Dear Friends -
When our home on Norwood Road is in full swing, it is quite an experience! You can hear the laughter and chatter as students move from building to building and room to room between classes. You can feel the intense focus of students taking notes and grappling with robust essential questions, using what they know to build a bridge to what they have yet to discover. You can catch teachers pouring over the creation of dynamic assessments, and coaches getting ready for that practice before tomorrow's game. You can hear the squeals of kindergarteners discovering frogs and tadpoles by the pond, and the sopranos of performers in the PAC. There are few things more lively than a busy campus like ours, full of academics, artists, athletes, and activists!
I believe I speak for all of us when I say that we crave both the routine and the chaos of a pre-pandemic school year. The decision that we face regarding how we re-open school in September is a weighty and complicated one. Our Administrative Council pulled out the magnifying glass to examine a myriad of logistics surrounding preparations for the opening of campus. I called a Zoom meeting for all SSFS faculty and staff to hear their voices on the matter. I met virtually with a group of 29 community members representing a cross-section of students, faculty, staff, and parents from all divisions and various departments of the school. I reached out to local-area school heads to confer about scenarios for school re-opening. All the while, David Hickson was tracking the curve of infection rates; Laura Miyoshi was monitoring facilities guidelines from the CDC and state and federal governments; Lisa Dyer was speaking with medical professionals and keeping an eye on our small on-site summer camp to see what hosting limited groups of students on campus looks like. Division Heads were making various scheduling models and figuring out ways to create student pods and cohorts. All of us followed the re-opening plans and announcements of local public school districts. Most recently, some of us participated in a Zoom call addressing the re-opening of private schools with Dr. Travis Gayle, Montgomery County's Health Officer, and Dr. Earl Stoddard, Montgomery County's Emergency Manager. We have done our due diligence in making our decision about the opening of school.
The biggest driver of our decision is the safety and well-being of our students and our faculty and staff. While private schools have not been mandated to close their campuses, Montgomery County's Health Officer, Dr. Travis Gayle, has advised against in-person classes for the start of the school year, citing the high levels of risk and recent trends in our county which suggest that we stick strictly to social distancing protocols and small, stable groups to lessen exposure. With this in mind, all academic and co-curricular programming for grades K-12 will be conducted online for the first semester (ending late January 2021). We will continue to monitor the arc of the pandemic and will make a determination about how we will start the second semester on or before December 1, 2020.
Because we know that school serves the function of not only fostering academic growth, but also social and emotional growth and connections, each division is also creating small social pods of students that will be connected with a faculty member. These social pods (12-16 people) will meet together regularly online for check-ins and decompression; in addition, they will be invited to campus once every 3 weeks to share opportunities for in-person social experiences within their pods. Bringing large numbers of students and faculty to campus multiple times per week is not advisable at this time. However, our spacious, beautiful campus affords us the opportunity to host small groups of students to spread out and enjoy some in-person time together. Social distancing, face masks, and hygiene and sanitization measures will be in place, and participation in these on-campus meet-ups is voluntary.
Our dorms will be open to 7-day boarders who will quarantine on campus in their own small pods, and we will enhance their virtual learning programs with in-person supports and a structured environment for studying and living on campus.
At a recent meeting of our sports league, the PVAC membership voted unanimously to postpone the start of the fall sports season due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Directors have created a condensed three-season plan, with competition scheduled to begin in January.
For our youngest students (PK3 and PK4), for whom a virtual program is not a developmentally viable educational solution, we will be offering a limited, in-person program on our campus, with significant modifications to decrease risk of exposure for those students and their teachers. We are working with the state licensure office and our COVID response team to determine the programming balance that addresses both the need for student and faculty safety and the need for in-person programming for our youngest learners. Additional details regarding this program will follow, but in the meantime, please reach out to Courtney Benson, the Interim Head of Lower School, with questions.
Please see this summary description from David Hickson about our program plans for the fall. Stay tuned, as many more details regarding these plans (including an extensive COVID-19 Guidebook) will be provided next week.
Our decision was reached with many factors in mind. With all that we don't know, here's what we do know:
- Parents have significant concerns about bringing their kids to large gatherings right now. Even as indicators can look to be improving, parents are understandably feeling cautious about the level of exposure.
- Teachers are concerned that if we are in-person, the necessary focus on social distancing protocols - the wearing of face masks, keeping a safe distance from each other, not gathering in large groups and minimizing the amount of socializing across designated groups, and the major shifts in some of our social times (socially distant lunches and recesses, for example), will change the feel of school so significantly that it will distract from teaching and learning in ways that could be emotionally damaging. In-person schooling this fall would look and feel remarkably different from what we are used to. As one teacher put it, "We are going to be scanning for risk constantly and will miss the glory of school."
- Students need the social engagement that school provides. The CDC notes, "Aside from a child's home, no other setting has more influence on a child's health and well-being than their school." This has led us to commit to offering social opportunities on campus and online, utilizing the leadership and creativity of the student government groups Torch (US), Flame (MS), and Spark (LS) to build community. Please see the message from this year's clerk of Torch, Irene Denniston '21, who, as a senior and an SSFS "lifer," provides a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing our community.
- Teaching and learning online are not the same as in-person teaching and learning. Because we know this and wanted to be prepared to go virtual at any point, our teachers have spent the summer participating in professional development both in-house and with One Schoolhouse, a leading organization in K-12 online education. Our teachers are designing curricula made expressly for online delivery, and learning pedagogical skills specific to teaching in an online environment. That means that you'll continue to find the challenging, supportive, multifaceted academic program built on love of inquiry and depth of student-teacher relationships that drew you to Sandy Spring Friends! Additionally, we are making plans to ensure that students have access to the resources of our school counselors and learning specialists, as well as their academic advisors.
When it is safe to do so, we will return to campus in larger numbers. In the meantime, we will focus our energies on a task I feel extremely confident about: our ability to provide an outstanding and novel educational experience online, while keeping our community connected and supported in various ways, including using our campus for voluntary small-group in-person experiences in our social pods.
If there is anything that we can do to be helpful to you at this time, please do not hesitate to ask. I leave you with a little wisdom from one of my favorite sages, Winnie the Pooh.