Air quality upgrade will keep Foxcroft Academy students remote learning for one more week

By Larry Mahoney, Bangor Daily News Staff

Students at Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft will continue to study remotely next week, as they did on Thanksgiving week, while the air handling system is upgraded.

And headmaster Arnold Shorey said it has come at an opportune time since there were three cases of COVID-19 among students in the school earlier this month.

“It’s not a bad thing. Our staff has a lot of experience with on-line learning so we will take advantage of this time,” Shorey said. “This will be a timely reset.”

The students will return to the academy on Dec. 7 with its current hybrid model. Half of the students attend in-person classes on Monday and Tuesday and the other half go on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is a remote learning day and it is also used to sanitize the school.

Shorey said contractors are upgrading the school’s air quality unit, which requires tearing apart the third floor.

“This will allow us to bring heated fresh air into the building so we won’t have to keep the windows open all winter,” he said.

One of the COVID-19 guidelines involves having fresh air circulating through schools as much as possible, and the money used to do the work comes from the state government’s allocation to each school to address COVID-19 needs, Shorey said.

He said the allocated money will foot the entire bill, which he estimated at $200,000.

The in-school portion of the project should be completed by the time the students return to school.

“They should be at the point where they only have to work on the roof so it won’t interfere with [in-person] learning,” Shorey said.

He noted that the air quality improvement had been in the works as part of their long-term facility plan, and the current situation with the pandemic and hybrid learning “allowed us to do it now.”

The last of the three students who had contracted the coronavirus will be eligible to return to school on Dec. 7.

Shorey said they dodged a bullet in that none of the three students was judged to be contagious when they attended the school so he wasn’t forced to shift into remote learning mode.

“When we learned of the cases, we immediately called the [Maine Center for Disease Control], “ he said. 

They configured the time when they were contagious based on the start of their symptoms and  the Maine CDC told him the students weren’t attending in-person classes when they were contagious. They were remote learning.

They were each quarantined for 10 days after their symptoms occurred and two have already returned to school.

“We are thankful. We have been fortunate up to this point,” Shorey said.