A change in Keystone’s COVID communications policy

Dear Parents,

We would like to take a moment to let you know about a change in our COVID-related communications. In consultation with the Keystone Medical Advisory Committee, we have reviewed our protocols and decided to make alterations. At the beginning of the school year, we had decided to notify parents of positive COVID cases.

Moving forward, we will also notify you when an unvaccinated student or faculty member has had a primary exposure. This is defined as spending 15 minutes consecutively or over a 24-hour period, within 6 feet of someone who has tested positive for COVID.

Because of this new procedure, we would also like to ask for your assistance. If you test positive or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive, please let us know. We cannot report exposures if we don’t know about them, so the potential well-being of our community depends on all of us sharing information. We will maintain confidentiality.

If an unvaccinated student or faculty member is exposed to COVID, that person most likely will go into quarantine, pending the results of a COVID test.

In accordance with guidance from the CDC, a vaccinated person who is exposed to the coronavirus would not need to quarantine, but should watch for symptoms and be tested within 3-5 days.

We would also like to restate our policy that because students are wearing masks indoors, a positive case in a class would not necessarily require all classmates to quarantine. Only the person who tests positive would have to isolate while recovering. However, we would recommend testing, particularly if a child begins to experience COVID symptoms.

As with all the policies and procedures we have developed in response to the pandemic, our focus is maintaining the health and well-being of our entire community. We are committed to having every child here in person, while keeping everybody safe. As of now, we are not offering distance learning, nor concurrent learning, and are not planning on resuming those options.

Our goal remains to keep students on campus. We are following the recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which strongly recommends that young people attend school in person.

We are doing everything we can to make sure our students are safe on campus and that they can gain the academic, social, and psychological benefits of being with their peers and teachers in person.

With hope,

Billy Handmaker
Head of School

Penny Moyer, LVN
Monica Gutierrez, RN
School Nurses