About This Playbook

The purpose of this playbook is to provide a user-friendly guide to the decisions that need to be made around school management during a pandemic. The guide is organized into independent modules, each covering a different topic.

In each module, you will be asked to answer questions. Your answers will inform the next questions to be asked. If you want to change your answers, you can always step back through the process or start over completely.

At the end of a module, you will be provided with a checklist associated with your choices, as well as a record of all the answers you provided. You will be able to download this final report. The checklist items will include links to useful support documents, websites, and examples.

Who should use this playbook?

Anyone involved in school administration can benefit from this playbook. Individual modules may be best completed by different staff members.

What Should I Know Before Starting?

The decision to reopen a school during the COVID-19 pandemic will rely on many factors: risk of infection, need to care for students, ability to provide remote education, and others. Here we will address only the risk of infection, as the other factors are best decided by individual districts. This playbook is meant to provide the best information possible to limit the spread of infection within a school. First, we must make this abundantly clear:

There Will Be Cases Within Your School


Given the level of spread throughout the world, it is highly likely that at least one person (student, faculty, or staff) will become infected during the semester. No school can prevent cases that occur in the community. That is not the goal of this playbook. The goal of this playbook is to limit the spread of infection WITHIN your school.Because we know that there will be infectious people in your school building at some point, how do we limit transmission (spread of the infection to other people)? There are 10 layers to limiting disease spread, which can be combined in many ways.

Want to Try this playbook?

Anyone involved in school administration can benefit from this playbook. Individual modules may be best completed by different staff members

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