Dear Urban Families,

I know you have eagerly awaited an update on Urban's plans for the upcoming school year. What follows is information about our template for a hybrid approach to school. Given the current realities of the pandemic, it would be irresponsible to present this as a certainty, though I know certainty is what we all crave. This is our current hybrid model based on the following operating priorities:

1. Reducing health and safety risks for all our community members through a comprehensive response to guidelines from the San Francisco Department of Public Health. This includes reducing the population on our compact campus to allow for physical distancing and a thoughtful, hybrid pattern of in-school and at-home attendance.

2. Ensuring a consistent in-person experience for both social-emotional and academic reasons.

3. Working to create learning opportunities that are as equally accessible as possible.

4. Allowing students to retain the integrity of their academic program, including access to the full range of our elective-driven curriculum, as well as myriad non-academic activities like advisory and affinity groups, clubs, etc. 

5. Allowing for "scalability" – the ability to add or subtract in-person days or activities seamlessly as conditions and circumstances dictate.


Our plan is based on the so-called "4-10" model, an approach used by many businesses and schools in the U.S. and abroad, designed to reduce spread of the virus within a community by employing a "four days on, 10 days off" schedule that also reduces the in-person population density by half. (This op-ed from the New York Times provides a pretty good overview of the logic, and we've included other references on the website.)

 

At Urban, the plan looks like this: students and adults are on campus Monday through Thursday in "Week 1," with half the student population coming for the morning, and the other half coming in the afternoon. (Each of these two student cohorts is evenly distributed across the four grades.) On Friday of "Week 1" and the entirety of "Week 2," school is virtual. In the following week ("Week 3"), the student cohorts switch, with the morning group attending in the afternoon and vice-versa. A simple schematic is available on the Return to Urban--Fall 2020 web page.

A more comprehensive explanation of the advantages, opportunities, and challenges we anticipate is best captured in a substantive FAQ (on the web page), which I strongly encourage you to read. You will also be receiving much more detailed information in the coming weeks from our Assistant Head for Instruction Geoff Ruth and our Assistant Head for Student Life Charlotte Worsley, but I wanted to get this roughed-out plan to you as soon as possible. 

 

It would be naive for me or other Urban administrators to hope that even exhaustive planning and careful consideration of a thousand variables would yield a result that will equally satisfy everyone. Each of us is operating with varying degrees of challenge and anxiety; even within constituencies – parents/guardians, kids, faculty, staff – there is a tremendous range of opinion and expectation. We count, then, on what we have in common: a commitment to our students; a resilient optimism that, one day, students and adults will again roam mask-free in the halls of Page (and streets of the world); and the knowledge that even under duress, Urban will make the very best of a challenging situation.

 

With best regards,

Dan

Dan Miller
Head of School

PLEASE READ THE FAQ SECTION ON THE RETURN TO URBAN--FALL 2020 WEB PAGE.