When the Swine Flu Strikes Your School
What One Principal Learned From Experience
As any high school principal will tell you, when the phone rings at 11:30 on a Thursday night, it’s usually not good—particularly when the voice on the other end of the line is your superintendent. After one such call in May, I learned that an issue newspapers had reported earlier that week as a problem in faraway Mexico was suddenly my problem. A student at my school had been diagnosed with a “probable” case of swine flu. As a consequence, Rockville High School, in Montgomery County, Md., was to be closed the next day, for an undetermined period of time.
Wide awake at that news, my mind began to spin. It was time to alert my administrative team and other key players in the school, and to compose an automatic phone message to be sent out early the next morning to students and staff members. That would take care of notifying the community of the closing, but it was only the first of many actions that would be required to bring a bustling high school program to a halt.
By Friday morning, I realized that I had more questions than answers. Our school, for instance, is an SAT testing site, and students from all over the county were registered to take the assessment here on Saturday. Could the test be moved to another location? How would we contact those scheduled to take the exam who were not our students? And what would we do about our own Advanced Placement exams that were scheduled to begin on Monday? There were other, broader questions, too. Which staff members could work in the building? How would the building’s service workers rid surfaces of any virus? Although there were no athletic contests scheduled at the school, would our track and tennis athletes be permitted to participate in the upcoming regional and state competitions? If the school closing continued for several weeks, could instruction be delivered...
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