March 6, 2020
UPDATE ON HATHAWAY BROWN'S COVID-19 PLANNING AND PREPAREDNESS
School-Sponsored Travel
After careful consideration, Hathaway Brown is suspending all school-sponsored domestic and international travel scheduled during Spring Break. This decision was not made lightly, and it was made in the best interest of our students and faculty members based on a number of factors. As we always do when we are planning school programs that involve travel, we have carefully considered reports and travel alerts issued by national and international agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, International SOS, American healthcare organizations, and the U.S. State Department. In the case of the travel-abroad programs, we also have been in steady consultation with our in-country providers and other member independent schools in the Global Education Benchmark Group consortium. The systems we've carefully put into place to support these types of programs at HB are designed with our community members at the center, and every indication amid this evolving global health situation is that it is not prudent to proceed with any school-sponsored domestic or international programming at this time. All of the students and faculty members affected by this decision already have been notified, but we wanted to make sure the entire school community understood the factors we weigh in making such determinations.
Family Travel
Once again, we want to reiterate our position on family travel over Spring Break. We encourage families who are planning to travel abroad follow the safe travel precautions and the guidelines to avoid nonessential travel to countries listed on the Centers for Disease Control website at https://www.cdc.gov/travel. The CDC recommends that travelers returning from these designated countries spend 14 days in home quarantine, the length of time for COVID-19 symptoms to develop. This CDC recommendation has been made in order to mitigate the possible community spread of COVID-19 in the United States, as there is no vaccine or medication to treat or cure COVID-19. Should your family make the decision to travel to one of the countries listed on the CDC list, we urge you to heed the recommendation to keep your child(ren) at home from school for 14 days following your return. Likewise, we request that you inform HB of any travel any of the members of your family are taking to any of these designated countries before, during, or after Spring Break.
School Closure
In the event that HB would be unable to operate as usual during this ongoing situation, we have taken a number of steps to ensure that we would still be able to provide educational programming for our students if we could not be on campus. We have created a robust technology infrastructure and have inventoried and tested our hardware and software so we could make necessary equipment available to faculty members and students in all divisions as needed. Additionally, teachers across campus will gather together early next week to develop specific frameworks for the way that coursework would be made available to students and identify the expectations for interactivity during a time of school closure. In some cases, where possible and according to the ages of the students, work would be sent home in hard copy form. In other cases, teachers and students would connect digitally, either in real time or asynchronously. We understand, however, that not everyone may have access to web-enabled devices or the Internet. If this is a concern for your family, please be in touch with the appropriate division director so that we may create a confidential list of households that may require loaner devices and WiFi hotspots from the school, which we would provide free of charge should the situation warrant. While we do not anticipate that our campus will be shut down, it is a good exercise for our faculty members to design ways for us to seamlessly deliver outstanding curricular programming in the case of an emergency.
Facilities Cleaning
A deep clean of all campus facilities is planned during Spring Break, and our cleaning company will continue to thoroughly disinfect all hard surfaces in all of our classroom and common areas for the foreseeable future.
Questions and Concerns
Direct any inquiries related to the items discussed here to Sheri Homany, Associate Head of School, at shomany@hb.edu or 216.320.8769.