Principles Over Predictions: Preliminary Notes On School Life In the Fall
Dear Stone Community,
It has been quite a week or so in the world of education prognostication. Local schools have begun to announce plans for the Fall; PDE has released several lengthy documents with “guidelines” for re-opening; a handful of significant colleges have announced they will be online-only; several collegiate athletic conferences (including the Ivy League) have cancelled Fall Sports and the Big 10 has announced a significantly reduced football schedule; Betsy DeVos and President Trump have promised that schools will be “fully operational” come September; the American Federation of Teachers has sounded….well, a little less certain as to what that might mean. In the midst of these ongoing developments in the world of education -- and, as infection rates remain volatile across the United States -- it seems fair to say that the true impact of Covid-19 on our summers, and on our fall, remains highly uncertain.
Today, I’m reaching out to share with you the principles by which we are designing our Fall, while carefully avoiding any sweeping predictions. As I’ve said at Parents’ Meetings and Drop-Ins for the past fifteen or so weeks, I doubt very much that we will know “the full picture” of this disease (or our nation’s relationship to this disease) until the first week of August -- making any specific guarantee today regarding the percentage of our community who will be on campus in fifty or so days feels therefore premature: the possibility of overpromising and under-delivering in the context of a historic global health crisis feels high and feels potentially harmful. The purpose of this specific letter is to share with you some of the work we have been doing around school for the past few weeks, and also to continue to assert that we believe in design principles over predictions for right now.
First, our design principles for the Fall. Across Slack and across a number of different administrative meetings, we have worked to reflect on our successes and challenges last Spring and to establish and clarify “what must be true” at Stone this Fall regardless of learning context:
We must design with the understanding that the context for “school in the Fall” and even “school in 2020-2021” will remain volatile, and we therefore intend to design a model which can remain resilient and adaptive within that expected volatility;
We must design for safety -- the safety of our students, of our faculty, and of course of our families and our extended community members;
We must design for the deepest, richest, and most authentic on-model teaching and learning experiences we are capable of creating within the above constraints;
We must design experiences for our students which create deep joy, connectivity, and laughter;
We must design in such a way as to bias toward as many “face-to-face” minutes as possible within the above constraints;
And, we must design with the understanding that individual members of our community will have different relationships to this disease and that it is our responsibility to serve and support those diverse relationships by designing for continued flexibility.
As with last Spring, we believe our Mission, our values, our model, and our principles will empower us to navigate future uncertainty. That being said, we also have been working hard to fulfill the pragmatic requirements for a successful fall opening as well.
We have re-designated our “Safety Committee” as our “Pandemic Committee” and are looking at practices and facilities in order to create a healthy Fall model. We are incredibly fortunate to have the kind of building that we do -- one which is large, one with an industrial-grade ventilation system, one which consists largely of wide open and highly adaptable spaces. We are, of course, working on “what it means to enter Stone” (in what form we will temperature check our community; if we might enact any form of contact tracing; how traffic and drop-off at the front of school will conform to social distancing requirements; how our lunch service will work; how our students will navigate the building; etc. etc). We are currently ordering signage at all of our doors to remind our community of our best practices; we have enacted a “stand-up/mask-up” policy for the duration of the summer; we are beginning to write the PDE mandated “Reopening Plan” which must necessarily be approved by our Board of Trustees, filed with the State, and shared on our website.
So too have we been working hard to design an academic program that is highly familiar and also designed for resilience and flexibility. Next week, Course Selection forms will be sent out to our Upper School Families and you will see that we are indeed scheduling for our usual six Mod, four block schedule (as an aside: the course offerings in the Course Selection Guide are impressive and I am so, so grateful to our extraordinary faculty for designing such rich learning experiences in this current learning environment). The only noticeable change is that we are moving away from the six day rotating schedule (where blocks fall on different days and different times for different lengths) and moving to a more predictable five day fixed schedule for the 2020 - 2021 school year.
This is an important design choice: ironically, what we give up in variety we gain in flexibility as a “fixed” schedule better supports a kind of “plug and play” mentality in which our students and our faculty can intertwine personal and professional schedules a little more easily. Put differently: when we are at 100% capacity we can better predict and track facility usage; if we are working within a hybrid model our students and our faculty can more easily “find” and connect with one another and we can more easily coordinate who will be on campus when; if we are strictly Learning-From-Home we can all schedule “at-home” obligations more regularly; if we have members of our community in separate contexts (for example: members of our community who choose to be home for extended periods of time while others are in school) our schedules remain predictable and easy to align.
None of which, of course, provides you with the answer to the question that matters to you most: will we indeed be “fully operational” by August 26th? As you might imagine, I am asked that question every day by basically every person I know and interact with -- my colleagues, our community, my friends, my family, everyone. And I say the same thing every time: we simply don’t know, and I suspect that whatever it is we all believe to be true today may already have shifted dramatically by, say, next Friday. Will there come a day next school year when 100% of our community is on campus at the same time? I do believe so. However, as I watch the rate of infections fluctuate daily (and listen to the ongoing political rhetoric, in which we argue endlessly about what those fluctuations “mean”), so too am I immediately reminded that after fifteen weeks we still aren’t able to clearly state our relationship to this disease as a nation.
To that end, I believe the most important work Stone can do is to state our values clearly, and work as hard as we are able to support every single member of this powerful community.
I want to close by saying that I spent time in a (distanced!) cabin in the Adirondacks a week or so ago, and I repeatedly found myself thinking about the journey this community has taken together: the distance we have come, the work we have done, the large and small ways we have continued to express love and support for one another. There remains real uncertainty regarding what school will be on August 26th -- there is no doubt in mind that it is our commitment to culture and our commitment to one another that will allow us to navigate it successfully.
With so much gratitude,
Mike