Thirty students at Georgetown Preparatory School tested positive for the coronavirus this week in a pandemic outbreak that will move classes fully online at the prestigious all-boys Catholic high school outside Washington.

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       School officials say the cases were discovered as part of mandatory weekly testing at the 500-student school, which requires students and employees to be vaccinated.

       The outbreak was the first of the academic year, according to school officials, who attributed the cases to a post-Thanksgiving surge combined with off-campus social events last weekend, as winter nears and students are spending more time indoors.

       No teachers tested positive, and almost half of the students infected with the virus are part of the school’s 120-student residential program, said Georgetown Prep spokeswoman Connie Shaffer Mitchell. There have been no signs of classroom spread, she said.

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       Mitchell said the decision to switch to virtual learning was made after school officials received the test results Thursday. The thinking was, “Let’s hit pause, let’s not have any more spread, let’s make sure people are safe so they can have their Christmas break, their winter break — to be able to see family, travel or do whatever they had planned to do.”

       The school canceled classes Friday so teachers could prepare for five days of virtual instruction next week. The week after that, students begin a two-week holiday break.

       The well-known Jesuit school, which has educated U.S. Supreme Court justices and other Washington notables, is located on Rockville Pike, just north of the Beltway, in North Bethesda, Md.

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       The school is well-positioned to move to Zoom classes, having developed strong remote capabilities last year, when hybrid learning was in place, Mitchell said. Through many weeks of mandatory testing, she said, the school has had only a few positive cases. Most weeks, everyone has been negative.

       School outbreaks occur regularly in Maryland and elsewhere amid the pandemic. In the most recent week of data posted on Maryland’s school outbreak tracker, more than two dozen schools in Maryland had sizable outbreaks of more than 20 cases, including Leonardtown High School in southern Maryland’s St. Mary’s County, which recorded 86 cases.