During the 1918 influenza epidemic, Sidwell Friends closed the School, students gave back to the community, and “patrons and pupils” overtaxed the School’s sole phone line. At least Thomas Sidwell knew that a “cheerful frame of mind is conducive to health.”

The current COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly the most significant public health crisis of our lifetimes. But a century ago, Thomas Sidwell also had to usher the School through an epidemic: the “Spanish flu.”

The 1918–1919 academic year was not a normal one at Sidwell Friends. Along with other schools across Washington, Sidwell Friends closed for a month. Playgrounds, libraries, movie theaters, and other businesses around the city were also ordered to shut down. As one student lamented in the December 1918 issue of The Quarterly: “The first weeks of school have certainly been difficult ones for both faculty and students. The ‘flu’ succeeded in upsetting all plans and everyone has had to be ‘double quick’ to keep up in his work.”Without the benefit of Zoom, iPad apps, and all the other technologies that enabled the School to implement a distance-learning plan in a matter of days, this earlier generation of students had no choice but to put in extra time to make up for the missing hours of instruction.

One legacy that does endure from the School’s earliest days is its commitment to the wider community. The students of a hundred years ago were eager to let their lives speak and raised funds for the Washington Baby Camp Hospital, Red Cross, and Friendship House, a local social-service agency. Throughout 1918 and 1919, Sidwell Friends students held dances, athletic events, and bazaars to raise money for these local organizations. The students today, in turn, have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by employing 3D printers to create face shields for health care workers, sewing masks for local homeless shelters, and holding virtual concerts to raise funds for community-outreach agencies.

As administrators anticipate returning to campus under social-distancing restrictions, getting students to spend more time outdoors is one strategy under consideration. In the winter of 1919, outside activity also played a role in the School’s health and wellness efforts.

As a student wrote in the February 1919 issue of The Quarterly, “‘Fresh Air and Efficiency’—This is our new school motto, and we are getting more of each by spending our recesses outdoors instead of in the stuffy school room. Promptly at 11:15 we assemble in the study hall and march out into the yard—girls as well as boys—to have fifteen minutes of exercise.”

Meanwhile, this note from Thomas Sidwell to parents from February 1, 1919, is a reminder of just how exhausting things had become for the administration that year:

Life has grown so complicated and so difficult that we must ask that the Friends school telephone have a more restricted use. ... Our buildings are large and the mere walking back and forth to find persons or to carry messages consumes an incalculable amount of time. ... Our people are wearied with the war, the recent crowded condition of the city, and the great amount of illness there has been this winter. Will the patrons and pupils of the Friends School spare us further weariness by planning ahead and so not taxing the telephone to its limit?The 1918–1919 academic year eventually came to an end, and the Sidwell Friends com- munity managed to sustain no deaths from the influenza outbreak that took the lives of nearly 3,000 DC residents. Thomas Sidwell ended the year with a final note to parents: “The Friends School at the conclusion of its thirty-sixth year, wishes to thank its patrons for their cooperation during a trying year and especially during the period of influenza. With this cooperation, it has been possible to com- plete this year’s work in a creditable way.” Our founder’s message echoes today, as we thank our community and look ahead together to what promises to be a historic 138th year.

SICK LEAVE

1894

During a scarlet fever outbreak in 1894, Thomas Sidwell closed the school for a few days while he and five colleagues washed student desks with bichloride of mercury and then burned 140 pounds of sulphur throughout the buildings. For the unfortunate students who had come down with scarlet fever, Sidwell burned their books and everything left in their desks.

1907

A brief closure due to two students contracting diphtheria made the news in 1907, perhaps because one of the Sidwell Friends students who had been quarantined was Archie Roosevelt, the third son of sitting President Teddy Roosevelt.

In an announcement to parents about closing the school for fumigation, Thomas Sidwell advised, “Meanwhile it will all be well to remember that a cheerful frame of mind is conducive to health, and that the greatest safeguard against contagious disease is a strong, vigorous body, kept so through regular exercise, abundant sleep and proper food.”