver both face-to-face (and virtual learning, where needed) for our students, which helps the well-being of all. We imagine continued infection fluctuations throughout the next few months, and then hopefully a tapering off and return to low infection incidence like we had earlier this school year. Please keep us updated about your family’s vaccination status (parents and students), including boosters, by emailing this information to our school nurse, Martha Bello (martha.bello@cds.ed.cr).
As always, please write to me at cds_director@cds.ed.cr or call me at 2289 0919 ext. 2224 if I can do anything to help your children and your family have the absolute best experience possible at CDS. And I hope you all enjoy a beautiful extended weekend.
With Panther Pride,
Dr. Scott Adams, Director
