28 minute read
Navigating the Unknown
By Michele Godin
AS THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC SURGED, tens of millions of students across the United States spent the 2020-2021 academic year in a completely virtual or hybrid learning mode. The experience at The Episcopal Academy was very different, as most students spent 85% of their school year learning in-person, on campus.
Providing students with an in-person experience required more than simple masking and social distancing protocols. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic forced school leaders to rethink almost every aspect of the school year. Oftentimes, what might seem like a simple health and safety decision required intensive teamwork and significant reengineering in order to implement. From physical spaces, to the flow of a typical school day, to job roles and staffing models, to the ways in which we teach and engage our community, to our beloved traditions, and more, school leaders had to redesign everything to ensure our students could safely thrive on campus.
Today, as we reflect on our success in keeping EA’s campus open, we celebrate the incredible efforts of our entire community. Our administrators, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni were committed to doing whatever it took to maintain in-person learning. The smiles on our students’ faces, visible even through their masks, made all of the sacrifices worth it in the end.
Pictured: Kelly Smith '21
Credit: Tracy Rosenberg '21
Join us in taking a behind-the-scenes look at how we overcame one of the most challenging moments in our school’s storied history.
A BUSY SUMMER
The summer of 2020 was anything but restful for everyone at EA. Following the conclusion of a successful spring of emergency virtual learning, all eyes turned to the upcoming fall: How could we provide the best-possible education while keeping students and faculty safe? With a statewide stay-athome order in place, the COVID Operations Task Force began meeting virtually each week in May. By mid-July, the group was holding check-in meetings every other day with longer planning meetings each week. By August, the Task Force members returned to their offices on campus to continue preparations.
The uncertainty of the extent of community spread come fall required the Task Force to consider three possible scenarios: a full virtual return, a full in-person return, and a hybrid approach. For each scenario, the team developed different Upper, Middle, and Lower School academic schedules, as well as revised plans to execute programs like Chapel, dining, student clubs, athletics practices, and arts events. Updates were shared with parents, faculty, and staff weekly via emails and webinars, along with regular parent polls to gauge each family’s comfort level with an in-person return.
The Task Force closely monitored positive case trends and guidance from the CDC, Pennsylvania Department of Health, local officials, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) PolicyLab. In mid-June, the local health department published its initial guidance to schools, which helped guide the development of EA’s Health and Safety Plan.
EA faculty focused on keeping students engaged during a summer of isolation. When it became apparent that most summer programming would not run, EA mobilized to develop a virtual schedule of 300+ for-credit and enrichment courses for students in all grades. “We wanted to find ways to offer value to our families and additional income to our faculty during an incredibly challenging time,” shared Greville Haslam Head of School Dr. T.J. Locke. “We offered all of our courses free of charge to current families, and we covered the costs of Global Online Academy courses for students.”
To help faculty deepen their online teaching expertise, EA’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) offered three custom-designed professional development programs. The first two sessions helped faculty prepare for teaching their online summer courses. The third course was an intensive, 40-hour online teaching certification program that 136 faculty members volunteered to participate in.
“There is a huge difference between taking an academic program and putting it online and intentionally designing a program for that environment,” explained Dr. T.J. Locke. “Our certification focused on helping teachers design dynamic experiences, foster community, balance synchronous and asynchronous time, and build formative assessments for the online environment. We wanted them to have all the tools necessary and to feel confident and prepared if we needed to start the year out in a virtual setting.”
PREPARING CAMPUS FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR
In coordination with the Task Force’s planning, EA’s facilities and operations team spent the entire summer preparing the physical campus. Every classroom had to be measured to ensure appropriate spacing between desks. In order to fit all students in each class, the team removed large furniture and ripped out built-in cabinets. They installed plexiglass dividers on desks in early education classrooms to help provide an added layer of protection. They created outdoor classrooms and mask break areas by installing tents wherever possible. They also reworked nurses’ offices, converted spaces into isolation rooms, and adapted faculty offices and common spaces.
Upper School student lounges were relocated to larger spaces, like the Carrafiell Family Theater and Class of 1944 Chapel, where they removed furniture and carefully measured and marked distanced seating locations. They built a satellite dining hall in the Dixon Athletic Center, which would allow students to be spread out across three dining locations. Extra stanchions and thousands of floor decals were installed across campus to help students maintain a safe distance from one another.
The team reengineered the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems across campus to increase the amount of outside air being pulled in, to lower the humidity level, and to enhance filtration. They partnered with EA’s cleaning service to enhance the typical daily cleaning standard and to expand staffing so there would be more help with sanitizing high-touch surfaces during the school day.
EA also invested in new electrostatic sprayer technology to apply an antimicrobial agent on high-touch surfaces. All water fountains were converted to bottle filling stations, and touchless faucets were installed in bathrooms and handwashing stations. Barrels of hand sanitizer were ordered, and 150 dispenser stations were installed across campus.
“The planning for our in-person return scenario was a massive undertaking. The work was intensive and at times felt neverending,” explained Mark Notaro, chief operating officer and chair of the Task Force. “Our facilities, maintenance, grounds, and security crews never lost sight of the goal to get our campus ready for a safe return. It was teamwork at its finest.”
SCHOOL DAY REDESIGN
A large component of EA’s Health and Safety Plan focused on how different aspects of a typical school day would be managed in the inperson return scenario.
EA adjusted its dress code to remove items that are not laundered daily. Other one-year adjustments included waiving the athletic requirement and allowing students to pack their own lunch instead of utilizing the standard all-inclusive lunch plan. School leaders also knew that some families might not be comfortable returning in-person if campus reopened, so a remote learning option was made available. This option would also help students or teachers who needed to quarantine or isolate at different points throughout the year. Teachers were provided iPads and stands to set up in their classrooms to allow students to join class from home. EA’s 1:1 device program allowed for every student, PreK through 12, to have a laptop or iPad to use while in-school and at home.
In the Class of 1944 Chapel, seating dropped from 900 to 140. The team worked with school chaplains and the technology team to set up livestreaming capabilities, and faculty members volunteered to serve as producers. Students from one grade would attend Chapel inperson, while the rest of the students would remain in their classrooms and watch the livestream. The team of producers were also trained in EA’s new webinar platform so that Chapel could continue if school needed to transition to virtual learning at any point. Finding a way to safely provide lunch to around 1,200 students also proved challenging. The new satellite dining hall gave an additional location to spread students out. Dining staff members would prepare meals and transport them in hotboxes from the Crawford Campus Center up to the Dixon Athletic Center. School leaders needed to restructure their daily schedules to incorporate more lunch blocks and to carefully schedule grades and students in a way that kept total capacity as low as possible in each space during each block.
The flow of traffic to the dining halls and through the servery and eating areas needed to be retooled to allow for distancing, and tables needed to be carefully sanitized between blocks. With so many tables, the cleaning process would take some time, but too much time would then impact the incoming group of students and not provide them much time to eat. The Task Force assembled a team of 25 administrators, staff, and student deans to help the cleaning and dining staff achieve quick turnover.
The new daily health screening presented another logistical challenge. Completing on-campus screenings of 1,500 people would take too much time and may require staggered arrival times. The team partnered with an app developer to create a daily screening app that employees and parents would need to complete each morning before arriving to campus. Following completion of screening questions, a green screen would appear in the app. This screen would need to be shown to a school official before entering a building each morning. The Task Force mapped out morning checkpoint locations and tapped faculty and staff volunteers to manage the areas. EA’s Health Services team would begin monitoring for failed screenings around 5 a.m. each morning and would follow up with each person to gather more information and determine if it was safe for them to come to school that day.
“We knew many families would be uncomfortable sending their young children to school on buses, so we anticipated an increase to our carline traffic,” shared Head of Lower School Dr. Terry Malone. “We needed to find a way to quickly check for green screens as parents pulled up so that we could keep traffic flowing. We tripled our typical carline staff by leaning on team members from the admissions, advancement, business, communications, and operations offices.”
The “all hands on deck” approach was critical to the success of in-person learning. Faculty and staff jumped in to serve new roles, and special relationships were formed, as people who would normally not work closely together collaborated to ensure smooth and safe school operations.
The Lower School needed to make many other adjustments to their day. Students typically travel to other classrooms for their “specials,” like library, science, Spanish, art, and drama. This year, the specialist teachers travelled to homerooms using mobile classroom carts. Many of the specialists’ rooms were too small to safely accommodate a full class, and school leaders wanted to limit student movement and hallway traffic.
The playground was closed most of the year, so recess looked very different. Teachers leveraged outdoor spaces and tents to allow students to take mask breaks and, as one teacher described, “to get their wiggles out.” Students continued to travel to physical education classes, but activities were revamped to allow for social distancing. All-school assemblies would be hosted via webinar and broadcast into each homeroom. Dismissal would also be managed differently.
The Middle and Upper School also needed to rework a lot for an inperson return. With strict capacity limits set for each classroom, school leaders needed to carefully design student schedules. To help reduce hallway traffic, the schedules were designed with added “passing time,” and class dismissals were staggered. Middle School recess would relocate to athletic fields where students would have more room to spread out. Upper School students who had free periods would now need to report to their relocated student lounge for a study hall. If they wanted to meet with a teacher or coach, they would need to be signed out.
School leaders also anticipated that faculty and staff members may need to quarantine at different points throughout the year. To ensure extra hands were available to substitute in classrooms and help with other duties, the school hired 18 extra adjunct and assistant teachers. A few of these teachers were EA alumni who were excited to return to their alma mater to help out.
TESTING & CONTACT TRACING
“One of our biggest challenges was designing a way to track where each student was during every minute of their day. We knew we would need this information for contact tracing and notification purposes if we had any positive cases,” shared Head of Upper School Mike Letts, Hon. “Our class, lunch, and athletic rosters were already housed in our database, so we added rosters for everything else we could think of, like student clubs, fitness room hours, bus riders, and more. We required teachers and coaches to take attendance during every block of the day to help us track who was here and which groups of students they interacted with each day.”
Health Services and Communications worked to design a three-tiered notification plan for future positive cases. Everyone involved in the process participated in practice drills before the school year began in order to be ready to act swiftly.
The Task Force knew contact tracing and quarantining would be an essential layer in mitigating community spread. As the local health department’s contact tracing team became overtaxed, schools were asked to conduct their own contact tracing. The Health Services team was expanded to include the athletic trainers and five per diem nurses. Four members of the team completed a specialized, six-hour contact tracing course from Johns Hopkins University and worked to set up internal processes for quickly isolating individuals, logging sensitive health information, and identifying close contacts.
Health Services and the Business Office also began working to establish relationships with testing providers and labs so that testing could be offered on-campus for symptomatic individuals and close contacts. As supply of Personal Protective Equipment became scarce, the teams collaborated to find and order masks, face shields, and other equipment for faculty and staff.
DECISION TIME
As the summer weeks sped by, the time to make a decision on which scenario to implement for the beginning of school was drawing near. An extra week was added to the year to allow for flexibility and extra instructional time ahead of what might be a disruptive year. The first day of school was set for Aug. 31.
Due to heightened positivity rates and fear of a post-Labor Day spike, the county health department issued a recommendation that all schools begin in a virtual setting through Oct. 8. Local health experts endorsed the recommendation, and state officials left it up to each school and district to make a decision on their instructional mode. After a spring of virtual learning and an activity-less summer, many families were disappointed by the recommendation and strongly urged school leaders across the region to move forward with in-person learning. Countless news stories recounted four and five-hour long public comment sections of virtual school board meetings. One by one, school boards began announcing a virtual start, with a hopeful hybrid return in October.
After much deliberation and consultation with health experts, EA announced it would also begin the year in a virtual setting. Work quickly began to coordinate for families to sign up for 15-minute time slots to retrieve personal items left behind the prior year and to pick up books and supplies for the first few weeks of school. School leaders continued closely monitoring positivity and incidence rates. A special EA COVID Index was designed and updated daily, which compared the proportion of EA students from each local county to each county’s latest metrics. Weekly calls with health experts from the community and CHOP PolicyLab were held to help inform when it would be safe to resume inperson learning.
With the statewide stay-at-home order lifted earlier in the summer, school leaders worked to organize small, outdoor, distanced gatherings for different groups of students during the first few weeks of virtual instruction.
“We knew how disappointed our students were to not be able to return to campus. The lack of social interaction during the prior months was so hard on them,” explained Head of Middle School Imana Legette. “We wanted to find safe ways to help them socialize and reunite with their friends. Our expansive outdoor spaces allowed us to invite advisory groups back for some fun activities and to host small orientation sessions for new students.”
The fate of fall athletics was still in question, but segments of Upper School teams began gathering on fields for distanced strength and conditioning sessions. Lower School hosted small activity days, especially for PreK and Kindergarten students to help them get to know their new school and classmates. Community service and other club activities were also hosted for small groups.
In mid-September, a provisional plan to return to in-person learning was released to families. The anticipated post-Labor Day spike was not as drastic as health experts predicted, and the Task Force felt confident in its Health and Safety Plan.
As the team prepared to re-open campus, it partnered with experts at KPMG to conduct a comprehensive audit of its plan. The KPMG team was impressed by the thoroughness of the plan and commended the Task Force for thinking through so many intricate details to ensure the health and safety of students and employees.
STUDENTS REUNITE RETURN TO SCHOOL
Faculty returned to campus a few days before the students’ return in order to tour campus, attend special protocol training sessions, and conduct dry runs of the school day. One teacher described their return to campus like stepping into a time capsule dated March 12, 2020, when campus abruptly shut down at the beginning of the pandemic.
While much work had been done to ensure everyone’s safety, anxiety levels were high leading up to the first student day.
On Sept. 21, students began arriving a few grades at a time. The youngest students were welcomed back first, along with the senior class, who would play an important leadership role in setting an example for the entire student body. Throughout the week, school leaders and faculty held safety training sessions for students and helped them assimilate to the new protocols.
All students returned together a week later, with approximately 10% of students choosing to remain virtual. As everyone settled into a new normal, the Task Force continued to closely monitor local positive case trends and evolving guidance. The health department’s guidelines for schools were updated 13 times throughout the year, requiring ongoing tweaks to protocols and school life. State officials issued a travel advisory, recommending against non-essential travel, and suggested that individuals quarantine if travel was necessary.
As the weeks progressed, students and faculty fell into a new, natural rhythm. Typical autumn activities were adapted in real-time to adhere to the new protocols. Student assemblies and club meetings were mostly held virtually, so headphones were a new essential school supply. School portrait day included a drivethrough option for students who were learning remotely. Choral and woodwind music classes relocated outdoors, and many other teachers took advantage of outdoor spaces.
The Inter-Academic League announced that an abbreviated, non-championship, fall athletic season for Upper School would begin in late October. The Athletics Department mobilized to increase buses, since fewer students could be transported due to social distancing, and to coordinate live streaming, since spectators would not be permitted to attend competitions. Middle School sports continued without competitions. Middle and Upper School designed new ways and spaces to supervise students between the end of the day and their sports blocks.
With visitors not permitted on campus, the Admissions Office needed to rethink how to manage the busy fall admission season. The team partnered with the Communications Office and school leaders to produce many virtual events and experiences to help prospective families learn more about EA.
On Oct. 20, EA was notified of its first positive COVID case in the community, and all of the Task Force’s planning and drills were put to the test. The team quickly completed contact tracing and issued notifications. For the first few positive community cases, the team consulted closely with EA’s school physician and local health officials to determine if quarantines beyond identified close contacts were recommended. During the fall, the school was seeing an average of two positive cases per week.
Everyone spent as much time outdoors as possible. The Clark Campus Green took on a polka dotted appearance, as distanced circles were painted to help students identify where it was safe to take a mask break or enjoy a snack. The circles quickly became an iconic visual of the year.
EA/Haverford/Agnes Irwin Weekend was canceled, but that did not stop students from celebrating Spirit Week. Students participated in themed outof-uniform days, outdoor activities, and lounge decorating contests.
WINTER STRESSES & CELEBRATIONS
Health experts were gravely concerned about people spending more time indoors and potentially traveling or hosting family and friends during the holidays. The Task Force faced the season with caution. A proactive decision was made to transition to virtual learning for a week following both the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. As positive case trends were monitored, a decision was also made that Upper School students would remain virtual between the two breaks. The decisions were wise, as positive cases reported to EA began to slightly rise following each holiday. In fact, positive cases were significantly spiking everywhere. By early-December, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was reporting more than 10,000 new positive cases each day. The few schools that had returned to hybrid quickly transitioned back to virtual with no firm return dates planned. Local officials began increasing some of the easing restrictions in an effort to slow the spread. New indoor youth sports capacity limits were enacted, forcing EA’s winter varsity teams to restructure their strength and conditioning sessions into groups of fewer than 10 people.
The holidays at EA are always a special time and ripe with cherished traditions. Parents, faculty, and staff quickly worked to pivot in order to help students celebrate. The grounds crew set up an enormous tree on the Clark Campus Green, and the Music Department worked with students to produce and release virtual holiday concerts.
The EA Parents’ Association converted its Gingerbread Decorating party into an at-home activity, logged 400 orders of decorating kits, and braved the cold to staff a curbside pick-up for families. A special retrospective video was produced to celebrate the popular Scrooge Chapel and broadcast via webinar, to the delight of students and faculty. Seniors from the Upper School orchestra gathered in small groups in the evening to pre-record beautiful renditions of nine carols that would be played during the webinar broadcast of Lessons and Carols. A virtual Christmas Eve service was also hosted via webinar, and a special “EA Unlocked” podcast episode with student-performed holiday music was released.
As the world turned the calendar page to 2021, hoping for a brighter year, Mother Nature made her presence known across the Mid-Atlantic. Multiple snow storms and bitterly cold temperatures pounded the area, resulting in weather-related delays and virtual learning days. Families across the region collectively mourned the loss of snow days, now that learning could continue outside of the classroom. Lower School students still got to enjoy sledding during recess, and the school announced surprise dress-down days every couple of weeks to help keep student spirits high during the dreary winter months.
By late January, positive COVID case counts began to decline, and the newly-approved COVID vaccines began making their way into the arms of healthcare workers and other high-risk individuals. Many other schools remained virtual with plans to resume hybrid learning in the spring. At EA, students and faculty eased back into COVID routines on campus. Most time was spent indoors since cold temperatures left campus snow-covered for weeks. A short, inter-league winter athletics season was held, and artists who missed the opportunity to perform regularly during Chapel and other events were featured via the new Performing Arts video channel.
As the cold days began to fade away, the community optimistically eyed the spring, hoping to soon reach the light at the end of the very dark COVID tunnel.
A HOPEFUL SPRING
While EA successfully continued deploying its in-person learning plan, the majority of schools across the country remained in a virtual or hybrid environment. Pressure had been mounting to elevate teachers on the vaccine priority lists, in the hopes that schools everywhere could re-open. Teachers rejoiced on March 2 when government officials announced the goal to have all educators vaccinated by the end of the month.
Finding an available vaccine appointment in those early days was like searching for the Holy Grail. As the Task Force worked with the county to set up a vaccination clinic, teachers were encouraged to try to find appointments on their own sooner. In midMarch, the county’s education department began accepting appointment reservations for their upcoming teacher clinics, which allowed those who hadn’t yet found an appointment to schedule their vaccination.
Back on campus, spring had sprung. The trees and flowers were blooming, and the iconic white circles re-appeared across the Green, inviting students and faculty back outdoors. The EA Parents’ Association helped to brighten homes for Easter by coordinating a flower sale with drive-through pick-up.
The Inter-Academic League announced plans for a full spring athletic season, with limited spectators, and a new, large outdoor stage appeared in front of the Chapel for ArtsFest and spring musical productions. EA’s dining services partner, SAGE, hosted a schoolwide outdoor lunch on National Picnic Day, leaving many students to remark how it was the first day that felt truly back to normal on campus.
The combination of warmer weather, vaccine availability, and pandemic fatigue led many in the region to begin to let their guards down. School leaders asked the entire community to double down on efforts to maintain protocols and keep students safe.
In mid-April, EA experienced a COVID spike in Upper School, forcing a transition to remote learning to mitigate any further spread and allow Health Services more time to contact trace. Health Services had recently secured a certificate of waiver to be able to operate similarly to a lab, allowing the school to process COVID tests on-site. Students who were identified as potentially high-risk were asked to secure a negative test before returning to school, and the Health Services team was able to offer convenient testing on campus. Upper School resumed without further incident three days later.
In May, the Alumni Office hosted a special virtual Alumni Week celebration, complete with awards ceremonies, class reunions, and town halls with school leaders and students. A limited number of parents and family members were invited to campus for spring concerts and productions of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” by the Harlequin Club and “Godspell” by the Domino Club.
As vaccines were approved for emergency use in adolescents, the Task Force worked with a local pharmacy to host a vaccination clinic for students. As vaccination rates in adults and teens rose, state and local officials began to ease restrictions and congregate setting capacity limits. While the Task Force decided to maintain its on-campus protocols through the end of the school year, the outside world was starting to look a little more normal. This was positive news as the team prepared to host all closing exercises on campus.
CLOSING OUT A MEMORABLE YEAR
Leveraging the new outdoor stage, the Task Force planned for all ceremonies to be held outside. The team worked with outside production firms to help set up an audio system, jumbo-tron, and livestream feeds. Mother Nature made another appearance during the trying year by unleashing an early heat wave, wrought with the threat of dangerous thunderstorms.
The 5th grade promotion ceremony, held on the final Friday of the school year, was hosted outdoors under a cloudy sky. The Class of 2028 was celebrated and welcomed to the Middle School. During dismissal, parents surprised the Lower School teachers with a special thank you car parade.
The 8th grade promotion ceremony was held a few days later. Parents of the Class of 2025 gathered on the Green during an extremely hot morning. Students processed up the lawn to their seats and were congratulated for their resilience, flexibility, and leadership in the Middle School before being officially welcomed to Upper School.
EA’s 236th Commencement was held on the evening of Tuesday, June 8. School leaders had decided weeks prior to move the date up and to host Prom after Commencement. All seniors were tested twice prior to Commencement so that they could participate without needing to wear masks.
By the Numbers
$3.5M in COVID-related investments
693 COVID tests administered
194 webinar events hosted
4,500 social distancing floor decals
144 in-person school days
18 new adjunct faculty members
A JOYFUL FAREWELL TO THE CLASS OF 2021
The forecast for Commencement night was again questionable. About an hour and a half before the ceremony, the call was made to move indoors. Everyone involved in event preparations quickly transitioned everything indoors. Each graduate would be permitted two guests, to allow for proper distancing, and other relatives could view a livestream in the theater.
Rain poured down on the Chapel roof as Valedictorian Bo Aldridge congratulated classmates. “The world will not long remember what everyday life was like under the shadow of COVID, but we will,” he shared. “We will remember that we did not merely exist, we did not just persist, waiting for the storm to pass, but rather in the face of overwhelming adversity, we dared to thrive, and develop into young adults.”
The rain subsided and the sun appeared, just as the final organ notes of “Episcopal, Episcopal” could be heard wafting through the air. The 137 members of the Class of 2021 and their families spilled out onto the Green, shrieking with joy and posing for photographs.
The next two days were spent preparing for the on-campus Junior/ Senior Prom. For the seniors, it would be their first prom since last year’s was canceled. All students and their dates were required to visit campus for testing. A dedicated group of senior parents planned an amazing night for students, complete with fun music, a delicious dinner, twinkling lights, carnival games, photo stations, and a surprise fireworks display.
As the stillness of summer crept across campus the next day, the reality of what the EA community had collectively accomplished set in. Despite many obstacles, students studied safely on campus for nearly the entire year and enjoyed countless, albeit modified, traditions. Students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni demonstrated great resilience and flexibility and banded together to support Episcopal and one another through one of the most challenging times in our school’s history. This year serves as a palpable testament to the enduring strength of our institution and community.
These members of EA’s COVID Operations Task Force led the school’s efforts in ensuring a healthy and safe learning experience for students.
• Lawrence Capuzzi, Finance
• Todd Fairlie, Athletics
• Michele Godin, Communications
• Laura Hurst, Health Services
• Imana Legette, Middle School
• Michael Letts, Upper School
• T.J. Locke, Head of School
• Terrance Malone, Lower School
• Cynthia Nichols, Human Resources
• Mark Notaro, Operations (Chair)
• Paul Sanders, Asst. Head
• Joseph Shanahan, Operations
• Katie Vigna, Dining Services
