@123France Bowdoin was saying that, if they had to find more beds for kids in Brunswick, they would do it for the students. Kids won’t have to figure that out themselves. The traditional way of finding more beds, at most schools, has been forced triples but that’s obviously not going to work this year!
“As for testing…good luck. Still a shortage. Do you take away tests for college students over healthcare workers, first responders, military, or nursing home workers? Plus, we still don’t know how relevant antibodies are or aren’t…how long do they last?”
It isn’t true that all states have a shortage of tests even now, and if the number of available tests doesn’t ramp up by fall then the country has a much bigger problem than whether students can go back to college.
I’ve been following the situation in Utah closely, both because my D goes to college there, and because they are one of the best organized states in terms of response (for example every resident is being sent a mask in the mail). They are starting to open up (even some malls are open - and this is a non-political thing, Salt Lake City has a Democrat mayor) because they have more testing capacity than the number of tests they need to do each day and they have already put in place a highly developed contact tracing infrastructure (1200 contract tracers are working today in a state with fewer than 3000 known active cases). They are managing to trace 90% of all positive cases to the source (i.e. community spread is now quite limited) and are deploying mobile testing strike teams to tackle hotspots in care homes, etc.
So I feel pretty confident at this stage that Utah colleges will be back on campus in the fall, presumably with testing used before students get to their dorm room. Only a minority of students are from OOS, but travel in general will have to be thought through carefully and as a tourist dependent state that is presumably the next focus once instate issues are under control. They are making everyone who enters the state fill in a contact tracing form with their details and it wouldn’t surprise me to see additional measures like temperature screening (backed up with rapid testing) implemented too over the next few weeks.
Removed. Wrong thread.
Amherst College has said they are already collecting tests and PPE (such as face masks and gloves) with the hope of resuming in-person classes in fall semester. I think by fall we will be good on testing and contact tracing. Massachusetts in particular is investing a lot in contact tracing.
Wow, sounds like Utah has an excellent public health department. They’re both lucky (no or limited early cases) and good (solid testing and contact tracing).
May have been already mentioned (haven’t read the whole thread) but I imagine schools will be renting hotels to add beds / spacing. They’ve done this before (non covid) so many already have experience with that.
DS19’s school has moved fall/winter course registration from June to July. Also a local news article is reporting that
Which is no surprise as they will need to have contingencies in place in the event that in-person instruction can’t resume, but it further reports
which it makes it sound more likely that that’s the direction they will be taking.
Here’s one easy prediction:
Large universities in urban areas won’t take chances by starting their fall terms with most of their students living on campuses.
@1NJParent I agree.
I’m finally caught up, phew. Guess I’ll add another student perspective.
I’m a high school senior who’s finally past the pity phase (I think). The first few weeks were the hardest because it was just so abrupt and final. Funnily, our school closed after spring break, and the day before spring break is always senior skip day, where nearly everyone, even all of us AP nerds, skip to go hang out with friends. That could’ve been our last day to say goodbye to everyone, and that’s what stings the most.
But my school district is actually handling it well, comparatively. They’re even doing cute celebrations for the seniors - for the top 10 students in every school, they came to our houses with signs (#X in the class), took pictures (from a distance), and put it on the school’s Twitter. I still miss my friends, but we have weekly virtual game nights or they’ll drop by on a walk and we can chat from opposite ends of my front yard. It’s not the same, of course, but not terrible either. For that reason, I could make it work with online learning in college, but I’d still at least want to live on campus, which is the plan right now. We’ll see how that pans out.
That being said, I know I’m extremely fortunate. My mom, meanwhile, works at a very low-income, inner city elementary school. Online learning isn’t working for them now, and it certainly won’t for another school year; out of classes of 20 to 25 students, only 1 or 2 are actually submitting work. You can’t blame them - they’ve got parents who don’t speak English, are out of work, struggled to get food on the table before the outbreak. For that reason, I’m in the camp for needing to open the economy - just how to do it is the question. Lots and lots of testing, of course, but how are schools going to fund that? Not out of their own budgets, I hope, because there wasn’t enough funding even during a normal school year.
I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like there’s a good possible solution - but I guess that’s true of the real world. As I get older, I’m realizing just how… gray everything is, i.e. not black and white. Before, you just did what your adults said, because they know best, right? But now we’re the adults having to decide what’s best, and it’s not always that easy. Welcome to adulthood, I guess. 
@homerdog – This may have been addressed already, as I have skipped pages of this thread, but do you know how the Maine schools are planning to handle the governor’s 14 day quarantine for anyone arriving from outside of Maine?
@hurricane314 - thank you for your valuable and informative input.
@CT1417 I don’t think the governor of Maine has decided how long that 14 day quarantine will continue. At one point, she was considering it going through Aug but that’s not 100% decided yet. Right now, I see it’s tentatively through August. It was not mentioned in Bowdoin’s town hall and I did not know about it in time to ask myself. Right now, I think Bowdoin’s fall timeline (the original one before this happened) brings first years back on Aug 24th. I know some athletes typically come back before that (at least football and soccer do…not sure which other teams).
Bowdoin has always said they will have to play by any rules set by the governor first and foremost so I guess it’s still up in the air. Someone on this thread (who knows how many pages back) said quarantine in Maine for those 14 days is not the same as quarantine in some other states - not as restrictive. In fact, if you look at the article you attached, they’ve got hotels and campgrounds opening in July even to OOS people so that doesn’t make a ton of sense since no one is going to go on vacation to Maine and sit in their hotel room for 14 days.
I think your attachment shows “guidelines” but the details have not been ironed out yet. And August is pretty far away so who knows.
I saw the Wesleyan President being interviewed on one of the news programs this morning and he gave ‘even odd’ to having kids on campus in the fall. Whatever that means! CT is pretty hard hit with cases.
Got a kick out of his setting. Most interviewees are sitting in some carefully staged setting/office. This guy looked to be in a disheveled home office with books sideways and paper falling out of bookshelves!
Yes, that’s how I read it. They sent out info to students today but it still is missing a lot of details. I think they are trying to present a tentative plan but like other schools they are reminding everyone things may change. They are also trying to work with some local landlords to provide flexible leases for off campus kids who don’t already have things line up which is interesting.
Even odds means 1:1 odds or 50% chance.
Most students at most of these large universities do not live on campus (although some have most frosh living on campus).
Caltech’s faculty town hall where many issues were discussed, including:
- Testing
- Instruction Continuity
- Student Housing
- Enrollment
- Financial Outlook
I agree. I don’t see it happening (not having students living on campus) - they need the money. Large universities have large graduate and undergrad populations that live off campus. I think if the numbers in August are as they predict here https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/massachusetts
then we’ll have a standard August start in Boston (for example) with hybrid teaching (50% of students physically in class and the others in their dorm via video conference - switching off) to maintain distancing as much as possible.