Head's Weekly Message — Jan. 7, 2022

Dear Mayfield Senior School Community,

 

Happy New Year!

 

I hope you had a lovely Christmas filled with family and friends. I also hope that your plans weren’t too impacted by the COVID-19 surge. My husband and I traveled east to spend the holiday with our oldest son Aubrey, his wife Haley, and our beloved nine-month-old grandson Heath. It was such a blessing to be able to be part of Heath’s first Christmas and to experience some milestones in person including his first real crawl—the perfect Christmas gift!

 

As I’m sure for many of you—between Christmas and New Year’s our attention turned sharply to the surge in COVID-19 cases and the effect of this on our Mayfield community. In order to keep our community as safe as possible and to avoid unplanned campus closures—we had to make the difficult decision to postpone the return to campus for a week to allow everyone the opportunity to be tested before being together again. We made the decision to test everyone on Wednesday in order to catch cases contracted over the New Year’s weekend. As of now, Friday morning—we feel extremely fortunate that we have only received 1 positive test result so far of the almost 450 tests that we administered.

 

This very low positivity rate gives me great confidence. Never-the-less we are further ramping up our mitigation efforts in compliance with the requirements of the Pasadena Department of Health. These include the mandate that all faculty and staff wear surgical-grade masks while on campus. We strongly urge all students to do the same. In addition, everyone on campus must now wear their masks outside when distancing is not possible. We have very good evidence that proper mask wearing really helps prevent spread—so I ask you please to reinforce this with your daughters.

 

We are going to do our best to monitor mask-wearing and making sure that everyone eats lunch outside weather permitting. We have also decided to suspend all large indoor gatherings at school (assemblies etc.) until the end of January, which included postponing Choreographers’ Ball (now Jan. 27 to Jan. 30).

 

All this being said—the absolutely most important action we can all take right now to keep our community and families as safe as possible is to make sure everyone is fully vaccinated and boosted as well. The Pasadena Department of Health is following the new CDC guidelines concerning isolation and quarantine. These include the mandate that those eligible must have received a booster dose of vaccine in order to prevent quarantine if identified as a close contact. Those who are fully vaccinated and boosted (when eligible) are the only ones who will be able to avoid quarantine—so please have everyone in your family boosted as soon as possible.

 

I want to give a special shout out to Nurse Cathy Cota for all her very hard work and care during these challenging times. Please remember that we have created a new

dedicated attendance phone line: 626-799-0267 and email address studentabsences@mayfieldsenior.org for parents to use in order to report a student’s absence or request and early dismissal. Thank you for your attention to this change.

 

Now—some wonderful news—I am thrilled to let you know that we have entered the third and final phase of our Strub renovation project. Students will find a few changes when they return to campus on Monday, but we don’t anticipate any disruptions. Thank you so much for all your prayers and support as we complete this important work on our beloved home.

 

And finally—I want to wish all of you a very blessed Epiphany. Our Founder, Cornelia Connelly called this her “Great Feast.”  She marked the day with an annual retreat and special letter to her sisters. This year let us seek to honor our beloved Cornelia by living the prayer found in her Epiphany letter of 1854—written 168 years ago.

 

 

 

With Love and Gratitude,

 

Kate Morin