California college students are headed back to classrooms just as new COVID-19 cases in the state are starting to decline from the peak of the omicron surge. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy road ahead for the university administrators tasked with keeping them safe. How many isolation beds are needed on campus? Should in-person classes be resumed all at once, or phased in?
Those are just some of the questions colleges are grappling with as they head into the spring term, after postponing in-person instruction for the first few weeks of January. On the one hand, many public health experts say the virus will soon become endemic: constantly present, but with predictable transmission rates that health systems can manage without being overburdened. On the other hand, face-to-face learning is returning just weeks after the highly-transmissible omicron variant swept through California campuses, straining campuses’ ability to separate infected students from the uninfected...
Some California colleges are looking to increase isolation capacity and are updating masking policies to require surgical, KN95 or N95 masks indoors. Most say they will continue regularly testing students for the virus, on top of requiring booster shots.
At the same time, universities say they are preparing for a new normal in which we all must coexist with the virus. “It’s unfortunate, but it means this is going to become something we just need to live with and adapt to in an ongoing fashion, similar to what we had to do in the world around influenza,” said Mary Croughan, an epidemiologist and provost at UC Davis.
Universities aren’t out of the woods yet, University of California Health Executive Vice President Dr. Carrie Byington told the university’s Board of Regents at their January meeting. Byington predicted the virus will become endemic, but she believes the timeframe is in “years, not weeks." And while many students are eager for the return to in-person classes, others are wary. Some are pushing back against administrators’ ”live with COVID” mentality. They say universities’ current plans to resume in-person instruction without allowing students to opt out puts vulnerable communities at risk — including disabled students, those who are immunocompromised or those who are caregivers to immunocompromised family members.
Instruction “needs to be in a safe environment, where we are all able to prosper,” Elysha Castillo, vice president of external affairs with UC Riverside’s student government, said during a virtual town hall convened Friday by student activists. “And that means including those who cannot be in person. We need a more safe and hybrid environment.”...
The omicron wave tested colleges’ ability to manage on-campus infections, with sometimes chaotic results... In some cases, hotels weren’t enough: UC Riverside officials reported on Jan. 14 that they had no more room to isolate COVID-positive students either on- or off-campus...
At UCLA, more than 400 COVID-positive students were in isolation by the second week of January. The university never ran out of isolation beds, but encouraged students to isolate at home, spokesperson Bill Kisliuk said...
UC Merced expects to continue dealing with the omicron surge through spring, said Charles Nies, the university’s assistant vice chancellor of student affairs. In-person instruction is being phased in and larger lectures won’t be held until mid February. Officials also plan to move some students from on-campus housing to apartment buildings off-campus, freeing up more beds for quarantine and isolation. In a message to students Jan. 21, the university pointed to data from Merced County — where cases hadn’t been falling as quickly as in the state overall — as one reason for caution. But Nies said he hopes the university can shift its response by fall, moving “into more of looking at this from an endemic model instead of the crisis pandemic model.”
As COVID-19 becomes endemic and safety procedures relax, UC Davis’ Croughan said it will be important to maintain a culture where students feel like they can stay home if they’re sick. This includes asking professors to offer recorded lectures to students — synchronously or asynchronously. UC Davis professors can already enroll in an optional program where the university hires students to record their lectures. Professors can post them online for students who can’t attend class in-person, university spokesperson Julia Ann Easley said. Universities should also provide laptops and broadband to students who can’t afford them so they can access classwork at home, Croughan said...
While administrators are getting ready for a new phase in the pandemic, some students are still voicing discomfort with returning to in-person learning. Petitions at several UC campuses demanding courses that blend online and in-person learning have garnered thousands of signatures. Speakers at Friday’s virtual town hall, which included representatives of several UC student governments and UC Access Now — a group working to combat ableism on campus — called on the university to allow any student to decide whether they needed to continue learning online, without having to provide documentation. Some encouraged students to skip in-person classes this week as a form of protest...
Sarah Theubet, a UC Davis senior who has multiple autoimmune disorders, said she had one in-person class scheduled for winter quarter, but worked with her professor to take the class online. “I was very vocal with my professor in stating that I refuse to come to campus as a vulnerable person,” said Theubet, who chairs UC Davis’ disability rights advocacy committee, a student-run group. She said she appreciated that UC Davis was giving professors the ability to hire students to record lectures. Still, professors aren’t required to record their classes, “so it’s not actually a fix,” she wrote in an email to CalMatters. Instead, she said the university should not return to in-person classes at all. “It is not safe,” she said.
Full story at https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/college-beat-higher-education/2022/01/california-colleges-omicron-safety-plans/.
Note: Yours truly taught in-person last week. The course relies heavily on guest speakers and because the coronavirus protocols to get a guest on campus are complicated, the guests were Zoomed into the classroom. That process allowed two students who could not attend due to virus issues to watch via the same Zoom link used by the guests. I kept the link on for my portion of the course. However, for many courses, a "hybrid" arrangement could be far more difficult. Lecturing through a mask, in addition, is not ideal. But, it is what it is.*
===
*For anyone interested: https://archive.org/details/pa-145-week-4-edit.
No comments:
Post a Comment