Start-of-School Protocols

Each morning, prior to arriving on campus or entering the carpool line, parents must complete a daily COVID-19 health screening form for their child(ren) using the AUXS Safety App. The form consists of a list of questions and a field to report your child’s current temperature. This information is being monitored daily by our nurse’s office. Once the form is submitted, the parent will immediately receive either a green pass permitting the student to be on campus or  or a red pass requiring the student to stay home. Should the child be required to stay home, one of our nurses will follow up with the parent after 8:30 AM to determine the next step.

Families failing to complete this daily screening form will receive an email reminder to complete this form as soon as possible. Repeated failures to complete this form may lead to a student being ineligible for on-campus instruction.

Any absence from school associated with illness and/or symptoms of COVID-19 must be reported on the AUXS Safety App. This will allow our COVID-19 Response Team to follow-up with parents.

If a parent visits campus, they must also complete a screening form for themselves prior to entering campus. Parents will be asked to show their green pass at the front desk. 

How Do I Sign Up for the AUXS Safety App?

1. Parents who do not already have AUXS Safety App accounts will receive an email on Monday, August 16 with their username and password.

2. Please follow the instructions in the email to set up your account.

3. Refer to this Quick Reference Guide for assistance and practice.

We will require frequent hand washing. Teachers will give lessons on how to properly wash hands.

We have installed sanitizing stations around campus and will require their use throughout the school day.

If any child exhibits COVID-19 symptoms, we will immediately call their parents and expect the child to be picked up immediately. Unlike last year, siblings of symptomatic students will no longer be sent home unless the siblings are also experiencing symptoms. Siblings will only be required to stay at home if their sibling tests positive for COVID-19. People exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms will be required to either present a negative PCR test result or complete 10 days of isolation in order to return to campus. The details surrounding these pathways can be found here.

Under no circumstances will any person be allowed to return to campus with a fever. Students must always be fever-free for 24 hours without the use of fever-reducing medication before returning, regardless of test results. If the twenty-fourth hour post-fever falls during a school day, please wait until the following school day before your child returns.

Any absence from school associated with illness and/or symptoms of COVID-19 must be reported on the AUXS Safety App that day. This will allow our COVID-19 Response Team to follow-up with parents. 

People with COVID-19 have had a wide range of symptoms reported, ranging from mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. People with these symptoms may have COVID-19:

• Fever or chills

• Cough

• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing

• Fatigue

• Muscle or body aches

• Headache

• New loss of taste or smell

• Sore throat

• Congestion or runny nose

• Nausea or vomiting

• Diarrhea

Per the CDC, close contact is currently defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period. The CDC offers an exception to contacts inside of a K-12 classroom where masking is strictly enforced. It defines a close contact as a student within 3 feet of another student for a cumulative total of 15 minutes over a 24-hour period. We have enacted this exception at AOS. Should there be a positive case of COVID-19 on campus, one of our three trained contact tracers will identify any close contacts and provide those individuals with next steps (see section on quarantining). 

Individuals can be exposed to COVID-19 in a wide variety of environments. Because of this, it can sometimes be unclear or uncertain if an individual meets the CDC definition of a close contact. When such events arise, AOS contact tracers will closely examine the circumstances surrounding the exposure and reserve the right to qualify an individual as a close contact, even if they don’t fit all the criteria of the CDC definition. Our contact tracers will continue to make every effort to keep our community as safe as possible and as many students attending school in-person as possible.

We are required to report all student and employee positive cases and close contact information to the City of Houston Health Department. If your child has been deemed a close contact of a positive case on campus, please expect a phone call from the City of Houston for their contact tracing purposes.

If an AOS community member is identified as a close contact, quarantining details depend on their vaccination status.

If the individual is fully vaccinated:

• They are not required to quarantine and are able to immediately return to campus.

• They are required to take a PCR COVID-19 test 5 days after exposure to the positive case.

• If at any point during the 14-day period following exposure, the individual begins to experience any COVID-19 symptoms, they must stay home and schedule another PCR COVID-19 test.

If the individual is unvaccinated:

• They are required to complete a 14-day off-campus quarantine*.

• If at any point during the 14-day quarantine the individual begins to experience any COVID-19 symptoms, they should schedule a PCR COVID-19 test and report the results to the school.

• The individual is not required to take a test in order to return on the 15th day after exposure.

*CDC guidelines provide for the option to shorten the quarantine period by testing negative after 7 days or quarantining for 10 days. However, we have chosen to continue to require a 14-day quarantine as it remains the CDC’s recommendation for the safest course of action. We will reevaluate this approach as the pandemic evolves.

Household contacts

Situations involving positive cases within a household present an extra layer of complexity due to sustained exposure. Each household comes with its own set of unique factors such as vaccine status and ability to isolate the individual who has tested positive. If you find yourself in the situation where someone in your household has tested positive, your AOS contact tracer will ask you a series of questions to help determine the course of action for you (if an employee) or your child. To provide an added layer of transparency to this process, you can find our decision-making tree here. Please know that the complexity of this tree may be overwhelming at first glance, but your AOS contact tracer will guide you through it. We are making every effort to keep our community as safe as possible and as many students attending school in-person as possible.

In the event that a classroom requires disinfecting, we will notify via email only the teacher and parents of that class. Please note that we will not notify classroom parents when the symptomatic student is cleared to return.

In the event that we have a positive case on campus, the entire school will be notified via email. Anyone required to quarantine and move into online learning will be alerted via voice message, text message, and email.

Identities of symptomatic individuals and those who test positive for COVID-19 will be kept confidential.

We encourage all community members to get vaccinated for COVID-19 as soon as they are eligible. Research shows that the best defense against hospitalization and/or death due to COVID-19 is the vaccine. We care about the health and well-being of our entire community and want everyone to be as protected as possible. 

As the pandemic evolves and school guidance changes, vaccinated adults and students may be able to participate in certain opportunities that may not be available to those who are unvaccinated. This could include being allowed to take off one’s mask while indoors, participate in an overnight trip, or adhere to different physical distancing restrictions among other things. We also plan to track vaccine percentages among our students in vaccine-eligible grades and adjust protocols for grades in which a high number of students have been vaccinated.

The majority of our staff and faculty at AOS are fully-vaccinated. We may report statistics on our vaccinated adults this year once we have onboarded all new employees, but we will never share any individual vaccine data about AOS employees. This is protected, private medical information and no family should ask for this information or expect to receive this information regarding their child’s teacher or any other individual AOS employee.

AOS created a COVID-19 Response Team to quickly engage the situation from all angles if a COVID-19 case is suspected or confirmed in our community. This team is led by Emily Benton and includes members of the Administration Team and our school nurses. Any time a case is suspected or confirmed, this team will assemble in order to effectively determine the proper contract tracing, facility disinfection, and community communication that needs to occur.

• A full-time day porter will sanitize commonly-touched areas throughout the campus, multiple times per day.

• All classrooms will be adequately equipped with disinfectant wipes for teachers to use throughout the day to spot clean surfaces as needed.

• For students who change classrooms, desks will be wiped down with disinfectant between each class.

• Per our standard practice, classrooms, restrooms, offices, and other common spaces will be cleaned nightly.

• Disinfecting foggers will be used to spot treat areas where suspected illness has occurred.

The nurse’s clinic is divided into two separate areas. In one room, nurses will tend to minor cuts and bruises, etc. The other room will serve as a quarantine room for any student exhibiting potential COVID-19 symptoms.

Routine standard cleaning will be conducted after a student is seen in the clinic. We will disinfect the nurse’s clinic immediately if a student with potential COVID-19 symptoms visits the clinic.

We will welcome a limited number of visitors onto campus. Faculty and staff can resume in-person meetings with families, and parents may volunteer on campus for certain opportunities. All visitors must comply with all COVID-19 protocols including mask requirements and completing the health screening form on the AUXS Safety App. We will continue to limit contact between campus visitors and AOS students, which includes not currently allowing families to join students during mealtimes. We look forward to resuming this practice in the future.

We will resume our standard program of special events and school assemblies, but the size, configuration, and number of invited guests will depend upon the space being used. All events will adhere to our current protocols. 

To begin the fall season, we will allow a limited number of spectators for both indoor and outdoor sports. For indoor sports, two people per family may attend. For outdoor sports, up to four people per family may attend. All spectators must adhere to our COVID-19 protocols, including masking guidelines and distancing requirements.

Water fountains will be turned off, but bottle filling stations will remain on.

We are lucky to have modern buildings with well-maintained HVAC units. We worked with an HVAC consultant to ensure our system is optimized for maximum airflow. In addition to upgrading the type of air filter we use for all of our buildings, we made a significant investment in technology to help reduce the likelihood of certain pathogens, like viruses, spreading on our campus.

During the summer of 2020, we installed an air purification system in our HVAC system that is designed to reduce the amount of pathogens (including COVID-19) in the air. The system is a Global Plasma Solutions Needlepoint Bipolar Ionization system. It produces an electronic plasma field in the air ducts of the HVAC system, which ionizes the air particles. This breaks down pathogens and aggregates tiny particles in the air so that they will be trapped by our filtering system. This system has been installed in all buildings on campus. Not only will it help reduce the COVID-19 virus in the air, but it will also help reduce cold and flu pathogens. For those students, faculty, and staff with allergies, the system will also clean the air of allergens, odors, and VOCs in the air. This system will provide a healthier air supply for everyone in all buildings on campus.

Middle school students will resume the use of lockers and locker rooms. In order to prevent crowding around the lockers, students will visit their lockers on a rotational schedule. We have also removed locks from the lockers in order to speed up the process. Time spent in the locker rooms will be less than 10 minutes.

Our carpool routes will return to a more normal operation. You can find those routes linked below. As always, when waiting in the carpool line, please do not block the driveways of our neighbors or the driveways into the lower school parking lot.

• Jones Center & Kindergarten Carpool Route

• 1st-4th Grade Carpool Route

• Middle School & Combo Carpool Route

• Students Needing Assistance Carpool Route 

We are discontinuing temperature checks altogether so this will hopefully speed up the morning carpool line from last year. This change also means we will have less adults monitoring the carpool line so all students being dropped off via the middle school & combo route will be responsible for getting out of the car on their own.

For afternoon carpool, lower school students will be physically distanced until their parent enters the carpool line. Middle school students will remain in their classrooms until their parent enters the carpool line. We have also discontinued the single-riders carpool line for middle school so all middle school students should be picked up via the middle school & Combo route.

These routes can also be found on the Parent Documents & Forms resource board.

Morning Carpool

• Arrive between 7:30-7:40 AM if possible. This will cause a shorter wait for you, and it will help us prevent congestion at the end of our carpool window. Families that arrive at this time report wait times of only a couple minutes.

• All students should have their masks in place before opening any car doors.
    

Afternoon carpool

• Make sure your child knows who is going to pick him/her up every day before coming to school.
   

• If you are going through carpool twice (once to pick up a LS child and once to pick up a MS child), please make sure your MS child knows this.

We have dissolved the classroom cohort model for the 2021-2022 school year, and we will return to our typical (pre-pandemic) number of sections and class sizes in all grades. To accommodate the redensifying of our classrooms, we will reduce the amount of space between desks from 6 feet to 3 feet, per CDC guidelines.  

We have restored the standard class schedule across divisions. This means that middle school students will move from room to room and attend class with a different group of students for each period. Students in 3rd and 4th grade will also change classrooms, but will remain with the same group of students per our standard practice. We have restored our full offering of enrichments, including those focused on singing. Students will be allowed to sing while physically distanced and masked, both indoors and outdoors. We will resume both plays and musical performances with limited audiences attending in person. These performances will be modified so as to meet our COVID-19 protocols. 

For those grades that change classrooms, teachers will create static seating charts to reduce the number of surfaces each student encounters and aid in the contact tracing process. Desks will also be disinfected between each class period.

Lunch

While it is still premature to return to our full pre-pandemic lunch service due to the density this would create in the Dining Hall, we are excited to say our lunch plan for 2021-2022 more closely resembles our standard program than the 2020-2021 program.

Jones Center and Kindergarten students will have a limited-option meal service delivered to them. To provide up to 6ft of distance between each student, they will eat in their classrooms and in nearby common spaces.

1st-8th-grade students will select their lunch from the food service lines in the Dining Hall, including the salad bar, soup, and sandwich stations. They will then be divided between the Dining Hall and the outdoor pavilion to eat. If eating in the Dining Hall, students will sit 6 to a long table and 4 to a round table with plexiglass between them. We have purchased cafe tables and chairs for students to eat at on the pavilion. These cafe tables sit one individual per table distanced from other students, but without plexiglass.

For the time being, parents may not visit their children during the lunch hour. This is another protocol we hope to revise over the course of this school year.

Snacks

To provide an additional opportunity to safely unmask, all snack breaks will occur outside. We will provide daily snacks to Jones Center students. Lower school and middle school students need to provide their own snacks.

Breakfast

Breakfast service is suspended until further notice.

All Jones Center students will attend chapel service together. This will take place in the Cathedral instead of St. George Chapel in order to accommodate proper distancing between families. Two Jones Center family members per child may attend chapel with their child(ren) starting the week after the Original Greek Festival holiday (per our standard operations). 

All Kindergarten-8th-grade students will attend chapel in-person every other week, and virtually when they do not attend in-person. Chapel Buddies will resume attending chapel together. We will utilize all seating areas in the Cathedral to ensure proper distancing is maintained. Unfortunately, because all seating areas will be used by students, parents are unable to attend Kindergarten-8th-grade chapel at this time. We hope to revise this protocol over the course of the school year to allow all students to attend in person every week and to welcome parents back to our chapel services. Please note that AGOC priests may not wear a mask while delivering chapel services but will be distanced from students at the front of the Cathedral. 

Singing is an extremely important component of our school culture and a way we express our faith. Therefore, we are eager to resume singing in our chapel services, but due to the increasing number of cases caused by the Delta variant, we are temporarily suspending it. Once we see improvement in our community transmission rates, we will resume this practice.

Teachers will make efforts to allow students to use individual supplies whenever possible, but students may share some materials within their grade or class when it is not possible to provide students with individual supplies. Any communal supplies will be disinfected periodically throughout the day, and students will be asked to sanitize their hands before and after using communal supplies.

During the 2020-2021 school year, we were forced to suspend the late start typically held on Tuesdays. This time is essential professional development and planning time for our faculty and is sorely missed. Although we will begin the year with a regular start time for all school days, it is our intention to resume a late start at some point during the school year. A switch to a late-start schedule would change morning drop-off from 7:30-8:00 AM drop-off to 7:50-8:30 AM for one day of the week. We will provide advance notice prior to this change and will continue to have morning EDC available.

We feel that school trips are essential AOS experiences, and our goal is to provide these experiences in the 2021-2022 school year. Day trips will resume in the fall. Overnight trips will be postponed until spring and evaluated for safety as pandemic conditions change and students become eligible for vaccination.

We are excited to share that all middle school students will enjoy a day trip to Camp Allen in September. More details surrounding this trip will be made available soon.

Managing a virtual learning program while simultaneously teaching a classroom full of students proved to be nearly untenable for our faculty during the 2020-2021 school year. This will become even more challenging as we emerge from the cohort model and have full classrooms once again. We recognize the utility of this option for our students and families in some circumstances, so we will continue offering a virtual learning option, but we will only offer our Hearts & Minds at Home (HMH) program in the following, specific circumstances this year. 

• A family may complete this application to enroll in HMH for an entire trimester. This option is primarily intended for those with medical reasons to stay home, but we may consider other reasons as well. The school reserves the right to reject applications as well as to revoke permission to participate in this program at any time at the school’s discretion. Families utilizing this option may not “move back and forth” between virtual and in-person learning and must commit to a full trimester of virtual instruction.
   

• Students who are in isolation due to a positive test or quarantine due to close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 may participate in HMH beginning at the start of the school day after a 24-hour wait period has elapsed from when the school was notified. This wait period is designed to allow our teachers time to prepare for a virtual learner. (For instance, if a student is sent home on Monday at noon as a close contact, that student may begin HMH Wednesday morning.)
   

• In the event of a full-grade, full-division, or full-school campus closure due to COVID-19, HMH will be enacted after the same 24-hour wait period described above.

Students participating in HMH may not participate in any on-campus events, including any athletic events.

Devices will be made available for pick up or sent home with Kindergarten-8th-grade students participating in HMH. Kindergarten-2nd-grade students will use iPads, and 3rd-8th-grade students will use Chromebooks. Jones Center students will not need devices for HMH learning. Should there be moments where a device would prove useful, parents may use any household device.

All other absences or early pickups will be treated as they were prior to AOS instituting HMH. Teachers will ensure that any necessary work and instruction occurs when a student returns. Students who feel unwell should not participate in any form of instruction and should instead rest and focus on getting better.