Masks, small classes, no parties. How colleges plan to keep students safe from COVID
Thousands of college students are now converging on area campuses for the first time since COVID-19 shut everything down, and officials are greeting them with long lists of restrictions and innovations for keeping them safe.
No parties and no guests in dorm rooms, for starters.
Masks and smaller classes will be the new normal. Areas where students once congregated are cordoned off. Health checks verbally or electronically are required before entering certain buildings. Only two people in an elevator at a time. Self-serve food stations are forbidden. And, perhaps most daunting of all, students are expected to clean their dorm rooms and bathrooms multiple times every week.
For most students, classes begin on Aug. 24. At the University of Kansas and University of Missouri this past week, students have been moving their belongings into dorm rooms, but they won’t actually be living there for a few more days. The schools extended move-in dates and assigned students times to avoid crowds.
University of Missouri-Kansas City will test dorm residents before they move in, and vending machines are now loaded with personal protective equipment. Many schools are handing out kits stuffed with masks, sanitizer and disinfectant. KU will test everyone on campus. KU and MU will work with county health officials on contact tracing.
“It’s not enough,” said Ryan Reza, who is entering his junior year as a KU political science major concentrating on global and international studies. “It’s very worrisome, outright dangerous.”
Experts are wary as well.
“This virus is not very well controlled throughout the U.S.,” said Dr. Bill Schaffner, a professor of preventative medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University. “The countries that have opened their education systems have been able to do so if they have community spread under control. If we are not careful we will have more cases.”
Reza pinpoints the problem: “The universities have been given this impossible task,” he said. “They can make students social distance in class, but they can’t make them social distance outside of class. I feel very comfortable saying that most students expect an outbreak.”
In a letter to administration, the UMKC chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the college’s decision to open campus “has produced urgent concerns regarding the safety of faculty, students, staff, administrators and the Kansas City community.”
Even before they fully open, schools have already seen cases, most of them among student athletes preparing for a season that may not happen.
The New York Times recently surveyed officials at “every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities,” and found at least 6,600 cases tied to about 270 colleges. Some schools did not release numbers, citing student privacy laws.
According to the Times, between March 1 and July 28, 29 cases were found at Kansas State University, 18 at UMKC, 16 at KU, and 10 at MU. But MU officials said their numbers are likely much higher.
So far, though, the spread of the virus on campuses has not deterred area efforts to open.
In the classroom
There is no one-size-fits-all mandate, so officials — after surveying students, faculty and staff — are doing what they believe best suits their campus and academic programs.
Most will offer a combination of in-person and online classes. How that looks will vary from course to course, decided by the professor, evaluated by deans and following university rules for room capacity limits.
North Carolina’s Davidson College and its College Crisis Initiative collected reopening plans for nearly 3,000 institutions and found that 25% are opening primarily online and 21% are opening primarily in person. Another 15% are offering a hybrid of the two. Only 5% will be fully online and only 2.6% will be fully in person.
“Teams have been working since late spring to change the layout of our physical space,” said Jennifer Lundgren, provost and executive vice chancellor at UMKC. “We limited classrooms to only 25% of the capacity. So a class that would normally hold 100 we are only putting 25 people in it.”
Maintenance workers rearranged every single piece of furniture in classrooms and in some cases removed it to allow six feet on all sides of each person in the room. “No matter where a person is sitting or an instructor is lecturing there is the ability to social distance,” Lundgren said. All universities have detailed plans for frequent cleaning of classrooms.
But limiting people in classrooms and lecture halls “posed one of our biggest puzzles,” she said. There just weren’t enough classrooms. So UMKC repurposed space. For example, board rooms and conference areas became classrooms, and event space in the student union and the campus auditorium became lecture halls. The campus recreation center on some days will serve as the practice hall for the university orchestra. And in some cases the university rented pianos for conservatory students doing distance learning from local apartments.
“We stretched out the class day,” Lundgren said. Classes start as early as 7 a.m. and go until 9:45 p.m. “Some of our larger classes that may have as many as 400 students made the decision to go with a hybrid model.” Those lectures are doing synchronized online classes that may have one day with everyone clicking in remotely and other days where some are online while others are in the room.
About half of UMKC’s 5,887 fall courses are scheduled to be in-person, and the other half are online and hybrid. That took some clever schedule juggling between college counselors and students to give most what they needed at the times they wanted.
Some students, depending on their major, have to be in-person in labs even if they would rather take all their courses online. Reza’s roommate at KU is a civil engineering student and required to go to lab classes. So while Reza opted for all online courses to minimize contact with the virus, “if my roommate contracts it, then I’m exposed,” he said. “We can’t social distance at school.” The two share a two-bedroom apartment in Lawrence. “It’s tight.” Reza said.
Living on campus
“In some instances our dorms are going to be a safer option than students living in an apartment by themselves,” Lundgren said. “We are doing both double and single occupancy, but in the double rooms students will actually have 13 feet separating beds, and their desks will be away from one another so that social distancing can occur.” Masks are required any time students are out of their room, she said. Lounge areas will be closed, and kitchens will be locked.
Every student entering their dorm now has to use an access card and check in at the front desk.
At the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg this year, all residence hall rooms will be single occupancy only. The school lifted a restriction that required freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. Now they can live at home with a parent or grandparent if they’re within 65 miles of campus.
UCM, like other schools, is encouraging students to keep the recommended social distance, but they won’t police or prohibit private gatherings in dorms. “It is up to each one of us to take responsibility for our own health and well-being, including being mindful of the health and well-being of others,” the university said on its website.
How students behave in the dorms will “be on an honor system,” Lundgren said. “We have been messaging students about their social responsibility to one another and for keeping the campus safe.”
At meal time, students can call in food orders to the cafeteria and then pick them up.
KU expects to operate most of its student housing near capacity. Students were given a choice to live with roommates or suite mates. “Roommates will be treated as a ‘single household’” and won’t need to mask up inside their room, suite, or apartment, the university housing plan states.
University officials and health experts have warned students and faculty to abstain from travel to certain areas, domestic and abroad. In some cases, particularly with international students who returned home for the summer, it was unavoidable.
Anyone who traveled from an area at high risk for COVID-19, including China, Brazil, Iran, parts of Africa, the United Kingdom and some U.S. states, will need to self quarantine for 14 days and test negative for the virus before engaging in campus activities or attending in-person classes.
“If we are to be successful in welcoming more of our population back to campus this fall, all of us will have to do our part,” Chancellor Douglas Girod said in a notice to the campus community.
And university leaders say that if, down the road, health officials force them to take all classes online and close dorms because of a COVID-19 outbreak, students will get a pro-rated housing refund.
What about the parties?
“I know students whose crystal ball tells them that about halfway through the semester we will have to all go virtual,” Schaffner joked. “I think universities are prepared to be that flexible.”
A survey of college students released this week by SimpsonScarborough, a higher education research and marketing firm, found that 28% of the 905 students with the option to return to their campus say they were not going back or hadn’t decided yet. And of the 927 surveyed freshmen who were set to attend a four-year college this fall, 40% said it was likely or highly unlikely that they would actually go.
And the survey said that only 25% of returning students strongly agree that their institutions would take the necessary steps to keep students safe
Hannah Soyer, a 20-year-old graduate student and a teaching assistant in KU’s English department, said that for her, being on campus was just too dangerous, so she is going back home to Iowa and will take her two classes and teach from there.
Soyer has a form of muscular dystrophy and relies on personal care assistants — students — to accomplish many tasks. She has to be lifted and needs help preparing food. “I was not able to find helpers this semester who were willing or able to isolate themselves to a level I am comfortable with,” she said. “I’m sure I am not alone. I’m only comfortable with helpers who are not taking in-person classes and not living with people taking in-person classes or participating in risky activities, hanging out and socializing without wearing masks.”
That’s the kind of behavior that Dr. Jennifer Mellick, an Overland Park pediatrician, said is normal for young adults. And is likely to be the flaw in the best laid college reopening plans.
“It may not have anything to do with what’s going on on campus,” Mellick said. “Even if the universities do everything right and students while on campus follow all the rules, the question is what is going on off campus when students go into town to hang out?”
County health officials in college towns worry that students will set back progress made to slow the virus spread.
A mask mandate went into effect in Columbia on July 10. Health officials say they’ve seen signs that it’s been successful in containing the spread of the virus.
The week before, from July 3-9, the positive test rate for the coronavirus was 15.8% there. In the several days after the ordinance went into effect, from July 10-16, that dropped to 6.2%. And the most recent positivity rate was 9.2, still significantly lower than before masks were required in Columbia.
Scott Clardy, assistant director of Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services, said that the county continues to see more and more young adults with COVID-19. And with MU starting back up, he’s concerned.
Nearly one-fourth of all COVID-19 cases in the county are from people ages 20 to 24. Overall, about 55% of the cases are in people under the age of 30.
“Next week we’ll see what happens,” Clardy said. “Given the fact we are bringing people in from all over the world, and we are already seeing an issue, it would be foolish of us to not expect some increases there. I hope I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong.”
Even student leaders who believe the universities are doing all they can are skeptical about whether this campus revamp experiment, in the midst of a pandemic, can actually work.
“It does remain to be seen whether all the precautions are going to be enough,” said Brandon Henderson, UMKC student body president.
What worries him, he said, is that while some students will be extra careful to wear their masks, social distance and follow university safety rules, others “just don’t care and it is really going to be a matter of can we get those students who are not taking this all seriously to take it seriously once we get started?”
Schaffner agrees. He said none of what universities are doing will play out perfectly. “But each will provide some barrier. It’s like Swiss cheese. Every slice of Swiss cheese has holes in it. But if you put up enough barriers, then most of the holes are covered, and that’s what colleges are trying to do, reduce the risks.”
Includes reporting by The Star’s Laura Bauer.
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM.
