St. Colette Youth Ministry
2021 Safety Information

Updated September 2021: 
We continue to adapt our policies to the changing times, under direction from the Archdiocese of Detroit, Livonia Public Schools, and the Wayne County Health Department. 
 
Screening
Teens will be screened when they arrive to any in-person event by filling out a screening form and taking their temperature. This is currently standard procedure for anyone entering the St. Colette Activities Center (adults and teens).  If your teen has any of the following symptoms we ask that you keep them home:

• Fever
• New or unusual cough
• Sore throat
• Shortness of breath
• Contact with someone with COVID-19

If anyone who has attended our in-person meetings tests positive, we will inform all who have attended in-person meetings. We will NOT share the name of anyone who tests positive, just the fact that someone did. If your teen has attended one of our events and does test positive, please let us know – anonymously if you choose – but please let us know. Some of our staff members, adult volunteers, and teens are either people with compromised immunity or are caretakers of elderly relatives - including both Mary Jo & Aleta! We are doing our best to offer opportunities for our teens but need to safeguard our own health as well. 
 
In Person Gatherings – full group
This fall we will be meeting indoors. When the weather is good we will do some activities outdoors, and we move around the building as much as possible to give ourselves room to spread out. Last year our building was updated with filters on the air handler that are able to remove viruses and bacteria from the air, and we always make sure the fans are on when we have an event in the building.
Per recent guidance from the health department, teens will continue to wear masks when indoors - we have extra masks available for any teen that forgets one.
We have hand sanitizer throughout the building and gloves are available to anyone who wants them. When we serve snacks and drinks, they will be individually wrapped, or served by someone wearing a mask and gloves.
Our maintenance department is regularly sanitizing chairs and other touched surfaces throughout the building after every event.
We will be enforcing social distancing as much as possible, but we are aware that many of our teens are gathering together outside of the group, so we really need our teens to do their part and keep their distance from anyone they are not already gathering with. We have planned our activities so they do NOT involve contact or shared items.
  
Online Gatherings
While we were glad to have the option of online meetings during the beginning of the pandemic, we do hope that we can continue to meet in person for this school year. If we are forced to cancel meetings because of a local outbreak, we will offer an online gathering just so teens have the chance to talk and see each other's faces.  We use Zoom to host our meetings and have the following protocols in place for these meetings:

• Every meeting has at least 2 adults present – typically Mary Jo and Aleta but other regular adult team volunteers sometimes join us.
• Meeting links are sent only to our Youth Group text list via Flocknote – teens are able to share the link with friends if they choose but we ask that they let us know if they have a new friend joining us.
• Our meetings are password protected and participants must be verified before they are able to join the meeting.
• We ask all of our teens to use their cameras for the majority of the meeting so we are all participating together.
• This fall we may be doing some group games via Jackbox games, which will require them to visit the Jackbox website to log in to the game.
• Most of our teens also play the game "Among Us" which requires an app on their phone - we do play this as a group occasionally. 

 
Communication
At present we are communicating with our teens and their families in several ways:

• Parents of junior high students and 9th graders are automatically added to our parent Flocknote group. We send more messages right at the beginning of the year but as the year progresses you will just get very periodic reminders.
• Parents of upperclassmen are added to our parent Flocknote group if we have their email address, but if you or your teen hasn’t given us your email address, you will not get emails from us. Please let us know if you want to be added!
• Junior high students are only contacted via email to their parents or through cards sent in the mail. We do not contact our junior high students directly by email or text, unless they have asked us to specifically.
• High school teens are added to both an email list and a text list on Flocknote. Most of our communication to our high school teens is via text, by their preference.
• In general, our adult volunteers do not communicate with our teens one on one. The exceptions to this are usually Mary Jo or Aleta directly contacting a teen by text or phone to ask a specific question. We have given our adult volunteers guidelines on how they should and shouldn’t be communicating with our teens, so if you have any questions or concerns about that please contact us.
• Most of our communication with our teens comes via Flocknote, but our teen leaders will be using Discord to communicate with the group. Many of our teens already use this app for school group communication. 

 
As the year, these protocols may change as the current situation in Michigan changes – we will share any updates as they happen.