Many high schools are struggling with whether to allow students to learn in the classroom as Covid-19 infections surge across the U.S. But not the nation’s boarding schools.
These schools have been mostly able to offer in-person learning with relatively few incidents, using a variety of intensive virus-mitigation strategies, according to Peter Upham, executive director of The Association of Boarding Schools. About a third of the nation’s more than 260 academic boarding schools have had Covid-19 cases, Upham said, but very few schools have seen outbreaks of more than just a couple students.
In many ways, boarding schools are like colleges, with most students living full-time on campus. But while colleges must deal with young adults, some of whom sleep off campus, boarding schools work with minors who are much more restricted and the schools generally have fewer enrollees. That gives administrators far more control.
“We’re in a bubble,” said Andrew Caslow, a student at Virginia Episcopal School, which has about 260 students in grades 9 through 12 on its 160-acre campus near Lynchburg. “I still have to social distance and wear a mask, of course, but it’s a small price to pay for being with my friends.”
In early September, as Virginia Episcopal School was getting ready to return to campus for the first time since the start of the pandemic, Caslow sent the school’s administrator an urgent email. Caslow’s grandfather had died from Covid-19 complications, and he had spent time while at home researching Covidwise, a contact-tracing app rolled out by the state health department that’s built on top of software developed by Apple Inc. and Google.
“Boarding schools are bubbles with the majority of students and staff staying inside the campus with only a finite number of people leaving,” he wrote to the administrator. Contact tracing, he said, could help keep the school virus-free.
The school’s medical director, Adrianna Bravo, was already in the process of rolling out a pandemic program that would include Covidwise. But she was happy to receive Caslow’s communication. “It is a bright spot when we see young people caring so much about public health,” she said.
Under the rules Bravo helped set up for the school, everyone returning to the campus needed to complete a test at home beforehand, and they were then retested on their first day back at school and one week later. That regimen turned up only two students who tested positive, one before arriving and one the day the student got there. That student was sent home.
Once the students were seen as virus free, she said, they were put into small cohorts that they attended classes with and ate meals with, a strategy aimed at keeping any potential outbreaks small.
“When we opened up school, we were in the red zone, implementing every mitigation effort to the max degree,” according to Bravo. By the Thanksgiving break, she said, there were no cases of transmission on campus, though there was one false positive, which briefly put the school on high alert. With no new cases, Episcopal High School was able to relax some rules. Students, for example, were allowed to socialize outdoors with others outside of their cohort.
“I’m going to library, playing sports,” Caslow said. “So much is relatively back to normal, or at least the new normal now.”