Health & Safety

The Parabola Project has identified nine core public health principles to guide districts’ plans and strategies for safely reopening schools. Each principle includes concrete and actionable toolkits along with field examples and other resources.

 
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The principles are summarized with key resources below, and you can find deeper explanations in our School Reopening Readiness Guide. The principles should be considered together as they are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. You may not be able to follow all of these principles perfectly all of the time, but their effectiveness depends on implementing as many as possible at the same time. The more you adhere to these principles, the lower the risk of viral transmission and repeated school closures.

System-Level Supports

These principles are essential for driving alignment, improvement, and coherence across a district. They are ideally centralized at the system-level and implemented by district administrators and teams.

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Principle 1: Leadership & Culture

Promote a leadership approach and culture around health that build trust between leaders and the school community, make agile data-driven decisions, take a balanced view of health/education risks, and emphasize resilience.

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Principle 2: Risk Stratification & Prevention

Perform regular individual and family COVID-19 risk assessments for students and staff to determine who can participate in in-person learning, facilitate access to key childhood and flu vaccines, and promote immune system strengthening practices.

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Principle 3: Testing & Tracing

Coordinate with local public health systems for school closures, testing, and quarantine of individuals with COVID-19 and for establishing protocols for public health system contact tracing for school community members who test positive for COVID-19.

School-Level Supports

These principles must take into account existing facility layout, student populations, staffing, and timelines. Decisions are then implemented on a day-to-day basis by school leadership teams.

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Principle 4: Screening & Triage

Screen for symptoms of COVID-19 daily, instruct staff and students to stay home if any symptoms are present, and create space within the school for children and staff to isolate before going home if they develop symptoms during the school day.

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Principle 5: Space Layout & Air Quality

Assess design and configuration of the school building and other spaces for adequate airflow, ventilation, and safer movement of people within and between spaces.

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Principle 6: Cohorting & Scheduling

Group students and staff together in limited numbers, keep the same individuals together in each group, and limit inter-group contact to reduce the number of individuals exposed to each other.

Classroom-Level Supports

These principles are critical to day-by-day learning and safety, providing front-line teachers with processes, tools, and practices for working with students and other staff members. These principles are highly local and reflect classroom-level context for teachers.

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Principle 7: Masks & PPE

Require all children and staff to wear a cloth or medical mask covering both mouth and nose at all times and provide appropriate PPE to nurses and individuals assessing or treating a suspected case.

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Principle 8: Hygiene (Personal & Space)

Require all children and staff to clean hands (via hand-washing, sanitizing), clean and wipe down surfaces, especially high-touch surfaces, and conduct deep cleaning of building spaces to reduce exposure to COVID-19 droplets.

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Principle 9: Density & Distance

Limit the number of people in enclosed spaces and allow distance between people to reduce exposure to COVID-19 droplets.

 

Interested in learning more about the nine public health principles?

 

Take a closer look at the public health principles in our corresponding School Reopening Readiness Guide, which provides an in-depth view of each principle, considerations, and additional resources.

The guide is intended to be used by reopening committees or leadership teams to develop a comprehensive plan for reopening and identify action steps under each principle and corresponding objectives. The guide also includes a progress tracker for teams to utilize, along with the latest literature on COVID-19.