An Unprecedented By Eric Krebs ’17
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n Sunday, March 8, New York City reported 21 new cases of COVID-19, about the population of an average classroom at Xavier. By Thursday, March 12, there were 357 new cases per day, more than an entire class year. By the 15th, new daily cases outnumbered the entire student body. “On the night of March 11, Mr. Raslowsky and I had a conversation, and both of us decided that this was far more serious than we had been led to believe. We began to worry about our families and the safety of our kids, so we made the decision to close,” Headmaster Michael LiVigni P’21 recalled. The next day, Thursday, March 12, would be Xavier’s last day of in-person instruction. On Friday, March 13, members of the faculty and staff came to Xavier for intensive, collaborative preparation to transition to distance learning. “In our minds, we’d be back after Easter break...but that’s not what happened,” LiVigni said. This is the story of what did happen, how administrators, teachers, faculty, and students
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adapted to—and made the most of—a truly unprecedented upheaval.
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nce it became clear that closing was a real possibility, [Dean of Faculty] Brian McCabe P’23, [Dean of Academics] Lou Lovallo, and I began really hammering out what the daily, weekly plan would look like...and it wasn’t the logistics that came first. What came first was a discussion of our priorities,” Dean of Educational Systems Lindsay Willert told Xavier Magazine. Early meetings between the three deans lasted hours, covering different possible scenarios and how the school might adapt to each. Existing models for online learning, said Willert, mostly catered to the university level. Xavier, thus, had both the opportunity to learn from best practices and innovate its own. As it turned out, innovation that has been going on at Xavier for a decade helped prepare them to do exactly that. “We’ve been working on a different paradigm at Xavier,” McCabe
