The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Colleges to open campuses with COVID caution
Testing, smaller classes, less-than-full dorms the rule
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 two-week 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 on-ground, 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.
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.”
“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.”