At two o’clock on Friday, November 6, Sian Owen-Cruise learned that a seventh grader in the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor had tested positive for Covid-19. “I immediately wrote to the health department contact that I’m supposed to, and I said, ‘this has happened, and here’s what I plan to do,'” recalls Owen-Cruise, administrator of ‘RSSAA’s Lower (preK-8) and Upper (grades 9-12) schools. The entire eight-student “pod” immediately started a two-week quarantine.

Like the Ann Arbor Public Schools, Steiner switched to online learning when Michigan shut down in March. But while the AAPS stayed remote this fall, Steiner resumed in-person classes at its schools on Newport Rd. and Pontiac Tr. Owen-Cruise, who ran the Upper School for seven years before taking the top job in 2017, is the person most responsible for ensuring this can be done safely–a task that’s grown harder as the pandemic intensifies.

Sian Owen was born fifty-five years ago in South Wales in the United Kingdom. Her father worked for Dow Corning, and when she was in fifth grade he was transferred to Dow headquarters in Midland. “We intended to go back in fifteen months, but we’re still here,” she says with a laugh, the Welsh lilt still very evident in her speech.

She met her husband, David Owen-Cruise, during freshman orientation at Michigan Tech. They “were together all through college and married as soon as I graduated.”

She went on to the University of Minnesota, where she earned a master’s and PhD in communication studies. She stayed on as an assistant prof, teaching nontraditional students who “needed a leg up to bring them into higher education,” before leaving to teach at and run the Minnesota Waldorf School.

Based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, Waldorf education seeks to balance students’ academic, social, emotional, and physical development. Owen-Cruise says she encountered Steiner’s ideas in grad school, and “was very taken with the way in which he viewed human beings as not just a thinking, walking, producing kind of a being, but instead a much more complex, artistic, soul-based, caring, community kind of a being.”

Her daughter, Morgan, was a fourth grader at the school when Owen-Cruise started. When she finished eighth grade, she wanted to go to a Waldorf high school, so they moved to Ann Arbor so she could attend RSSAA.

Owen-Cruise didn’t immediately apply there herself–she says she felt her daughter “needed independence and freedom and a little time without her mom breathing down her neck.” Instead, she ran Washtenaw Success by 6, a collaborative organization that helps parents get their kids off to a good start by connecting them to community resources, preschools, and more. But once Owen-Cruise’s daughter graduated–she’s now a PhD candidate in computational chemistry working at the Argonne National Lab in Chicago–“it became the right thing for me to move to the RSSAA, which was what I always wanted.”

Like everyone else, Steiner’s staff has been rebuilding its systems on the fly this year. When schools closed in March, “we didn’t have what’s called a learning management system,” Owen-Cruise says. “We never imagined we would ever need one. In the summer, of course, we went out and got that technology in place.”

But she and the school’s leadership also created a detailed return-to-school plan. Based on CDC, state, and local health department recommendations, “we cohorted all our students into small pods,” Owen-Cruise says. “They don’t mix with other children during the day at the Lower School. At the high school, they’re allowed to be together outside, because we can more reliably trust them to keep social distance without oversight care. Each class has a group of teachers for three or four weeks. It means they’re not exposed to seven or eight teachers in a week, only three.” And they reconfigured both campuses to shrink classrooms to six or seven students, even moving the seventh and eighth grades from Newport to the high school on Pontiac Tr.

All Michigan high schools, including Steiner’s, reverted to online education when Gov. Whitmer’s “Pause to Save Lives” took effect in November. But the Lower School stayed open, and Owen-Cruise was glad the Upper School continued as long as it did. She says that Rudolf Steiner’s leaders had felt “our responsibility for these young people was to have them together for as long as possible.”

To explain why, she points to Steiner’s twelfth-grade chemistry class. When the school had closed earlier this spring, students could no longer fully participate in class. “The labs were done for them through Zoom–the teacher doing the lab and explaining what was happening.” This fall, teachers report that the students are “like fifth graders again, in the excitement of being in the lab, actually touching things.”

She is quick to point out that her school community was in a “uniquely fortunate position to reopen.” With just 309 students, “we can work with families and teachers and together come to a plan for reopening that all families could support.” Because they’d recently expanded the high school campus, they had space to spread out. And “we do not have to deal with the wide range of practical needs that the public schools have to address. It has become so clear in this crisis how much more than an education our public-school partners are providing–meals for students, for instance. We only needed to solve the practical problems around reopening in the pod structure. Finally, our faculty have been very supportive of reopening, with the precautions that we have taken, so we were able to staff our in-person classes.”

A week after that first Covid diagnosis, the student was fine, and no one else in that pod had fallen ill. But then another student got sick, and another pod went into quarantine.

With Covid infections at record levels around the country, Owen-Cruise says, she can “hear the drumbeats–the stakes are higher.” As the Observer went to press, a statewide order closed the high school, and Steiner leaders decided to extend the Lower School’s planned Thanksgiving vacation a second week. They plan to reopen both this month.

After the pandemic itself, what concerns her most “is how to support the faculty and staff through a dramatic increase in their workload,” she says. “They have no prep time. They have no release time at school.” And with smaller classes, “at the Lower School, they’re all teaching the main lesson twice every day. If they get a thirty-minute break to eat lunch and use the restroom, they’re lucky.

“This is my biggest concern: how people hold enthusiasm and joy and morale. But what I see every day is that they’re doing it.

After an extended three-week break over the holidays, they plan to be back in class in January–the state and the pandemic permitting. But whatever happens, she says, “We will do the right things for our children.”