Covid-19 Updates
Updated as of 1/21/24
Here at Semester Off we continue to monitor new developments with the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes (COVID-19). Please check back regularly as we will update this site as more information becomes available, and we may revise our approach at any time.
Please know that the safety of our participants and our staff is of paramount importance to us.
Approach Moving Forward
Our precautions and mitigation efforts are directed towards two goals:
1.) maintenance of the health and safety of our students, staff, and our collective households by reducing the risk that any member of our community contracts COVID-19
2.) rapid containment of COVID-19 in the event that a member of our community contracts COVID-19
We expect all students and full-time staff that are eligible for vaccination to be fully vaccinated and boosted and to provide a copy of their vaccination card to Semester Off. We understand that, in rare circumstances, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other Equal Employment Opportunity laws may exempt a student or staff member from this vaccination expectation, and we will comply with all such legislation. We also understand that, in rare circumstances, a student or staff member may have a pre-existing medical condition which makes vaccination a high risk procedure (e.g., prior allergic reaction to a vaccination), and we will evaluate all such occurrences on a case-by-case basis.
We will base our policies and mitigation efforts at any given time on the CDC and Commonwealth of Massachusetts recommendations; however, we reserve the right to implement more stringent policies than recommended by these agencies. If Semester Off does choose to follow safer protocols, it will likely be due to one or more of the following factors:
underlying health risks, including immunocompromise, present in one or more of our students or staff
underlying health risks, including immunocompromise, present in one or more of the household member(s) of our students and staff
unvaccinated status of one or more of our students, staff, or member(s) of our households
We anticipate that programming throughout the Spring 2024 Semester will continue to incorporate both outdoor and indoor learning. We believe that our cross-platform teaching strategy and use of outdoor space has conferred the safest and most effective approach possible. Our innovative approach has helped and will continue to help lift our students’ spirits and provide them with the social, emotional, and academic experience they are looking for while hopefully continuing to keep everyone as safe as possible in the process.
If you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, please reach out to us!
Specific Precautions
Specific precautions include, but are not limited to, the following:
use of high-performance HEPA-filter air purifier(s) when indoors
spending time outdoors during nice weather in our outdoor classroom or elsewhere outdoors
testing all symptomatic individuals on site or advising individuals to self-test at home prior to arrival
optional indoor masking
frequent handwashing and cleansers made available and encouraged
strict adherence expected of all students and staff to guidelines including a requirement to stay home if febrile or symptomatic
March 2020 - present: a retrospective
After a period of remote-only programming beginning in March 2020, our in-person reopening began in June 2020 during our Summer 2020 Semester. During the Summer 2020 Semester, we offered 80% of our programming in-person in our outdoor classroom, and the remaining 20% was conducted via Zoom and Virtual Reality. Our Fall 2020 Semester continued along the same lines as Summer 2020: for the first 9 weeks of the fall semester, we conducted 80% of our programming in-person in our outdoor classroom and 20% remotely. We completed the final 5 weeks of the Fall 2020 Semester offering our students the option to engage in in-person indoors programming for 40% of the week and the remaining 60% remotely. Given the rising numbers of cases locally during November and December 2020 and our students’ preferences regarding risk mitigation, we ultimately conducted these final 5 weeks in a 100% remote capacity at their choosing.
During March 2021, we offered pro bono programming to teachers and frontline healthcare workers to help care for those who have been sacrificing and placing their lives on the line throughout the pandemic. We engaged entirely remotely with our healthcare and teacher colleagues to maintain covid safety.
On April 5, 2021, we began our Spring 2021 Semester in the same fashion in which we conducted our Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 semesters: 80% in-person learning in our outdoor classroom, 20% remotely. As the vaccines were distributed more broadly and greater safety was achieved on the individual and community levels, we began a series of conversations with our Spring 2021 students, staff, and their families assessing our collective medical risks, as well as our collective psychological readiness to engage in indoor learning (particularly during days of inclement weather). By mid-June 2021, we achieved 100% vaccination status amongst our students, staff, and eligible family members, so we began to slowly re-introduce indoor learning while checking in regularly with all parties around their comfort with this transition.
Our Fall 2021 Semester began just as the prior semester ended. We again achieved 100% vaccination status amongst all students and staff, and we again offered 80% of our programming in-person in our outdoor classroom, and the remaining 20% was conducted via Zoom and Virtual Reality. In early November 2021, we moved our programming indoors, and eligible students and staff received boosters. The highly contagious Omicron variant began circulating worldwide and within Massachusetts during the last few weeks of the semester, but, to our knowledge, none of our students or staff contracted it.
Our Spring 2022 Semester was conducted markedly differently than any prior, COVID-19 semester. We began the semester in late January 2022 as the Omicron variant case numbers were decreasing locally, and we continued with indoor programming and an indoor mask-mandatory policy. We also tested every student and staff twice weekly and are thrilled that we remained entirely covid-free as a community during this period! Beginning on Friday, March 25th, after all students and staff tested negative for 5 consecutive days and local COVID-19 case counts remained low, we changed our mask policy to “mask optional.” Some students decided to continue masking - which was totally fine and accepted - but the majority of our group and staff decided to unmask. A glorious milestone, indeed! Unfortunately, in April 2022, for the very first time in the 2+ years since the beginning of the pandemic, a Semester Off student contracted COVID-19, most likely from an outside source. This infection was rapidly identified and contained, and we believe there was no transmission that took place at Semester Off. We reverted to the indoor, mask-mandatory policy given the rising risks of infection. Also, later in the Spring 2022 Semester, three Semester Off Instructors contracted COVID-19 from outside sources, and, again, we believe there was no transmission that took place at Semester Off.
During the beautiful and nearly rain-free, Summer 2022 Semester, we were able to meet outdoors over 90% of the time, and we tested all students and staff whenever we knew we would be going indoors on a particular day. The Omicron variants continued to spread in the community as evidenced by the wastewater data, but we were thankfully spared at Semester Off.
Given the high rate of protection in the community due to vaccination and prior infection, the lethality of COVID-19 reduced substantially, so we determined that it was appropriate to consider relaxing our indoor masking protocols during the Fall 2022 Semester. We conducted the first four weeks of the Fall 2022 Semester outdoors and when we transitioned to mostly-indoors learning in mid-October, by consensus of all students and their parents, we made indoor masking optional once again!
