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The removal of half day Wednesdays from the IACS 2022-2023 bell schedule was recently announced in the January 28 IACS Hawk newsletter by Head of School Greg Orpen, in disregard to the opinions and needs of many students and parents.
The elimination of the half day Wednesday is overall detrimental to IACS as a school, and poses no real benefits over the current schedule.
Student government co-presidents Drew Picard and Elea Zegdoun laid out their plans for the coming school year, focusing mainly on rebuilding our school community post pandemic, and taking on an active role in fostering a more diverse and inclusive IACS community.
As their first priority, the co-presidents shared that they wanted to rebuild the sense of community at IACS that was so severely harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “As a freshman, I knew every single highschooler,” Zegdoun commented. “[I knew] all of the seniors, all of the juniors, all of the sophomores, and all of my freshman class, but now as a senior, I don’t know any of the freshmen or any of the sophomores because we lost that sense of community so bad that year.”
IACS students will soon be able to get COVID-19 tested at school through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s COVID-19 Testing Program.
Three different types of testing will be provided: pool testing, symptomatic testing, and the “Test and Stay” program. Pool testing will occur once a week, where shallow nasal swab samples from multiple students are collected at school and put into a single tube for testing. Symptomatic testing will occur when individuals present symptoms at school (DESE notes that individuals should not go to school if experiencing symptoms while at home). The Test and Stay program is for close contact testing, where tests will be administered daily from the first day of exposure for at least five days, allowing close contacts to stay in school if their test results are negative for COVID-19.
