This is a temporary website as we work to resolve technical issues with our web service provider.
SSFS Website Currently Down (Updated Jan. 6, 12:40 pm)
SSFS's main website is one of many school sites to be affected by a web service provider outage, which began on Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022. Although the provider is working around the clock, restoration of all websites has taken longer than expected. We hope to have our fully-functional site up and running soon. Please note that this issue does not affect Veracross, Canvas, or Zoom. Thank you for your understanding and patience!
The School continues to work through a number of school scenarios that are driving our planning processes. SSFS will seek to provide the best combination of learning modes/scenarios that meet the conditions and restrictions in place at the time, with a willingness to shift modes as needed. The School’s bias will be to offer as much on-campus learning as allowed by state and county directives, as prudence dictates, and as much as School preparations will support. We will seek to keep parents fully informed about any decisions and changes in our operating plans.
CURRENT MODE: Fully on-campus instruction | All learning activities will take place on campus for all grade levels while adhering to our covid mitigation protocols.
QUESTIONS? CONTACT US
PRIMARY POINTS OF CONTACT
Lisa Dyer, School Nurse
lisa.dyer@ssfs.org
301-774-7455 x120
Mónica Ruiz, Assistant Head of School
301-774-7455 ext. 114
Several core values inform our work to compensate for the presence of the COVID-19 virus in our lives. The Quaker testimonies of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship, commonly known as the SPICES, continue to give life to all that we do. Amid this pandemic, our work to provide a high quality SSFS education is grounded in several guiding principles:
The health and safety of the school community is paramount.
The School will address the current challenges in ways that remain true to our commitment to the worth and dignity of each person.
Students learn best when they are in school in person, under the care and guidance of their teachers, and amid their peers. This environment best meets the social, emotional, and academic needs of children.
Scientific and medical expertise will guide our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, our protective measures, and our decisions.
The School will act in compliance with all national, state, and local governmental and public health directives.
SSFS will remain flexible in the face of increased knowledge and changing conditions, adapting our response to the circumstances that present themselves.
Since the declaration of the Coronavirus pandemic in the Spring of 2020, SSFS has closely monitored the progress of the pandemic and continually sought updated expert information to guide our decisions. This has been a shared responsibility among all staff and faculty at SSFS, particularly members of the Administrative Council. In preparation for the anticipated reopening of school for the fall, a COVID Response Team (CRT), a subset of the Administrative Council, was created in July 2020 in order to focus and optimize our preparations. The COVID Response Team reports to the Head of School and includes the Director of the Health Center, the Chief Operations Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, the Director of Human Resources, the Director of Marketing and Communications, the Director of Residential Life, the Director of Institutional Equity, Justice, and Belonging, the Assistant Head of School, and the Head of School.
The Division Heads Group (the Heads of the Lower, Middle and Upper Schools, along with the Assistant Head of School and the Head of School), coordinates the academic and programmatic elements of the COVID response plan for SSFS. In addition, the School has invited third-party medical, educational, and/or legal experts to review or suggest plans and preventative measures. At all times, the various administrative groups seek broad input from the larger community, as well as ways to test their conclusions and plans in light of the sense of the larger community. However, in order to respond in a timely and effective manner, decisions about school operations remain the responsibility of the school administration, under the policies of its Board of Trustees.
All attendees on campus are required to follow social distancing guidelines indoors and outside.
Face Masks and other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): Cloth face coverings (unvented) will be required of all persons coming to campus. These are especially critical for times when persons are indoors for any length of time. There may be specific, limited situations that make face coverings impractical or unnecessary: spaces occupied by only one person for extended times, outdoors when ample social distancing is otherwise observed, or when eating (with social distancing observed). We understand that face mask requirements will need adaptation and flexibility when dealing with the youngest students.
Personal Hygiene: This primarily means regular hand washing or use of hand sanitizer, particularly at activity or location transitions.
All Lower School students will need to participate in a personal health screening check prior to coming to campus.
SSFS employees, Middle School students, and Upper School students are not required to complete the personal health screening due to our vaccination requirement for these constituency groups.
Strict protocols related to persons who are symptomatic and/or have exposure to the virus, which may include not being allowed on campus for a period of time.
Schedules and procedures will be modified to reduce the number of different people that students and others come in contact with. These include:
Creating cohorts, or pods, of students for their time on campus;
Altered pickup and dropoff schedules to reduce interpersonal contact;
Severe restrictions on the presence of visitors (including parents/guardians) on campus.
No large in-person, indoor gatherings of students or staff
The School has enhanced its cleaning and sanitization protocols during the day and in the evening. In addition, during the school day, students and faculty will clean desks/workstations and other shared furniture after each use.
The School has updated ventilation systems in the classrooms, including opening outdoor air dampers, increasing total airflow, adding filtration systems, and more.