Guiding Principles |
This mitigation strategy was used during the 2020.21 school at both the elementary and secondary levels. BSD's elementary educational model has clustered students into small, primarily self-contained classrooms or cohorts. At the secondary level, cohorting was accomplished by having two different cohorts of students coming to school on alternate days (Cohort 1 on Mondays and Tuesdays, Cohort 2 on Thursdays and Fridays).
By default, cohorting at the elementary level will occur for the 2021.22 school simply due to the continued use of our traditional elementary model that clusters the same groups of students together for the majority of the day. Cohorting is not in play at the secondary level due to the wide variation in students specialized schedules and the specialized certification of teachers in specific academic content areas. In an effort to minimize mixing and contact between students:
What is Cohorting? Cohorting (sometimes called podding) is a new term for a strategy that schools may use to limit contact between students and staff as part of their efforts to limit transmission of coronavirus (the virus that causes COVID-19). These strategies work by keeping groups of students – and sometimes staff – together over the course of a pre-determined period of time. Ideally, the students and staff within a cohort will only have physical proximity with others in the same cohort. This practice may help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by limiting cross-over of students and teachers to the extent possible, thus: • Decreasing opportunities for exposure or transmission of coronavirus • Reducing contact with shared surfaces • Facilitating more efficient contact tracing in the event of a positive case • Allowing for targeted testing, quarantine, and/or isolation of a single cohort instead of school-wide measures in the event of a positive case or cluster of cases Additional Resources: CDC: What is cohorting? |