HS's in general race too much, but...

I understand why they do. I coached in HS from 1990-1997. We had one NY state championship CC team and several D1 scholarship athletes in that time. I think we raced less than most teams we competed against. Our top runners, generally juniors and senior only raced once a week. Other, developing, athletes might race three times every two weeks. They needed to learn how to race, plus we needed to get them excited for cross-country as a sport. They raced more because of that. Our top guys had a lot of competitive days amongst themselves in practice. We would stage mini competitions on the team all the time. My guys could race!

During the pandemic, with meets hard to come by now is the time to experiment a little to see what you really can develop if you have dedicated runners. Set a daily mileage that they run EVERY day (13 out of 14 days) without exception. Do time trials every week, varying the distance. Maybe 4K's, 3K's and 2K's. Get them running fast on the track or trails in time trials. Ideally you can get small groups (3 or 4 athletes) together to do this, but if not have athletes do it on their own and report results. We have the luxury of a 2400m stone dust trail that we use for training and time trialing. It's perfectly fast and candidly, faster than a track. It's nice to try and find something like that for athletes to use for fast running.

A typical two week training during this time might look like this:
1 day off
1 day long (120% of regular daily mileage)
1 day fartlek (we usually use 5 min warmup, 5 min cool-down, the rest at 3 min on/3 min off)
2 days time trials (4K one day, 2K the other day)
9 days training runs (training runs are at your daily mileage, the key is to "run how you feel today" which means there could be a lot of quick days as well as some slower days. Never hold yourself back on a day because you have a "workout" the next day.)