Sunny Li ‘22
Getting tested every Monday or Tuesday has become a weekly routine we live by. In a time when we have to endure the difficulties of COVID as we connect with others in a close-knit community, we dismiss weekly testing and required indoor mask-wearing as just another price we have to pay. As much as St. Mark’s is currently doing a great job of keeping everyone in check, especially as more and more school members have become fully vaccinated, certain precautionary methods at the beginning of the school year could have been carried out more effectively.
Speaking from my personal experience, I would not say living in quarantine for seven days was a fun way to start the school year. While I was only a few hundred yards away from my friends, it felt just like being back in Zoom school. This problem I dealt with in my first week of school was partly due to my prior difficulties of getting vaccinated as an international student back in China, but I would go so far as to say that it reflected on the safety procedures that St.m Mark’s could have been more effective about. Before school started, all returning students came back on campus on Friday, September 10, and received their PCR testing on that same day. Just a day after the arrival of returning students, the convocation took place in the Class of ‘45 Hall. At that time, when all school members gathered at the convocation, the results of the PCR test had not come out yet. Although all school events like that do require mask-wearing from all students—whether they are fully vaccinated or not—convening the entire school in-door without first receiving the results of PCR testing risks endangering the unfully vaccinated school members. Fortunately, in the case of the convocation, no other students have contracted COVID, but some did endure the seven-day quarantine as a result. The school could have waited for the PCR testing results and quarantined those who had COVID instead of risking exposing all school members, including those not fully vaccinated, to the disease.
Another question to consider is how effective the mask guidelines are, given that students can take off their makes in houses and outside buildings. We saw a wide spread of cold going around just in the past few weeks— at one point, half of the school was coughing and talking with evidently sore throats. If the cold is able to spread this easily, how would things look like if we had a student with a COVID case instead of the cold? These are questions to consider as we move into the school year with numerous updates from the safety protocol and state that we will be adjusting our procedures to.
Certainly, we should be appreciative of the efforts of our health services facilities and all the safety protocols that St. Mark’s has been created. At the same time, since we all know how tough it is for everyone to keep up with these protocols, could we have been more effective and saved several students of their fun at the beginning of the year, of facilities members that had to help out in the Annex for days? Certainly yes, had we requested for PCR testing results in advance of time, just as many other boarding schools around us, such as Fay school, did.
