Dear Beaver Families,

We have made the decision to add student testing to our COVID-19 plan. 

Starting Tuesday, February 23, all Beaver students will be tested 2x per month on-campus.

We are requiring all students who come to campus to participate in this testing as we want to have the reassurance everyone in our community is being tested. If you choose not to have your child participate, then they must go fully remote.
HOW TESTING WILL WORK

Students will be assigned a testing group and an appointment time.

  • Groups will be tested on alternate weeks. (Note: both groups will be tested the week after Spring Break.)
  • Testing appointments will be Tuesdays and Thursdays between 9 and 11 a.m. in Gym B.
  • If your student misses their testing appointment, they will test the following week (on the same day of the week they are typically scheduled).

Students will be tested by a nasal swab PCR test by a PhysicianOne Urgent Care professional. Read more about this type of test.

  • You will receive an email from PhysicianOne with the results of your student’s test 36 to 48 hours after they are tested.
  • If a test is positive, you will also get a phone call from PhysicianOne.
  • PhysicianOne will share all test results with Beaver. The Health Office will follow up with families in the event of a positive test result.
  • Please note: you may receive test results before we do. Therefore, if you receive a positive result contact the Health Office immediately so we can begin contact tracing.
NEXT STEPS
We are finalizing appointment times and groups, and we will email families and students once we have that information and more details later this week.
WHY WE’RE STARTING TESTING NOW
We are confident in our current approach to minimizing risk and transmission on campus; and—as you know—we have also kept the door open to the idea of student testing. In addition to ongoing discussions with the senior leadership team and the Board, we reviewed a recent parent and student survey and consulted with Beaver’s medical experts. We also benchmarked and spoke with leadership at peer schools about their programs.

Based on all this information, we determined that adding student testing to our existing faculty/staff testing will help us in two ways:

  1. It will improve our chances of identifying any asymptomatic positive student cases, which seems particularly important as new and more contagious strains of the virus surface.  
  2. It will give us even more data to make decisions this spring. Long term, we hope that BVR faculty and staff will be able to get vaccinated and Brookline may reduce the 6-foot requirement for distance between people. If we have strong evidence suggesting both our student and adult population is fairly healthy, we may then be able to move forward with bringing students back for more days on campus.  
If you have any questions about testing, please contact the Health Office.

Be well,

Kim Samson
Head of School