Boxed into Bijou: Where CC students stay after being exposed to COVID-19
Plus, a recap of last week’s town hall on sustainability
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2015, students at the Colorado College Italian House were learning how to make the perfect tiramisù. (An event like that today would probably include Zoom and a lot of awkwardly-angled kitchen shots.)
Today, three students describe their experiences in Bijou West, the designated off-campus quarantine space. We also recap last week’s town hall on sustainability.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained the benefits and drawbacks of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
✉️In Your Inbox:
This past week, there were a flurry of positive COVID-19 tests in the CC community: a student living in Bemis Hall, two students living in Mathias Hall, a student living off-campus, and a Sodexo employee.
The college is moving all J Block and Half Block courses to a remote-learning format.
Yesterday, the Colorado College men’s hockey team tied their first game in the National Collegiate Hockey Conference “pod.” All the games will be broadcast live.
Colorado College will announce its new president today at 2 p.m. MT. Keep an eye on your inbox!
✨New Contributor Alert: At the end of the Block, Miriam Brown ’21 will step back from The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. Please give a warm welcome and a Twitter follow to our new contributor Lorea Zabaleta ’23.
🚨We’re Hiring: We’re still hiring one new member for our team. CC students, if you’re interested in joining us, email us at ccreportingproject@gmail.com for application information. Applications are due Dec. 16 at 5 p.m. MT.
☀️LISTEN: Colorado College alum Jesse Paul ’14, who is a reporter for The Colorado Sun, interviewed Colorado Springs mayor John Suthers for a podcast about Suthers’ visit to a COVID-19 ward. Listen here.
‘There’s no way I can stay here for two weeks’: Three first-years reflect on their experiences in the college’s off-campus quarantine space
“Unmaintained.” “Kind of broken.” “A decently nice hotel that had just had the life sucked out of it.”
That’s how some Colorado College students describe Bijou West, a building about two miles from CC’s campus that is serving as the college’s quarantine and isolation space this year. If a student is exposed to the coronavirus, there’s a good chance they might end up in Bijou West. For some students, it took less than a week for them to be acquainted with the quarantine space.
Kendall Fraser ’24 had just finished her first day of class and was working out with her volleyball team when she found out she had to go quarantine. She went back to her room in Mathias and threw everything she might need in a duffel: her t-shirts, sweatpants, electronics, and favorite stuffed animal.
Meanwhile that day in a different Mathias room, Phoebe Dodge ’24 was preparing for the same thing. She had around 45 minutes to pack, she said, and she mostly just brought tank tops and shorts to wear. She didn’t think to bring any towels, jackets, or toiletries, a decision she would regret later.
“I did not have it together,” she told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Rafi Donohoe ’24 and her roommate were also among the students sent into quarantine the first week of school. Donohoe was off-campus when she got the call, and by the time she made it back, a Campus Safety officer was already waiting for her, wearing full PPE and driving a van with a plastic barrier separating the back from the driver’s seat.
“We were just really confused,” Donohoe told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “We didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t know why we were being put in quarantine. We didn’t know who we were being traced to.”
The roommates, whose rooms in Bijou West were right next to each other, brought a lot of stuff with them out of fear they would get bored. Donohoe said she brought some food, her tea kettle, art supplies, and books, and her roommate brought her ukulele.
“The person driving the van was like, what? Why do you have so much stuff?” Donohoe said.
Inside the quarantine space at Bijou West
Bijou West is only a few highway exits away from CC, right off I-25. The building is shaped like a ‘U’ with windows looking out to a central courtyard. There are a gazebo and an empty pool outside, and some of the doors did not have working locks, Donohoe said.
Part of the building was also under construction, according to the freshmen. They said some of the hallways had something resembling plaster over the floor, and in rooms where people weren’t staying, stacks of mattresses were visible.
Fraser remembered thinking on her first night: “There’s no way I can stay here for two weeks.”
The rooms themselves resembled normal hotel rooms, with a bed, bathroom, desk, TV, mini-fridge, and window in each. The quality of the space seemed to vary from room to room, however.
Some rooms had sliding doors to an inch-wide “balcony” closed off by guard rails. The ‘U’ shape of the building made it possible for students to slide open their doors and talk to each other. Fraser said the first few days she was there, she and around five other students would have conservations through their windows.
“I remember ... there was a guy out in the courtyard tossing out a ball, talking to his friend who was on a lower level,” Fraser told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
When they weren’t on their balconies, class and homework kept some students busy. Others passed time by working out, watching Netflix, and getting fresh air in their daily hour of scheduled outdoor time. Fraser said she also spent a lot of time “sleeping and freaking out.”
People quarantining in Bijou West receive delivery for three meals once a day from Bon Appétit. A self-described picky eater, Fraser said she left those bags untouched and ordered food through Doordash or InstaCart instead.
Dodge described the food as “really rough,” saying even though she marked she was vegetarian, she still received food with meat in it two or three times.
How the students left quarantine early
Fraser, Dodge, and Donohoe all managed to escape their quarantines early. Donohoe learned her potential exposure was to a symptomatic person who tested negative, so she was allowed to go back to campus after three days.
Fraser said after a week of living in Bijou West, her mom flew out to Colorado and rented a car to drive the two of them to her aunt’s house in New Mexico. The school hadn’t been testing asymptomatic students exposed to a COVID-positive person, so Fraser got tested once in New Mexico and received a negative result.
Dodge also left after a week to go stay in the basement of her aunt’s house, who lives about 15 minutes away from campus. She waited a week to leave Bijou West, she said, in case she started to develop any symptoms.
CC’s COVID-19 Emergency Manager Maggie Santos, who also leads Campus Safety, said the college does not recommend students’ leaving quarantine “at all.”
“However, we did have some parents who were like, ‘I’m going to pick up my student and take them home,’” Santos told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “And I’m not tackling anybody as they leave with their parents to go home and quarantine, as long as they realize that when they leave a quarantine environment and move to another place, they have now exposed ... whoever they’re staying with.”
If a student left for another state, Santos added, they would report that to the local health department.
Looking toward the spring semester
Even after three dorm-wide quarantines and a pivot to remote-learning, Donohoe still plans to return to dorm life come spring with hopes for some semblance of a college experience.
“Part of me definitely feels like I’m making a really bad decision,” she said.
When looking ahead to a Socially-Distanced Spring, one sentiment is clear: everyone is hoping to minimize the quarantines this time around.
“My experience was it’s a very disorganized and disjointed system,” Donohoe said. “It feels like there isn’t communication coming from all the different sides, and it leaves students in this state of stress and confusion.”
When asked to respond to criticism that communication about the quarantines were disjointed and confusing, Santos said she didn’t necessarily disagree.
“I would not argue with that at all,” Santos said. “Would I say that it was disjointed at first? Yes. I think it’s much better now.”
Disclaimer: This story was updated on Dec. 14 with new information.
CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this story quoted a source saying, “There are a gazebo and an empty pool full of dirt outside, and none of the doors had any locks.” We have since corrected it to say, “There are a gazebo and an empty pool outside, and some of the doors did not have working locks.” An earlier version of this story also quoted another source as saying, “I had a friend who literally, her ceiling fan was hanging off the ceiling, like by a wire.” We have since learned there are no fans in Bijou West, so we have deleted this quote.
Sustainability at CC: What you missed from last week’s Town Hall
2020 was a big year for Colorado College. In January, before the pandemic rampaged across the country, the college celebrated a landmark achievement: becoming one of nine higher-ed institutions in the U.S. to be certified carbon-neutral.
But the school isn’t stopping there. After meeting their goal of carbon neutrality, the administration created the Climate Change Task Force, a group of faculty, staff, and students dedicated to furthering the college’s sustainability goals. Now, with a nationwide presidential search underway, CC is gathering community input about sustainability goals to give to the new president once they’re hired.
Last Thursday, a town hall about sustainability over Zoom marked a step toward gathering community input about environmental goals. The town hall featured a student-led Q&A with panelists including CC’s Sodexo Director Bronson Terry, Bon Appétit General Manager Shannon Wilson, Bon Appétit Executive Chef Cody Rodgers, and Office of Sustainability Director Ian Johnson.
A central concern discussed in the town hall was the amount of disposable containers and cutlery used to package students’ to-go meals. These disposable to-go meals are a safety precaution to reduce the spread of COVID-19, and Chef Rodgers said he doesn’t see any way around the increased volume of waste.
“This is really to eliminate the points of contamination both for students and for our staff,” Rodgers said. “Individual safety is probably one of the most important things, I think, for everybody during this COVID time.”
Rodgers emphasized that the cutlery, though it looks plastic, is actually biodegradable, so it can be composted. He said Bon Appétit is looking into more options for biodegradable plates and bowls as well.
Terry represented Sodexo in the panel and addressed concerns that Sodexo had previously been combining recycling with trash and throwing them all away together. He said this happened because Sodexo workers were told to throw away any recycling soiled with food waste and other contaminants.
“Our new standard operating procedure addresses all of those concerns,” Terry said. “We're going to continue to maintain each waste stream in its appropriate bin,” he added.
The town hall closed by encouraging everyone to participate in the “What’s Next for Sustainability at CC” survey, which they will send out by email and will also make available on the Office of Sustainability’s website. The college will compile the results by the end of Block 5, and the results will inform the next town hall about sustainability set to take place this spring.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Isabel Hicks, Esteban Candelaria, and Lorea Zabaleta in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear every Monday.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.