Around the world, schools are all over the place in terms of their modality for learning.  Back in Santa Ana Unified in Southern California, my previous employer and home, schools are largely still in virtual learning mode, with selected campuses open for “learning labs” to serve some of the most impacted students, whether due to lack of connectivity at home or due to the need for in-person special services.  In Arizona, where much of my family lives and my mom and sister work as teachers, most schools are fully back in motion.  100% of students can be on campus.  Each week I attend a regional coordination call with Heads of School from around Central and South America.  The vast majority of the international schools operating in these countries are still in 100% virtual mode.  Here in Costa Rica, we are about a month in to a hybrid plan.  At Lincoln, students are organized into cohorts that rotate one week on, one week off campus, with about 20% of our students remaining virtual full time.  Questions of school openings and the structure for return are certainly a hot topic for political debate around the world.  In places where schools are open, there is pressure to close in the face of fresh waves of COVID.  In places where schools are closed, there is tremendous pressure to get kids back into classrooms.

Perhaps the most intense aspect of our return to campus, in addition to the tremendous amount of planning, preparation, and communication that is required, has been the ongoing attention to managing student health and safety.  Specifically, attending to potential cases, weighing prevention and protocol, and communicating with families, have all been daily, if not hourly, tasks.  We’re a month in to our hybrid return, and our detailed attention to protocol has been paying off.  We haven’t had any known cases of transmission on campus, and for those few situations where we’ve become aware of a potential case due to proximity in the home, or even a child having flu-like symptoms, we’ve been lucky with all negative test results.   Of course the low and trending lower rates of COVID in Costa Rica in general have been a huge help.  

Whenever there is a report of a potential case, either of a student on campus or at home, we convene the  COVID leadership team that brings together members of the administrative team, occupational health, and our school doctor.  I hadn’t completely anticipated how much work this COVID team would be called upon to handle while we navigate hybrid learning.  Every teacher absence or student in the nurse’s office requires a heightened amount of attention.  Every potential case requires an in-depth analysis, interviews to determine anyone who may have been exposed, and plans for communication so staff and families are informed whenever a positive case has been reported.  It’s a detail driven process.  

One of the most challenging aspects of analyzing any given situation is the weighing of prevention versus our written protocols.  In other words, the absolutely safest option is to be 100% virtual.  When you open the school, even with convincing data and research around the world that K-12 schools generally pose lower risks of COVID spread than many other operations, you introduce risk.  When a family decides to send their child to school – and we do provide our families the option to stay at home completely – they are likewise assuming some risk.  When we have a student with symptoms, obviously we send the student home (or have them stay home if not at school).   Students with symptoms either quarantine or can return with a negative test and no symptoms.  But, and here is where it is challenging, we do not quarantine everyone in the child’s class until we have a confirmed case, and even then if students never broke mask and distancing protocols, families can choose to keep their children in school.  We could, for prevention sake, send everyone home to quarantine every time a student has any symptoms.  Yet that is not what the protocol dictates nor does it take into consideration the critical fact that our students are also wearing masks, social distancing, etc.  So we work through each situation and scenario carefully, making sure to do the detailed work of contact tracing while not overreacting.  Our greatest safety has been in a highly disciplined commitment to safety protocols by wearing masks and enforcing social distancing.  

In terms of the design of our hybrid system, there are a few features that have really helped us.  First, the week-on/week-off schedule has built an automatic quarantine into our program.  When students leave us on Thursday afternoon, they don’t return until Monday 10 days later.  We’ve had a couple of potential cases where this has helped us tremendously, as students were essentially put into quarantine before we could confirm a positive case.  Second, we have been doing virtual Fridays.  Originally, our rationale was to separate the cohorts and have a space for extra cleaning.  In practice, virtual Fridays has been even more helpful as a strategy for supporting teachers with a day where they are not simulcasting instruction, and have a planning block to be able to prepare for the coming week of both in-person and virtual learning.  Our board of directors has been very concerned about how we are supporting our staff during hybrid learning, and virtual Fridays I think go a long way to help classroom teachers manage the demands of daily teaching.  Third and finally, we adopted a shortened day schedule.  Students are on campus until 12:15 and then head home for virtual closing meetings and afternoon tutoring sessions.  This is partially a reflection of the nationwide protocol in public schools in Costa Rica to limit hybrid instruction to 4 hours daily.  Private schools have more flexibility, and indeed, our school day is slightly longer.  But it has helped to break up the day.  We allow our teachers to go home if they desire for the pm virtual sessions, that way if they have kids of their own at home they can be there too.  We also made the strategic decision to hire additional full-time substitutes who we have trained in both virtual and in-person settings.  Of course we had to weigh potential costs against the projected need for substitutes, but having a handful of trained staff to step in as needed has been a huge help when we have faced last-minute absences.  We also benefit greatly from having full time assistants in all of our Pre-K through 2^nd grade classrooms.  Schools have rightly pointed out that operating schools in hybrid fashion can cost even more than under typical circumstances, and building some flexibility into the number of staff on hand for in-person learning certainly has required additional investments.   

Of course we are still learning and making adjustments.  Hybrid learning has challenged us to find balance between the learning needs of students, the operational challenges of the school, the sustainability of staff, and the expectations of our parents and community.  It’s an ongoing process that requires tremendous commitment from staff and a lot of communication and dialogue with families and other key stakeholders.