2020-21 Updates

First, we find the student and bring them to the isolation room in our Health Center, which is separated from the rest of the center by a door and has a separate air-circulation system. Then we immediately figure out who has been face-to-face with that student for more than 15 minutes and if there's another student on campus that fits that category, we bring that student over for quarantine.

The Health Center is more than capable of seeing a student through COVID from diagnosis to recovery. However, any parent who can drive to pick up their student who has been either isolated or quarantined here at school is encouraged to bring their student home to be isolated or quarantined there. The Health Center may ask you to sign a waiver if you take your child who has tested positive home, acknowledging that you are aware that they are contagious and need to be separated from other people that are vulnerable.

So far, less than 10 percent of our student population has been infected with COVID-19. Students who have been infected will not be tested for 90 days after their infection. They still need to practice all of the mitigation that we have recommended and they need to abide by the Community Agreement.

For staff, definitely; for students, that remains to be clarified. Rhode Island is currently in Phase 1 of its COVID-19 vaccination program, and our Health Center staff has already been part of the immunization process. The state’s plan for who will be vaccinated in Phase 2 has not yet been finalized.

One reason is that our teachers feel like they can get to know their students better in a semester-long course. Also, colleges actually prefer the depth of semester-long course as opposed to a shorter trimester course.

Faculty worked with the Sage dining hall staff to solicit student feedback on the previous semester’s food, and we’re prepared to better serve the students with their preferred choices and increase popular options. For lunch in particular, students will be able to choose what they wish to eat that day from the items that are going to be prepared. We have also added a snack period between 2:15 and 2:45 p.m. Monday through Saturday and on Sundays from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. During those snack periods offerings could range anywhere from sandwiches to fruits (and some of us hope for some cookies every now and then), but there will be a pretty good balance of all the things that we think our kids are hoping for.

We will continue to work hard to provide ways for students to access food from other sources, but services such as Grub Hub and Doordash, we believe, represent an unnecessary safety risk by allowing independent contractors that we don't have any background information on to enter our campus and interact with our students. A lot of work was done in the fall to try to provide a more controlled delivery, whereby food from local establishments was delivered to a central location and we will likely expand and redeploy that plan. It’s also important to us to support the local economy.

The grill will not be back fully operational during its normal hours because we use the grill as our second dining hall. It is difficult to have it open during the day because the dining staff has to clean it between each use and actually prepare the food for every meal there. We did, however, start developing a grill delivery during the week in the evenings and will continue to provide that option in the winter.

Yes, but we do not allow students to go from dorm to dorm. We have identified several spaces on campus that can serve as mutual gathering locations and we have repurposed our second hockey rink to be, essentially, a second field house. We're exploring ways that kids can find those opportunities to socialize once classes are over, but again we do have to make sure that we're monitoring the health of our community. That will dictate how we proceed over the winter term.

Campus visits will remain paused during the seven-week winter term and will be reexamined for the spring.

Probably not during the winter term, given where we are still in the pandemic. Our students were fantastic this fall, but having furniture that would possibly tempt and encourage individuals to hang out close together just doesn’t align with our safety expectations in residential spaces. We’ll re-evaluate this in the spring.

No. The heads of the ISL schools made the joint decision to cancel interscholastic play this winter, as they did in the fall. While we're hoping that the spring term will bring some changes to that, we don't anticipate a typical spring athletic season either. Rest assured, the ISL heads of school are meeting every other week, doing everything they can, to try to figure out ways to return to team play.

Yes. In the supervisory period, it will be open to dormitory floors that will go with their dorm parent, and then after that it will be open as usual, with density controls in place, such as sign-ups. We want to be deliberate about density throughout the entire term.

Yes, the pool will be open starting Monday afternoon, Jan. 25. We will have swim practice every day, and we are planning to look at some ways to get kids into the pool at other times too, once quarantine is over.

Our calendar remains the same. Spring Break is scheduled for March 6 through March 27. We're going to wait to determine exactly what the quarantine period will look like for our return after we get through the winter quarantine period.