COMMUNITY EFFORT

Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges to St. Paul’s School, along with innovations, unsung heroes, and plenty of silver linings.

JANA F. BROWN

As the sun set on the summer of 2020, Rector Kathy Giles was staring down the start of the 2020-21 academic year, wondering how — and if — St. Paul’s School would be able to keep its community safe and in person during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was a lot of uncertainty as to how we were going to protect everyone’s health on the grounds,” Giles says. “The whole political context last summer leading up to the election was a low point, and it was hard to separate the anxiety generated by the pandemic from all of these other issues that were really turbulent in our community. But, throughout all of that, our students and families were warriors, singularly focused. For me, that was a lifesaver. It was, ‘Here is why we are here, here is how we are going to do this.’”

If the focus was on staying together and keeping the SPS community healthy, then getting to Graduation on May 23 was the ultimate goal. For Dean of Students Suzanne Ellinwood, the realization that they were going to achieve that milestone came on May 20. By then, all underformers had departed for the summer, leaving the members of the Form of 2021 to gather ahead of their commencement. On that Thursday night, Ellinwood was struck by the (vaccinated) Sixth Formers’ smiles as they gathered in the Friedman Community Center.

“Seeing them together and seeing how healthy they all were, how connected they all were,” Ellinwood says. “There was a peacefulness to the group. I realized this is why we did this, to get to this point at the end of the year. Looking at these great kids who had done so well, despite challenges, and seeing their contentment was a very special moment.”

Getting to the culminating moment of the school year required significant community strength and resolve. At Graduation, Giles acknowledged the efforts of the many who contributed to the success of an unexpected year. In addressing those gathered in person and watching online, she spoke of the adjustments made in order to get there. More than 400 students were vaccinated by health center staff in the final week of classes. The Board of Trustees put in countless hours to support the changes required to keep students COVID-free while in session. Facilities set up new classrooms, updated air circulation systems, and cleaned nonstop throughout the year. The Information Technology team ensured that learning technology worked smoothly — even with students scattered all over the world at times.

“Everything,”Giles says, “went better than we expected.”

A HEALTHY COMMUNITY

In order for students and faculty to be together on campus, living and learning during a global pandemic, it all began with the work of SPS Medical Director John Bassi and the team of nurses and administrators who integrated COVID testing into their daily regimen. Staff members Chris Jorgensen and Mary Marzelli oversaw a program that administered 740 pooled saliva tests for employees and students each week. By the end of the academic year, Dr. Bassi reported that the total number of COVID tests administered for 2020-21 topped 17,000. And, in that time, zero students (and only 12 adults) tested positive on campus. Jorgensen and Marzelli were nominated for — and received — Toland Awards, recognizing “exceptional service by a staff member.”

One discovery prompted by COVID was that St. Paul’s overall was a healthier community due to the safety measures mandated by the pandemic. For a year, the health center saw no cases of the flu and almost no cases of the usually pervasive strep throat.

The School’s success in handling the pandemic did not happen by chance. Prior to the global COVID-19 outbreak, St. Paul’s was ready with a pandemic preparedness plan that dated back to the H1N1 spread of 2009. The plan was reviewed and updated to meet the coronavirus crisis with a health and safety team that included Dr. Bassi, Ellinwood, Vice Rector for School Life Theresa Ferns ’84, Vice Rector for Faculty Michael Spencer, Director of Environmental Health and School Safety Tim McGinley, and CFO Brooks Seay. The group was in constant communication with infectious disease expert Dr. Jim Noble of Concord Hospital.

“We used that [pandemic plan] as a foundation,” Dr. Bassi explains. “To edit on the fly and see how a document like that works in real life was interesting. In medicine, we By the numbers like to have guidelines, best practices, and evidence-based decision-making, and there was none of that. Through hours of discussions and deliberation, we came up with a plan we felt would work. I look back at January 2020, and the amount of planning and resources we had to put in to actually make it work was tremendous. We are blessed to have a school that supported the plan.”

Students eat lunch in the Middle Dining Room, thanks to the efforts of FLIK Independent School Dining

Michael Seamans

FOOD ON THE GO

Once students were on campus, tested, and through quarantine, the School executed the next level of planning for daily life. At the start of the year, St. Paul’s contracted with FLIK Independent School Dining to provide meals to the community. FLIK brought its own team of COVID advisers and infectious disease experts and worked to make food more accessible and mobile for students, faculty, and staff. Paul Robarge, who took over food services management in early September, identified the goal for the year as “providing a safe operation that delivered nutritious and delicious” food options.

Because of the need to de-densify spaces on campus, grab-and-go lunch was served to staff members at a site on Rectory Road. Students and faculty had the option of finding meals in Coit and in the Friedman Community Center, where Robarge’s team set up daily lines that included salads, soups, sandwiches, and other choices, from veggies to cookies. While hot foods were spooned into individual containers at the time of service, cold foods were pre-packaged in compostable or reusable containers in Coit and transported to the off-site dining locations. On a daily basis, the food services staff packed items from fruit to hard-boiled eggs to grilled chicken (and beyond) into small containers for easy transport, labeling them with dates and allergens.

“The cold-food side was very challenging,” Robarge notes, adding that his crew was operating at approximately 70% of the normal workforce due to COVID. “The amount of work behind the scenes was astronomical.”

Year-end totals paint a staggering picture of the effort involved: 400,000 meals served and an average of 15 hours a week per employee of overtime logged. The goal post-pandemic, he adds, is to return to making traditional options available in Coit, including self-serve stations.

“I am super proud and very relieved we were able to get through this,” Robarge says.

RETHINKING CLASS SCHEDULES

Registrar Kristen Palizzolo managed a similar overhaul of systems, but hers involved course selection, course classification, grading, and class location to accommodate pandemic teaching and learning. Because students left the grounds for March Break 2020 and never returned for the remainder of the 2019-20 academic year, the Registrar’s Office, which includes Palizzolo and Assistant Registrar Megan Delisle, was forced to figure out a way to reclassify 150 courses as distance-learning options so they would appear correctly on transcripts. Grades also had to be modified to reflect the pass/fail system adopted for the 2020 Spring Term. In addition, Palizzolo and Delisle mailed 140 diplomas to members of the Form of 2020 and packaged and sent 60 academic awards to points all over the map. All the while, both women had children at home, who were unable to be in school or childcare.

“I distinctly remember one day,” Palizzolo recalls, “when we got most of the classes converted, telling the kids they needed to be on their own and then locking myself in my office at home to get it done.”

The work continued into summer 2020, as the Registrar’s Office designated atypical classroom spaces (the Sheldon Rotunda, McLane Squash Courts, and the Captain’s Room in the Hockey Center, among others) to accommodate social-distancing requirements. They also integrated a split lunch period into the schedule to limit the number of students in the dining hall at one time. That change, which worked well to reduce mealtime crowding, will be permanently adopted. Meanwhile, the schedule was everevolving, as total in-person school days numbered 143, with an additional 32 schoolwide distance-learning days on the calendar. Faculty adapted to their new spaces, while students complied with whatever was required for them to learn — whether virtually or in person.

LEARNING, TEACHING, AND GROWING

In a year when thriving was difficult for the entire world, SPS Sixth Formers submitted applications to 236 colleges and universities for consideration. Student artists produced 1,908 pieces of original work in fine arts courses throughout the school year. The Crumpacker Gallery hosted three in-person and four virtual exhibitions, featuring 78 student artists. The SPS Ballet Company, SPS Theatre Company, Chamber Music Program, and Chapel Choir offered 12 live performances. Across all arts programs, 16 visiting artists provided lectures and demonstrations via Zoom.

Athletics, which faced great uncertainty through much of 2020-21 because of the reliance on the health of other school communities, was able to offer a total of 176 interscholastic games over the course of the year, including a high of 82 in the spring. Parents, who put their trust in the School and complied with requirements that they not visit campus, gained access to 130 contests via livestream, through cooperation with fellow Lakes Region schools.

“What I learned from this group of students and faculty was resilience and persistence,” says Director of Athletics Dick Muther. “Everyone did what they needed to do to make it work for the kids, from parents to athletic trainers to equipment managers to support staff.”

0

Students who tested positive for COVID-19 on campus 1,908

1,908

Pieces of art produced in class by students

143

In-person school days during the 2020-21 academic year

17,000+

COVID tests administered during the academic year

400,000

Meals served by food services in 2020-21

150

Courses reclassified as distance-learning for Spring 2020

176

Interscholastic competitions for student-athletes

740

Pooled saliva COVID tests administered weekly

(continued on page 21)

Karen Bobotas

An SPS Graduation Like No Other

Gratitude and hope are at the forefront as School celebrates the Form of 2021.

Between the goalposts of the Guzzo Family Field, the Form of 2021 met its simultaneously traditional and extraordinary goal of graduating together, in person, in front of loved ones.

“Goodness, here we are,” Rector Kathy Giles said in her opening remarks to the 144 graduates, “on the football field, in family squares, on May 23, in person at Graduation. That’s an unprecedented sentence at the end of an unprecedented year.”

Rector Giles recognized students and employees for their efforts to live and learn on the grounds in the face of so much change. “It’s not what we wanted or planned, but we — as a whole — we have made it into something valuable and powerful,” she said. “And against the backdrop of suffering and injustice in the world out there, it has been an amazing privilege for each of us to get to do our jobs here, together, this year … St. Paul’s School exists to educate students to build purposeful lives in service to a greater good, and everyone here this morning has had a hand in making sure we stayed true to that mission this year.”

In his address, Sixth Form President Seth McKenzie spoke of the challenges of the past year. “How does one put into words what we have gone through as a form?” he asked. “Can words even truly convey what we went through? Our chosen theme for the year was resilience. Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. I cannot think of a form that embodies what resilience is more so than us.”

Beyond the difficulties of the academic year at SPS, he continued with a variation of the Rector’s theme of pushing good into the world and addressed the responses of the Sixth Form Officers to the aftermaths of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 and the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

“Worldwide, society has pivoted to and committed itself to making existing institutions more equitable and safer for everyone,” McKenzie said. “We saw this on the grand scale in the Black Lives Matter movement, and on the smaller scale here at SPS, where two Sixth Formers founded the Student Diversity Equity and Inclusion Council.”

As an institution, McKenzie said, St. Paul’s has made strides in affirming and uplifting student voices, in particular those of minorities. He added that there is still more to be done, and he called for the graduates to continue “to fight for our collective, honorable, and true-to-values vision of St. Paul’s. To do so, it is important that, once you receive your diplomas and walk off this stage, you do not lose the sense of community that we have all known so well.”

It was that teamwork that led to the vaccination of more than 400 eligible students prior to their departure on May 18 and the Graduation of the Form of 2021 on May 23. Ellinwood, the dean of students, credits the entire school life team with remaining positive and optimistic. At the end of the year, she adds, “We all still love our jobs and love working with kids and families. That, coupled with in-person Graduation, was huge. To be able to provide that to this class in the middle of a pandemic, we are so proud. I also credit Kathy [Giles] and her optimism. She was a great role model for positivity.”

Another unexpected benefit of the pandemic included an increase in sleep for students, resulting in improved wellness. Thanks to the delivery of personalized fitness, sleep, and recovery data from WHOOP fitness trackers donated by company founder Will Ahmed ’08, SPS learned that, in 2020-21, students averaged 70 minutes more sleep per night than the national benchmark.

“We will not be going back to all of the student-life time issues we wrestled with in the past,” Giles says. “We learned that teacher/student time is premium, so we moved some meetings out of the afternoon into early mornings so faculty can do that while kids are sleeping.”

Giles started her boarding school career in 1985, and has been through crises of varying degree during that tenure. The past year, she acknowledges, was challenging because of the need for high-stakes decision-making combined with rampant uncertainty, community anxiety, and a lack of reliable information with which to make important decisions due to the evolving nature of a pandemic. There is one image that she says will remain with her forever. It was Easter morning, Sunday, April 4, 2021, and Dr. Bassi’s team had just received the final round of reentry testing after students returned from March Break. All tests came back negative for COVID-19. Instead of eating in the tents that had been set up to limit indoor contact, students were able to eat — together — in Coit.

“What the kids realized was that everyone had come back healthy from the break, and we were going to be able to have the spring they wanted to have,” Giles says. “We were going to be able to finish this year. Kids were going into brunch and high-fiving that we were a healthy community. It was our goal to stay in person all year so students and teachers could do the work of learning, teaching, and growing. Everyone bought in and did their part, even when it was scary and hard.”

The Sheldon Rotunda was among the campus spaces modified to accommodate socially distanced learning.