Dear Cushing community,

It has been a great first weekend in Ashburnham! Late summer weather brought all the Penguins outside for socially distanced fun on the turf field and across campus. Seeing the campus come to life again is exciting for all of us.

Today I write with more good news: we again had 100% negative COVID-19 test results for our entire community from testing administered this past Wednesday. I am proud of our students and employees for getting us to this point and allowing us to repopulate campus successfully. Congratulations to each and every community member for following the guidelines of quarantine prior to coming to campus and for continued willingness to make decisions that put the health and safety of the entire community first.

Although this is certainly a victory for Cushing, our work to remain healthy for the remainder of the semester is only just beginning. As I communicated over the summer, we will continue our strict behaviors of mask-wearing, physical distancing, and other viral mitigation practices. Nothing changes with how we live because of this test result, as we are still in the early stages of the semester. 

It is also a good time to remember that nothing we do is completely effective against COVID-19 transmission. Mask wearing is important but not 100% effective; distancing won’t always be perfect; and the campus is not a totally sealed, closed system. Testing does give us a snapshot of risk on campus at a point in time, but we cannot test everyone every day. Our goal is to keep campus COVID-free, so we have to implement and enforce every strategy consistently and whenever possible. 

With the above in mind, I also want to let our community, especially our students, know that we are in discussion with our medical team about adding some privileges after the third week of the fall semester. These will not be drastic changes in terms of our daily operations—and will not include home visits—but these changes could help our community understand that if we are able to maintain a COVID-free environment, additional privileges may be right around the corner. We are all looking forward to that! We want our students to thrive on campus this semester, and so we continue to be creative about ways to keep our community together while still maintaining our safe distances. 

Thank you again for your commitment to Cushing Academy, and please accept my thanks for your continued vigilance and compliance with our requests to maintain a healthy campus!

With gratitude,
Randy R. Bertin, Ed.D.
Head of School
978-827-7102