Dear Elite School of Dance Families, 

We are excited to let you know – we are beginning our reopening on September 8th! 

As you probably know, in late July the Governor introduced additional restrictions on our state's reopening. One of the new restrictions was reducing fitness centers to 5 participants at a time, and this would have included dance studios like us.

An update to restrictions and guidance was announced on August 3, which you can find here, with new requirements taking effect August 10. In reviewing and discussing the new guidelines, we want to share the following updates to our operations at ESD:

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But before we get to that, we want to thank all of you who have been extremely thoughtful and sent helpful feedback, suggestions, concerns, and words of encouragement.

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From those results, we know some of you are looking forward to the prospect of getting back in the dance studio. We also know that some of you are understandably concerned about a return, and some just aren't sure how to feel – we completely understand all the different degrees of un/certainty.

 

ESD has developed a plan of different stages of our own for reopening, as we want to make sure we are conducting practice as safely as possible. We are committed to working through the stages and adding more dancers as soon as we can, responsibly, as we slowly turn the dial of reopening up.

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Because of our required reduced capacity, we will need to re-enroll our dancers that are ready to return to the studio into a new class. We know that we had asked everyone to stay enrolled in their old classes because at the time, we had no way of knowing how long we'd be closed or what reopening would look like, and hoped for an end of the year recital in the month of September. We appreciate everyone that stayed enrolled while payments were suspended, and we will be giving everyone who did priority to return in the new session.

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But now we know that we can't just flip the switch back on; we have to essentially start anew. And because of this, we've decided the best way to proceed is to temporarily return to sessions, instead of our continuous enrollment. This will allow us to continue to best adjust our schedule as government restrictions lift and increase customer demand. 

We are still working on a new enrollment process, but we're hoping your initial takeaway can be these three things:

 

• For anyone previously enrolled at ESD when we closed in March, your tuition will not be reinstated (auto-payments will not begin) unless you enroll in a new class. Priority enrollment will be given to those who maintained their enrollment during the closure before we open up enrollment to the general public.

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• Because of the need to significantly reduce capacity and socially distance, we will have a whole new schedule this fall. We will need anyone that would like to return to re-enroll, based on the new schedule.

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• The new schedule will be an 8-week session from September 8th-November 3rd.  Then as the state continues to re-open in phases and our reduced capacity limitations are adjusted, we will modify our schedule again moving forward.  Families enrolled in the summer session will again receive priority enrollment moving into the 2020-2021 class season.

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• Please know, as we've said before, we understand the decision if and when to return to any of our pre-COVID activities is very personal. And even when some of us do physically return to the studio, we will also continue our virtual classes for as long there is demand for them. We hope the information here is just that – informative.  We are all in this journey together, and hope we continue to serve your family this coming season. 

 

Sincerely,

Heidi and Tony Gamlieli
Elite School of Dance