On July 30, The Westminster Schools announced their plan to welcome students and faculty back on campus for the new school year after working all summer on the requirements and safety protocols to keep the school open. On August 12, the school started to reopen in person with a staggered orientation. For the first couple of weeks, grades alternated doing virtual school and in-person school in order for the administration to see if the protocols were working and so that students could get used to the new routines.

Because most of the students in the Middle School were coming back to campus in the middle of a pandemic, some faculty had their doubts about how long the school would be able to stay open. “Talking about the first week and orientation, I was like ‘it’s not gonna happen.’ And then you know it happened. And once we were here, I was 50/50 about thinking it’s going to close,” says Middle School Dean Vielka Reina. 

When Westminster teachers prepare for the new school year during a typical summer, they usually have to think about educational trends, curriculum, and innovative classroom practices, which are much more interesting topics than what they had to deal with this summer. Instead, as Principal Danette Morton explains, the faculty was focused on logistical matters like “how are people gonna use the bathroom, how are they going to get water, how are they going to fit into this space or that space, and how many people can fit into a classroom and do we have enough classrooms for all of our students and at a safe distance.” 

After the spacing for the classrooms was figured out, many precautions had to occur to keep the school virus-free, including implementing sanitizing stations and placing stickers to remind students to stay six feet apart. The school also had to figure out a way to test the students before they came to school and to stay spaced while testing just in case someone did have the virus. Two rounds of testing ended up being done, one a week before school and one after Labor Day weekend. The first round of testing involved a nose swab, and eleven people had the virus. The second round of testing utilized a saliva test, and this time only three people had the virus. Mrs. Morton said, “there’s no evidence that any of those folks who were positive spread to other people while they were on campus. So we feel like the protocols are working.”

It has been eight weeks since Westminster opened in-person, and with all the work that has gone into testing everyone at school and the safety protocols, the school shows no sign of closing and going virtual.