What should Harvard schools do when a student or staff member has been exposed to COVID-19? Does it matter if the person is vaccinated or unvaccinated? Was the contact indoors or outside? Does an exposed person need to quarantine? To be tested daily? With guidance from the state and from medical professionals, the School Committee has had to set policies for all these scenarios and more.
One very difficult question has been deciding when it is safe to allow an exposed person to be tested and—if the test is negative—stay in school, rather than quarantine. In the most recent revision, Harvard’s policy requires people who have had a high-risk contact (such as a household member with COVID-19) to quarantine for seven days and then have a negative test before returning to school. Someone who has had a very low-risk contact can be tested and, if negative, stay in school. The school nurses will have the authority to decide about cases that fall between those two extremes.
The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has also been revising its policies frequently. However, School Superintendent Linda Dwight said Harvard’s policy is much stricter than DESE’s. Dwight summed up her position: “I want to keep kids in school as much as possible—but safely.”
Protecting Harvard schools from an outbreak of COVID-19 has absorbed much of the School Committee’s attention since the pandemic began. Both the full committee and its policy subcommittee have spent countless hours developing safety policies and then revising them as circumstances changed. The most recent revision took place at a special Tuesday morning meeting this week.
The School Committee devoted about two hours of its Aug. 25 meeting to its COVID-19 policy. But in public comment at the end of the meeting, resident and physician Susan Voute raised concerns that the test-and-stay policy was not strict enough. So the committee returned to the issue at Tuesday’s special meeting.
The up-to-date version of the entire multipage policy, with an accompanying flowchart, is available on a link from the main page of the school district website, psharvard.org.
