Dear FVS Community,
I hope everyone is well. Today is the first day of Interim, and we are bracing ourselves for the winter storm that is expected to arrive in the next 24 hours. I’m writing in advance of the four-day weekend that follows Interim (March 20-23) with information that I hope will be welcome news.
Our COVID Task Force meets weekly to assess the landscape and make sure that the protocols we have in place appropriately support the safety and well-being of our community. I am pleased to say that our students, families, faculty, and staff have all been doing a great job upholding our
Community Commitment and also to report that our weekly testing has yielded no further positives since the one case identified in early January.
DX and WX Leave
Starting Friday, March 19, boarding students will be permitted to leave campus with other FVS students, day or boarding, on either a day excursion (DX) or weekend excursion (WX) leave. If students choose to request either a DX or WX leave, they will still need to follow our Tier I or Tier II leave expectations dependent upon their plans. These expectations are included below and have been updated to reflect these and other evolutions to our policies. Students will need to submit their leave requests through REACH no later than noon on the Thursday before their leave begins.
Tier I is for trips from FVS to one’s own home or another FVS student’s home that are made by car and involve only interaction with the members of one’s own household, or with the host student, parents and siblings or others who live in that household if visiting another FVS student’s home.
- Students must leave and return to campus with their parents, or with the parents of the student who is hosting them, or via car with their day student host.
- These trips are not limited to any given timeframe, and examples include weekend excursions as well as day trips from campus by boarding students when they are accompanied by a parent.
- Depending on the duration of time off campus, students will be required to maintain weekly COVID testing at their own expense while off campus.
- Plans must be provided in advance, and both the student and their parents will be required to sign a specific Community Commitment for each excursion.
- Students will be tested for COVID upon return to campus on the weekly testing times schedule and will not have to quarantine so long as they have followed the above requirements.
Tier II is for all other excursions within the U.S. whether made by car or plane, by boarding or day students to locations other than the home of an FVS student home or that may involve interacting more than briefly with people outside of their household family or that of their FVS student host family.
- Examples include travel for significant family events, college visits, and trips home that require air travel or overnight stays outside of one’s home.
- Depending on the duration of time off campus, students will be required to maintain weekly COVID testing at their own expense while off campus.
- Upon return to campus for boarding students, they will be tested for COVID through the FVS Health Center and required to quarantine in the Perry Complex. On the seventh day of quarantine, boarding students will again be tested for COVID and then released from quarantine upon return of a negative test result, which has typically been two days after testing.
- Upon return home for day students, their family must arrange for a PCR test both upon return and then again seven days later, and both results must be submitted to the FVS Health Center and approved prior to the student’s return to campus.
Residence Hall Visitation
On campus, starting Friday, March 19, boarding students will be permitted to visit other residence halls of the same gender and parietals will be permitted with the proper permissions through the weekend duty teams.
Looking Ahead
With the arrival of Interim, we now look toward the end of the year, which is just over two months away. We’ve done great work together thus far protecting the privilege of in-person learning, and I hope that these updates to our protocols and the movement we are making toward normalcy will help support and invigorate the commitment that we must maintain to each other as we work toward the finish line.
Sincerely,
David Racine
Dean of Students
Fountain Valley School
6155 Fountain Valley School Road
Colorado Springs, CO 80911
