SAN DIEGO — La Jolla Country Day School has been open full-time since September 2020. But how?
"Everything we've done is to take care of the well-being of our staff, our faculty, and our students," Gary Krahn, Head of School at La Jolla Country Day, said.
La Jolla Country Day is a pre-K through high school campus with 1,100 students.
Since indoor classes reopened full-time, Krahn says less than 1% of students have tested positive for COVID-19. Those cases are believed to have been transmitted off-site, and no outbreaks have been reported at the school.
"As of today, we've had no child transmit the disease on this campus," he said.
Krahn credits a number of factors.
For starters, students are closely monitored via daily temperature checks, COVID tests every three weeks and contact tracing through an app.
For every 45 minutes of indoor instruction, students spend at least 15 minutes outside.
But, Krahn said what's really made a difference is monitoring the air around them.
All classrooms are equipped with windows, fans, as well as hospital grade carbon dioxide monitors.
"That's hard-wired into a control panel so we can determine…I can look on my phone right now and can see the CO2 content in any classroom. That doesn't tell me there's a virus. It just tells me the air circulation is at a level where we can't transmit the disease from one child to another," Krahn said.
He acknowledges doing all this takes a lot of resources, which other schools may not have.
"We anticipate that this year and next year to keep these campuses safe it's going to be close to $3 million," Krahn said.
Still, he says there are less-expensive alternatives like non hospital grade CO2 monitors, which still offer protection, and homemade devices.
One costs $35.
“We rigged up a box fan with a merv 13 filter literally taped to it," Krahn said.
Public school districts have been allocated hundreds of millions of state dollars to help pay for similar safety upgrades.
Smaller ones like Cajon Valley Union have reopened in-person learning for all students, but the county's largest district, San Diego Unified, has not.
Reasons include having to deal with more students, multiple campuses and a large teachers union.
"The thing that's really been the magic for this school is our faculty came back to school. They trusted our protocols," he said.