Dear Washington Market School Community,

We are grateful for your support as we crafted our testing/Virtual School/return on Thursday and Friday week. Each Independent school has its own set of criteria and challenges and we, having 242 unvaccinated children, have the task of keeping everyone safe while staying connected to our early childhood teaching model. Enormous thanks to our teachers for coming in on Monday to get the materials ready that were needed to go on line, to our staff who were the organizing and planning, as well as handing out/collecting test kits for all and to those at Hudson who were also handing out the children’s bedding, to the parents who managed to get to school on a cold day and perform a test in the wind, and of course, to our children who tolerated coming to school but not coming in the doors and then to all for going online for two days instead of being together in person.

We are all absorbed with dealing with the Covid virus. It may be hard to grasp at this moment when the Omicron variant is racing through the city and country, but it does appear that the near-term prospects look promising. Although far more contagious than the Delta variant, it is far less virulent. We now know that, even if the number of hospitalizations remain at the same level, patients are likely to be less sick and require less intensive care. And another positive, being infected with the Omicron variant appears to reduce the likelihood of catching the more virulent Delta variant. There is also the expectation that the rate of infection with Omicron will shortly start to decline, as happened in South Africa, possibly as soon as the next couple of weeks.

As David Leonhardt, in the NYT, recently wrote: “The combination of vaccines and Omicron’s apparent mildness means that, for an individual, Covid increasingly resembles the kind of health risk that people accept every day.”

Exactly what this means for our largely unvaccinated children is not easy to say. So, until the data is clearer and the risks reduced, we will continue to be cautious, restrict access and close classrooms in which there are Covid cases, but will be prepared to loosen restrictions when the hard data and government protocols convince us that this is the best course.

We know that wider population data has little to do with how you want to protect your very own child. Please understand that we appreciate this dichotomy and approach the issue of safety as if every WMS child is our own.

Thank you for being with us,

Ronnie