The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Colleges to open with COVID caution
Kahlil Greene, president of the Yale College Council, will be spending his senior year at home in Montgomery County, Md., just outside Washington.
While he’ll miss the major events of his senior year — the senior masquerade, senior societies, and his friends at Yale, Greene decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
“Having been on student government, I knew how strict rules would be to come back to campus,” Greene said.
Yale, like other colleges and universities in Connecticut, is requiring tests for the coronavirus before students come to campus, as well as after they arrive, and must quarantine in their residences for 24 to 36 hours until test results come back. Students who move in during Yale’s twoweek quarantine period must quarantine in their residence hall (they may use the courtyards) until the end of that period, according to a message from Yale College Dean Marvin Chun.
That is, unless they come from a state on Connecticut’s restricted list, when the quarantine rules are even stricter. Those students must quarantine for 14 days after arriving, like all travelers from those states. As of Saturday, Maryland, Greene’s home state, was on the list. Students also must be tested twice a week.
Breaking the quarantine rules can result in removal from campus and a $1,000 fine by the state, Chun wrote.
The risk of a COVID-19 outbreak once school starts is ever present, adding to the stress. “You’re away from home, so if, God forbid, anything would happen, I just thought it would be a lot easier for me and my family” to enroll remotely, Greene said.
“I think campus life would have been so different, it wouldn’t have been worthwhile to go up there,” he said, knowing that, as a senior, he’ll miss “time you spend with your friends because it’s your last year. All those things will be erased.”
But Greene thinks the upcoming year will be hardest on the sophomores, who may only live on campus in the spring semester. That means they will be off campus from last March, when schools closed, until January. “It’s just erased from their experience,” Greene said. “So they wouldn’t have a full year at Yale after two years at Yale.”
Under Yale’s plan, firstyears are only allowed on campus in the fall semester, while juniors and seniors can live on campus all year.
While disappointed, Greene said he’s not overly upset by having to attend class from Maryland. “It’s going to be an interesting experience, but definitely not how I imagined it,” he said. “I generally prepared for it the last five months because I didn’t expect it to get better,” referring to the pandemic.
This academic year will be very different for college students. Masks, testing, social-distancing rules, fewer residents in the dorms and a limit on time to be able to hang out in the dining hall or lounge will be the rule, following the state’s guidelines.
According to those guidelines, all residential students must bring documentation that they have had a viral test, and if they tested positive must delay arrival until 10 days pass without symptoms.
Students who have symptoms of COVID-19, who have had close contact with someone who has the disease or who arrive on campus without proof of a negative test will be required to quarantine for 14 days. All students coming from the states on Connecticut’s restricted list will also be required to quarantine for 14 days when they arrive on campus.
To accommodate students who choose to study remotely or who won’t be allowed on campus, and to keep class sizes small, colleges and universities have come up with multiple ways to offer classes, with terms such as hybrid and flex, synchronous and asynchronous, online and onground, becoming common terms on campus.
Almost all schools in Connecticut will be welcoming students back to campus, though online learning will remain important in order to limit the number of students in a classroom at any one time.
“We’re really trying to diversify all of our learning options. It’s been a pretty complicated jigsaw puzzle,” said Summer McGee, dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven and the university’s COVID-19 coordinator. “We’ve created fully online semester options for nearly all of our students.”
McGee, whose expertise is in public health, said some students have raised concerns about being in close quarters in class or in the dorm, but most are ready to return. “I think what we have heard from our students is they want to come back to campus. They want to continue their college experience,” she said. “We really let that be our guiding principle.”
While much of the staff will continue to work remotely, “By and large our faculty have said they are eager to come back, too, so that’s what we’re letting drive our plans,” McGee said.
The university also is better prepared to move everything online after having to do so without warning or preparation in March. “What we’re putting a lot of emphasis on right now is how we educate and train both our students and our faculty and staff on what we need to do to keep the campus healthy,” McGee said.
Each school has its own version, but many will be using a combination of in-person (on-ground) and online teaching. In one, half the students will be in the classroom while the other half watches the same lecture online (that’s known as synchronous). The two halves switch places on the second day of the week, and the material is different on each day.
In a hybrid model, the professor teaches the same material to each half of the class on different days, while the other group is watching a prerecorded lecture online, covering different material. That’s what’s called asynchronous. “We encourage students to block out that time on their schedules” to watch the recorded lecture, McGee said.
Both allow for students who, for health or other reasons, can’t physically attend class. Also, for commuter students, “the days of the week they come to campus would always be the same,” she said.
At UNH, with 2,300 classes, “we couldn’t have fit” everyone without putting some classes online, McGee said.
Keeping students spaced out in the dorms is another issue. “We’ve eliminated nearly all of our triples,” McGee said. “We’ve done a lot of work to arrange the rooms to give as much space as possible. We have almost 100 students that are still waiting for rooms and want to live on campus and we’re trying to accommodate them.”
In case students test positive for COVID-19, areas have been designated for isolation and quarantine. “We’re going to monitor very closely our testing rates,” McGee said. “We’ll have a dashboard to monitor all of our key indicators.”
She said because students will be spaced at least 6 feet apart in class, it won’t be necessary to cancel a class or quarantine all the students if one tests positive. “The CDC definition of what a contact is is someone who has been in close contact less than 6 feet apart for more than 15 minutes,” she said. Students in a classroom would not usually be considered contacts, she said, unless they were doing lab work or other work in close proximity to each other.
“We may still want to let students know that someone tested positive and they may want to be more vigilant,” McGee said.
UNH President Steven Kaplan said it’s worthwhile to bring students back despite the risks. “When you walk away from college, in the end there’s only a certain amount of knowledge that sticks,” he said. Interacting with students and faculty is also important, he said.
“To me it’s a lot healthier than sitting in your room in front of a computer screen,” he said. “The social aspect is missing. There’s a lot more to be learned in college than what you’ve learned in the classroom.”
Kaplan said that if the virus spikes and “we have to close in October or November till there’s a vaccine … to me that’s the horrific side of it.”
He said everyone’s cooperation in maintaining the health guidelines is imperative. “As far as I’m concerned, if people aren’t following the rules, if they’re faculty or staff, they’ll go on full-time furlough and if they’re students they be expelled.”
McGee said such measures would only be taken in extreme cases of “intentional noncompliance.”
“We’ll follow the regular disciplinary protocols and processes to investigate things that occur,” she said. “The difference will be that the sanctions for violating student disciplinary policies will be much more sever because of the stakes involved.”
Christine Petto, chairwoman of the History Department at Southern Connecticut State University, said she is concerned about the health of students, faculty and staff. “This is just very stressful times,” she said. “It’s scary. I worry for our students coming back. I worry for our first-years. This is not the introduction we want them to have,” as necessary as precautions are.
She said the university’s public health faculty, along with experts from the state, “have a game plan should something happen that will require us to make a change from on-ground. We’re in a different position than we were in March when we had to, really quick, scramble.”
Petto said all her teaching will be online, which she has had experience in, so she will be on campus only for office hours and to do administrative work. “I have some colleagues that will be remote this entire semester,” she said.
Joe Bertolino, Southern’s president, said, “as a public institution … our directive in terms of opening or closing are a direct result of the governor’s plan to reopen Connecticut. Initially, when we talked about a fall opening we had hoped we would be able to fully open, which wasn’t the case.”
But he said the school will “make very effort to provide some kind of onthe-ground experience wherever and whenever we can provide it.”
He said college students deserve more credit for following the safety guidelines than they are sometimes given. “Our student leaders have articulated to us that students want to come back to campus and they believe that most students will follow the rules because they don’t want to hurt anybody and they want to be here,” Bertolino said.
Like Kaplan, Bertolino said the on-campus experience is important. “It is a delicate balance because, on one hand, you could make a decision to have everything online, but what is it that is lost in terms of the experience that students will have and their holistic development? What defines us as individuals is not just what we’re learning in the classroom and online.”
Bertolino said the important thing is “caring for the needs of people, our students, our faculty, our staff, their families. We really need to exercise an ethic of care … and we need to be flexible.”
He said having to close the campus again would be “a hard pill to swallow” but he’s confident the university would be able to adapt. “I think there will be a lot of celebration if campuses can make it to Thanksgiving,” he said. After Thanksgiving break, students at almost all schools will finish their semesters online and not return to campus until 2021.
Bertolino said most students are coming back to school but that “we have seen some decline” among the entering first-year students. “Folks were waiting to see what would happen all summer,” he said, while some have opted for community colleges and others are deferring entering until January or fall 2021.
“The downside is you might be losing students right now” but have “more students than you can handle a year from now.”
Sarah Gossman of Trumbull, who will be a junior at Southern this fall and is president of the Student Government Association, said she is excited to return to campus. “I think everybody’s eager to go back and return to somewhat normalcy,” she said.
“There is a risk that comes with this pandemic, but I think there are going to be rules enforced and I think the staff at Southern is going to enforce the rules,” she said.
Gossman said she’s taken online classes before and said “if online clases mean that I’m able to keep faculty and staff safe and students safe, I’m willing to do my part.” She credited faculty with being flexible about how they will teach courses and the residence life staff “for making moving back possible so we can even enjoy a residential experience in the fall.”
At the University of Connecticut, just 30 percent of classes will be in person, according to Eleanor Daugherty, dean of students. She said planning has been intensive across departments. “We’ve moved beyond crisis response,” she said. “It has really been essential that we not take a reactive position to a crisis, but instead that we recreate a living/learning experience in the fall.”
She said the university has a student ambassador program “that seeks to use a peer-to-peer education model to encourage compliance” with physical-distancing rules, mask wearing and other guidelines and to “demystify what contact tracing means.” Contact tracing is used to determine who an exposed person may have been in close contact to
“I do believe in the student body. I do believe that they will follow those precautions,” Daugherty said.
While residential space has been reduced to 8,000 beds, Daugherty said all students who sought oncampus housing have been accommodated. “We’ve been able to meet that need. There’s been a natural selection out,” she said.
Patricia O’Neill, president of the Connecticut State University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, expressed concern that testing and screening guidelines won’t be as strict for the commuter students at the four regional universities or the 12 community colleges.
O’Neill, a psychology professor at Western Connecticut State University, said only Eastern Connecticut State University has more than 50 percent of its students living on campus.
“We have a petition that has been signed by over 1,100 faculty members emphasizing that the Board of Regents must guarantee safety during this pandemic and reopening as well as that no faculty member will be harmed in terms of their renewal prospects or tenure and promotion prospects because of lost time” after schools closed in March. She said the regents had no comment.
“What I find curious is that, in terms of reopening … they’re not planning on engaging in widespread testing of students, faculty or staff nor are they planning on engaging in any sort of screening process for faculty, staff or commuter students,” she said.
She said not all faculty members have been given the option to teach remotely and it isn’t clear why.
“Right now we’re hoping to be in conversation with the system office over these safety issues and the system office deserves credit for their efforts at transparency and I’m hoping these will be useful conversations and, if they’re not, we’ll have to see how we respond.”
Asked at a July 29 Board of Regents meeting why all students, faculty and staff would not be tested, Dr. Deidre Gifford, acting state public health commissioner, said, “I want to emphasize that testing is not a strategy for containment of spread. ... One of the downsides of a broad testing strategy is the risk that people let their guard down” on other safety guidelines. She added that the state’s guidelines could change if cases began to rise in Connecticut.
Gifford also said, asked about the higher rate of infection among 20- to 29-year-olds, that “incidence of disease in this age group is not going up. It actually hasn’t changed.” It is the highest because other groups’ rates have declined, she said.
“Young adults certainly need to get with the program and start complying with these requirements,” she said, adding that state officials are watching closely indicators of a possible spike in coronavirus infections.
Yale will require students living off campus to be tested before the semester begins and then twice a week during the semester. All students coming from states on the restricted list must quarantine for 14 days after arriving, according to guidance issued Friday by Marvin Chun, dean of Yale College, and Melanie Boyd, dean of student affairs.