March 29, 2021

Dear Gibbons Community,

I hope that you had a great weekend. Gibbons certainly did! Congratulations to our Men’s Lacrosse and Men’s Soccer teams for their State Championships. We are so proud of our student-athletes and their coaches.

As I shared last week, Cardinal Gibbons has been considering a return to Plan A: 100% On-Campus. Thank you for your robust response to the survey we sent out about our possible return. The feedback from the entire community has been extraordinarily helpful as we contemplated this shift at an admittedly unorthodox time of the year. We have been in consultation with members of our COVID Task Force, the Diocese, our Board Chair Tim Throndson, and our educators. I have also had the opportunity to speak with a wide range of students and hearing their perspectives has been very enlightening.

As many of you know, there is little evidence nationwide of COVID-19 transmission in schools. As we move forward, we will continue to follow the NC DHHS guidelines outlined in the Strong Schools Toolkit, which can be found here.

After careful consideration, Cardinal Gibbons will return to Plan A beginning on April 19.

You can find an FAQ sheet with more specifics here, but I want to address some key points to provide as much context as possible.

The mental and emotional health of our students is paramount. We all know that change is initially anxiety-producing and that this shift to Plan A might cause discomfort to some students initially. All of our counselors are prepped and ready to talk with students about this topic. Additionally, we will have a counselor-led session just for parents the week after Easter Break.
We will not return to Plan A directly after Easter Break. By doing so, we hope to avoid any kind of spike that may result from traveling that families may do during that week. (We continue to discourage non-essential travel.) Additionally, by that time, all of our educators who have been vaccinated will be two weeks out from their second vaccination, meaning that they are fully inoculated.
We will not alter the schedule. In other words, we will be keeping the Content Focus Days and the Community Days (Senior Community Day excepted). Welcoming all of our students back to campus in April is a significant undertaking and changing the schedule is too much transition at this point. Additionally, the exam schedule will remain the same for all of the aforementioned reasons. Ms. Barkan will communicate more information about exams later this week.
We are asking families to commit to on-campus or distance learning by April 21. Students will have the opportunity to “try” in-person and opt out if they are uncomfortable or vice versa. We have never been in this situation before and so it is hard to predict how students will respond after 13 months of being away from school full-time. We are very sensitive to this reality. I know that some families have inquired about staying hybrid, but we cannot manage having on-campus, hybrid, and virtual students and still deliver an effective program. We will continue to provide significant programming for virtual students so they can feel as much of a part of the community as possible.
We will not require COVID-19 testing after Easter Break. The buffer between the end of the break and the full re-opening on April 19 allows enough time to avoid mass testing. We have access to a number of testing kits on our campus and may use them if the need arises during the final stretch of the year.
Senior Class Concerns. I know that some seniors and their families are concerned about this re-opening jeopardizing end of year events. We are fully committed to celebrating our seniors with in-person events. These events and ceremonies are essential to our community.

We will have a webinar on April 12 to answer additional questions that you may have. A link to join that webinar will be communicated in Gibbons Weekly on March 31. In the meantime, please feel free to send along any questions to me via email.

Thank you for your partnership and your belief in Cardinal Gibbons.

Peace,

Jeff Bell

Head of School