Fountain Hills High School in Fountain Hills, Arizona has closed its campus and canceled all extracurricular activities for the next 2 weeks because of coronavirus exposures on campus, officials said on Wednesday.
“Due to the number of students who have been in direct contact with a person who has tested positive, we feel this decision is in the best interest of our students,” the district said in a statement on its Facebook page. The school is also requiring all students to quarantine for the next 14 days.
For the school’s swimming & diving team, this means they won’t be able to participate in the upcoming Arizona High School swimming & diving state championship meet.
The school usually competes in Division 3 of Arizona High School swimming for the state’s smallest schools. It has an enrollment of under 600 students.
Both the Fountain Hills boys and girls teams were represented at the 2019 State Championship meet. Then-senior Connor Reiff finished 9th in the 100 free (49.89), while current senior Grace Clark finished 14th in the 100 free (1:00.29) and 15th in the 100 back (1:10.07).
The news comes after AIA swimming & diving coordinator Erin Coy sent a letter to coaches last week pleading with them to continue to be careful with their teams and student-athletes ahead of the state meet so that outbreaks wouldn’t disrupt competition.
One Arizona High School swim coach died this offseason. 61-year old Kerry Chroswhite, who was the head coach at state swimming power Chandler High School for 17 years, died in July a month after contracting the virus.
The Arizona High School State Swimming & Diving meets are scheduled to run November 6 and 7 at the Skyline Aquatics Center in an altered format designed to minimize the number of individuals in an open-air facility at one time.
Among other events cancelled are the school’s two upcoming high school football games against Show Low and AZ College Prep.
Fountain Hills High School is located in the Phoenix suburbs and specifically in Maricopa County. While Arizona hasn’t seen the same spike in new cases as most of the country, numbers are steadily increasing. Maricopa County over the last week has seen about 637 new daily cases of coronavirus. At a rate of 14.2 per 100,000 population, that’s slightly below the state’s average over that time period, and well better than the national average of about 23 new daily cases per 100,000 population over the last week.