COVID-19 Notification and Policy Update

Dear Harding Academy Learning Community,

I had laid out a two week time period for maintaining our indoor mask requirement in my email on December 31, 2021. As we are coming back to school tomorrow, I wanted to send an email out that we will be extending that indoor masking requirement through the end of January. As I stated in my earlier email, the key driver for us is the staffing required to keep ourselves open. As you will see from our most recent dashboard below, we are averaging around five to seven faculty and staff out over the course of the last two weeks. If having the masks is working on the margins and means we keep three to five faculty on campus, then it is worth it to keep our primary goal of remaining in person and on campus achievable. 

On another note, we will be moving to a three time a week dashboard which will outline our isolating positive cases by grade and homeroom/advisory. This will replace the individual emails to the homeroom and advisory, as well as to the grade level. We think the Monday, Wednesday, Friday timing is frequent enough to allow families to monitor the situation at school and in the broader Harding community. You can see the new format below. 

Thank you for your support and I look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow.