To the students, staff, faculty, and administration of Haverford College,

Haverford College’s current COVID-19 mitigation plan is insufficient and unacceptable. 

The refusal to mandate testing and the shift away from testing as a policy is shortsighted. Testing gives students the ability to assess COVID risks on campus and provides a layer of protection against a possible worst-case scenario happening on campus. Given the extremely infectious nature of recent variants and the very real risk of long COVID or death, we feel this is foolish and creates unnecessary risk for all students and staff, especially the immunocompromised and the elderly. How can we in good faith return to “the kinds of social interactions that define an enriching college experience” using the framework of “trust, concern, and respect” if we do not have accurate snapshots of COVID testing provided vis a vis routine mandated testing for the community?  For students to engage in activities like sporting events, in-person speakers, or social gatherings, there needs to be the level of safety that regular testing helps to provide along with our other measures of masking. 

The school’s opposition to hybrid learning or zoom options being provided for students is equally shortsighted. At the beginning of the semester, Renata Muñoz, speaking on behalf of DASH in an open letter/ petition to the Bi-Co schools that received 1100 signatures, explained how “the decision to have online courses only be available based on the discretion of the professor leaves course accessibility essentially up to luck and tells immunocompromised students to sacrifice their health for their courses.”  Why is the school so opposed to professors making use of a technology that grants disabled students greater access to the classroom? Hybrid learning options must be vigorously supported by the school as a way to enable the learning of disabled and immunocompromised students during and beyond the pandemic.

We, therefore, call on Haverford to: 

-Reinstate at least one period of mandatory testing before the break and encourage testing among students, to keep COVID cases low and to mitigate risk for social activities.

-Support professors who want to make hybrid options available and support students who need hybrid classes, to make the college a more accessible institution beyond the pandemic.

In Solidarity Always,

BiCo SDS