Dear parents,
I write to share our current plans for reopening Commonwealth in September. A planning group working together with consultants from Fusion Cell (who have deep experience in managing infectious risk at military installations) have devised a set of requirements for a return to school that will, we believe, greatly diminish the risk of infection.
Please read through the reopening plan and submit any questions you may have to this form. We also hope you will attend a virtual town hall meeting on Monday, August 10, at 7:00 p.m. (We will send an invitation with a Zoom link later this week.) At that meeting we will answer questions, clarify the planning that remains for August, and, we hope, give everyone a clear understanding of our path and options as we move toward September.
Let me start by saying that our plan assumes that infection rate and conditions in the Boston area hold steady or improve. Should that change, even between now and September, we will be ready to shift to a fully online model as we did in the spring.
Assuming trends hold steady, the critical measures that will permit us to conduct in-person learning are masking and the splitting of the student body into two teams to allow for social distancing in the school building: there will be no more than sixty-five students (and around twenty adults) in the building on any given day, and numbers in each classroom will allow for six-foot distancing. The two groups will alternately participate in person or from home. (The exact rotation will soon be determined.) We are equipping our classrooms to conduct concurrent learning, which allows those in the room to interact with fellow students (and, in some cases, teachers) who are at home. Our reopening plan spells out other measures that will be in place—about movement, handwashing and cleaning, air filtering, and more—that will further diminish risk.
It's important that all understand that, even as we conduct this concurrent plan, students, teachers, or staff members may work from home full time, especially in cases where underlying conditions or other circumstances make in-person participation too risky. We are confident from preliminary surveys and responses that we will have a sufficient number of students, teachers, and staff in the building come September to make the in-person learning meaningful and to provide effective supervision for the students.
Since early July we have been running our summer Dive In program each morning with ten to twelve students in the building. We have learned a lot about managing movement and encouraging safe practices. That experience gives me confidence about our ability, conditions permitting, to be ready for Commonwealth's modified reopening next month.
We look forward to answering your questions at next week's town meeting.
Yours,