Weekly Message from Head of School 2022/12/04-2022/12/10
Dear Keystone Community,
What an exciting week it has been at Keystone and across China. The news of shifting pandemic regulations and policies has been both hopeful and worrying. How are you doing with your practice of recognizing and labeling your emotions after reading last week? I do feel hopeful, and I also feel a sense of responsibility as we shift into a time of the pandemic where organizations have more control to make their own decisions—a privilege that comes with heightened responsibility.
As we have sent our students home to learn online, we identified several signals that we would need to see to be able to open campus:
Reliable access to home isolation for positive cases and close contacts
Confidence in our on-campus layers of safety to minimize risk of transmission
Decreasing prevalence of COVID in the community
How exciting that we have good news on #1 from a policy standpoint—for many families the concern of centralized quarantine has been as high (or higher) than fear of the disease. For #2, we also have a high degree of confidence, although we have a good deal of work to ensure that everyone in our community is trained and confident in how school will have to look when we re-open. It will not feel quite like it did when we closed. Students will eat quietly and not in a social manner. We will need to communicate regularly about the number of positive cases identified in our community, teachers and students will have to isolate at home occasionally and masking will be strictly enforced at all times.
Keystone has been dealing with the ripple effects of a distant pandemic for years, but this will be the first time that we are dealing with it in our homes, on our campus. Even now, as we are learning online, we know that members of our community are suffering from COVID, others are isolated as close contacts, we are learning how to live with this disease.
This is a transition that is not new to me. In the United States, I was part of a team of leaders that opened a school after a long closure due to COVID. When we reopened, we were faced with high levels of emotions-- from parents, students and teachers. And one of the most difficult things is that everyone was struggling, but not everyone felt the same. Most students really wanted to return to campus, if not for their amazing classes, to see their friends and be back in a community outside of their home. Parents wanted this for their children, and they all understood that online learning, even at its very best, is an incomplete stand in for life in a school. And yet, there were many students and parents who were very worried about coming back to campus. Some of them were immunocompromised and worried about bringing COVID home, others worried about elderly grandparents who lived in their homes. Others had adapted to the lifestyle of online learning and the freedom it gave them to avoid commutes and created space in their days to peruse other hobbies or passions.
Teachers had concerns too. When you are returning to campus while there is community spread, in active pandemic, it is like starting a new job—there are new routines, new duties and assignments—teachers worried that the additional load of learning these new routines would take away from their abilities to focus on their students and their learning. They had worked hard to get good at the online context; to make another big shift felt like too much for some.
These are feelings that are present in our community right now. We won’t all agree on exactly how to proceed, and when. Fatigue is common this time of year in the best of circumstances, and this month has been an exhausting one, and one that has come at the end of several challenging years.
While the challenges are far from over, but there is an opportunity for hope and gratitude here! It is extraordinary what China has done to protect people from the devastating loss of life experienced in other parts of the world due to COVID. We are going through this phase in a time when the health care systems are more capable and the disease itself is less dangerous. We are so fortunate to be here, now.
Our school community will experience these changes and emotions together: we are KeystONE. We will unite in action for our precious students. We have the knowledge, strength and compassion to navigate and lead through this complexity to the other side.
Warmly,
Emily McCarren
