School must go on. That’s been our community’s guiding thought every time a new safety, teaching, planning, transportation, or operational challenge has been posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past few months, we have met those challenges and, as important, learned how to be nimble and adapt when confronted with new ones. The result: our school will reopen on both campuses on Tuesday, September 8. Through months of hard work and planning, Poly Prep has met the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic head on and we are ready to confidently go back to in-person school safely. Poly reopened both campuses on Tuesday, September 8.

Among the most important lessons we can teach our children is how to feel empowered and resilient when confronted with change or uncertainty. That’s been our community’s mindset in addressing the new realities posed by COVID-19. That mindset makes me feel so optimistic about our return to in-person teaching and learning while keeping health and safety our top priorities. Our Dyker Heights faculty has reimagined their classes. They are ready, willing, and able, to share ideas about American history or how to solve algebra equations in more than 70 socially distanced tents spread out across our 25-acre campus. Younger students will form small pods in which they learn to read and multiply double digits in Lower School classrooms. As important as any lesson, our students will play and be active in the open spaces of our campuses and Prospect Park.

School must go on.

We are returning together as a vibrant learning community. And together is how we will find the strength, energy, hope, resilience, and inspiration to embrace a new way of learning. School must go on.

Audrius Barzdukas P’20
Head of School