College hopes food-insecure students will find refuge in campus pantry
Plus, the Scientific Advisory Group on its plan for a de-densified spring
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2017, Colorado College was hosting an Arts and Crafts Sale in Worner Campus Center. (The college did not schedule the 2020 Annual Arts and Crafts Sale because of the pandemic.)
Today, we report on how fears about students’ food insecurity led to Colorado College launching a weekly food pantry. Also, two members of the college’s Scientific Advisory Group describe their roles in advising the college’s current and future pandemic plans.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained Colorado’s hospital capacity, a report that immunity from COVID-19 may last years, and news from the AstraZeneca vaccine trial.
✉️In Your Inbox:
Nov. 25: A student living in Mathias Hall received a positive COVID-19 test result in CC’s randomized testing and is now in isolation.
Dec. 1: Six Bon Appétit employees received positive COVID-19 test results. These employees were last in Worner Campus Center between Nov. 17 and Nov. 24. They are now in isolation, and their contacts are in quarantine.
On-campus offices and facilities moved to 10% capacity after El Paso County transitioned to “Level Red: Severe Risk.”
Tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. MT the college is hosting a “Campus Sustainability Council Town Hall.” Register to attend here, or watch for our recap next week.
Photo courtesy of Patil Khakhamian ’22.
As COVID makes food insecurity more visible, Colorado College launches weekly distribution program to keep students fed
As COVID-19 continues to rage across the country, communities struggling with food insecurity grow increasingly vulnerable. In August, The Denver Post reported 1 in 3 Coloradans were struggling to eat. Last month, CNN reported there were thousands of cars in line to collect food from a pantry in Dallas, Texas.
While Congress sits on another stimulus bill, some communities have embraced forms of mutual aid, such as food redistribution, to help people hit hardest by COVID-19.
🍎How snack-pack kits turned into a weekly food pantry initiative
For Amy Hill, who directs campus activities at Colorado College, discussions on food equity date back to 2018, when she started a “build-your-own-snack-pack” program. The program aimed to address food insecurity for students who remain on campus over long breaks, when campus dining halls reduce their meal options and hours.
The snack-pack program ran on afternoons before the start of a long break. The offerings included snacks like popcorn and candy, but not any fruits and vegetables or ingredients you could build a meal with, Hill said.
Sophie Cardin ’22, the Vice President of Outreach for CC’s student government association (CCSGA), said food insecurity plagued the campus long before COVID hit. When her outreach committee put out a survey to students about the costs of college textbooks last spring before the pandemic, the results were sobering.
“A surprising number of students at CC, and in colleges in general, have skipped meals, not bought groceries, lived off of ramen in order to afford textbooks,” Cardin told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
So when the pandemic hit this March, Hill knew she would need to step up her efforts even further. Some students stranded on campus wanted free, healthy options for their meals without having to risk COVID exposure at a grocery store, Hill said.
In early April, Campus Activities paraprofessional Antonio Soto, who graduated from CC in 2019, joined Hill to help turn the snack-pack program into a well-stocked food pantry where CC students living on campus could shop weekly for their meals.
After the school sent home the majority of students last spring because of the pandemic, about 300 students remained on campus, Hill said. Over the course of the summer, around 65 additional students returned to campus.
“We bulked up what we were doing at that time a little bit more,” Hill told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Currently, the food pantry runs every Thursday from 2-4 p.m — to sign up, click this link.
In an average week, Soto estimated around 25 to 35 students sign up for a time slot to pick items out of the food pantry. Because of walk-ins, though, around 40 students typically show up. Hill and Soto said they spend around $600 per week on groceries for students, so every student is able to walk away with roughly $15 worth of food each visit.
At the end of spring and during the summer, some of the Campus Activities budget paid for the pantry initiative. The project was able to continue throughout the fall semester because CC’s student government decided to fund it as part of their annual budget.
Cardin said CCSGA continued meeting throughout the summer in order to take care of student needs on campus.
“There were a lot of complaints about the Bon Appétit hours being weird and the food not being healthy enough, and people not being able to get to grocery stores,” Cardin said. “So, the Executive Council met with Amy Hill from Campus Activities, and we started by just funding dry goods and canned goods.”
Although some talks preceded CCSGA’s decision to fund the pantry initiative, Cardin noticed that many CCSGA representatives have felt a greater need to engage in redistributive justice programs despite a reduced presence on campus.
“For a lot of people who didn’t know these issues existed on campus, COVID has really brought to light some of the problems that are underlying and always there,” Cardin said.
👀A look inside the pantry
Housed in a meeting room in upstairs Worner, the food pantry has tables lined with options catered to different dietary needs. Fresh fruits and vegetables always go fast, Soto said. Some other popular items include pasta, bread, peanut butter and jelly, chips, and popcorn.
Dairy-free alternative milk options, which have long shelf lives, are also a favorite. Hill said she tries to stay away from distributing perishable goods like yogurt, cheese, butter, and eggs because they have limited refrigerator space, and she doesn’t want to create waste if students don’t take everything each week.
Small containers of cereal and Pop-Tarts aren’t very popular among students, Hill said, though they are some of the easiest snacks to find at the store.
One week, Hill and Soto were surprised to find that the canned goods they started offering because of student demand were left untouched.
“We had a few ‘aha’ moments and learning curves that happened over this,” Hill said. When she asked students why they didn’t take any canned goods, they told her that none of them had functional can openers.
“So the next week we went to the Dollar Tree and bought 15 functional can openers to pass out to students,” Hill said.
During the first few months of the pandemic, Hill and Soto did all the grocery shopping, unloading and arranging of the food, sanitizing the space, and pantry supervision by themselves. The project became much easier, they said, once more people realized the food pantry was happening, and staff and students signed up to volunteer.
Soto said so many staff members reached out to help volunteer that he actually had to turn some of them away and create a waitlist in case people canceled.
“It was amazing to see how many staff are willing to help out and volunteer,” Soto said.
In June, four Campus Activities interns also started helping with the pantry, and became its main organizers for two weeks in August, when Hill and Soto were swamped with preparation for New Student Orientation.
Hill said they plan to run the pantry over winter break — on Tuesdays, instead of Thursdays — and into the spring. For CC students living on campus, there will continue to be no barrier to entry.
“We didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, you could only use the food pantry if you fall into this financial bracket, or you have demonstrated need,’” Hill said. “We wanted anyone to be able to come through without shame and take what they need.”
‘We’re all tired of this’: Two representatives from CC’s Scientific Advisory Group explain the college’s testing infrastructure and their concerns for the spring semester
When higher-ed institutions across the country began opening their doors for Pandemic Fall, some predicted that on-campus outbreaks would lead to a flurry of cases in their broader communities. That hasn’t turned out to be the case at Colorado College, said Associate Professor David Brown, who works in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department.
“The prevalence in the surrounding community may actually be higher than it is among CC students,” Brown told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “And so now it’s more of a matter of trying to keep the disease out, rather than trying to keep it in, to some extent.”
As a member of the college’s Scientific Advisory Group, Brown works alongside five other CC professors from a variety of disciplines to provide data- and evidence-based advice for the school’s COVID-19 mitigation strategy. Virtually anything related to COVID comes across their desk, and then they provide input to CC’s senior leadership. Additionally, the group draws on the expertise of some national public health consultants from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Scientific Advisory Group Chair Andrea Bruder, along with two other representatives from CC, meet weekly with El Paso County Public Health officials to discuss the county data and CC’s response.
Additionally, the Scientific Advisory Group were some of the masterminds behind CC’s testing plans and infrastructures, and they determine weekly a percentage of students, faculty, and staff to randomly test for COVID-19.
While the college nears the end of an ... eventful fall semester, the Scientific Advisory Group has their eyes set on spring. The plan, explained Bruder, is to bring back up to 1,800 students, about 300 more than were living on- or off-campus this fall.
The decision to bring back more students wasn’t made in a vacuum. Over the summer, Brown and Bruder did some mathematical modeling to look at possible scenarios for the campus, based on what was known about how quickly this coronavirus spreads. The worst possibility they accounted for was a full-scale college outbreak resembling one of the cruise ship catastrophes that occurred near the start of the pandemic. Thankfully, nothing close to that happened.
“In an environment where the virus is prevalent in the general population, it wouldn’t be realistic to expect to keep the virus completely out of the campus population,” Bruder told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “The virus will always be prevalent on campus, but I think we’ve adapted and learned how to manage it.”
But as incidence rates surge in El Paso County and state-wide, the risk of catching COVID is higher than it was at the beginning of the semester. In fact, the number of cases has put such a strain on the local health systems that two weeks ago, the college shifted its random testing provider from University of Colorado Health to a company called Ambulnz. UCHealth needed additional testing capacity to do symptomatic testing in the county, Bruder said.
Because of the increased likelihood of large gatherings from Halloween, the election, block break, and the holidays, the school plans to select more than 50% of its random testing pool to come in for swabs this week and the next, according to Bruder. The goal of increased randomized testing is to detect infections early and interrupt chains of infection that might result in larger outbreaks, particularly as some students hope to travel home for the holidays.
Yet random testing only works as an effective precaution when people show up to their appointment. Bruder estimated that on average, only around 70-80% of people come in for testing when they are asked.
“If people opt out of testing, then it might make the testing program less effective and increase the risk for everyone,” Bruder said. “We would like to have a participation rate closer to 100%,” she added.
Though random testing has been up and running for some time, plans from earlier this fall to increase testing turnaround times have stalled. The school planned to saturate their testing infrastructure with rapid Abbott ID Now tests that can have results back in around 15 minutes, but it looks like the rest of the country had the same idea.
“There have been some supply chain issues with the test kits,” Bruder said. “So we’re still using the Ambulnz team to do some or most of the testing right now.”
In the meantime, the college is also talking to Optum, the provider set up in the student health center, about taking on a larger portion of the college’s testing in the spring semester. Other potential precautions the group is discussing for the spring semester include partnering with the local health department and Colorado Springs Utilities to include some off-campus students in the wastewater testing program, and the possibility of securing additional supplemental housing options to continue to de-densify campus.
In regards to the looming Socially-Distant Spring, Brown is most worried about the risk of students, faculty, and staff coming back into the community after traveling for the holidays.
“With almost 100% probability, people will come back from their winter break travels, [and] some members of our community will come back carrying the virus,” Brown said.
Though they hope immediate testing of students once they arrive back on campus will mitigate that risk, it will only work if people follow “enhanced social distancing protocols” while they wait for their test results. Just one person not adhering to guidelines can ruin the entire precaution, like what happened on the third day of first-year move in when some people did not follow social distancing and sent a dorm of over 100 students into quarantine. Depending on the local, state, and national case numbers at the beginning of the spring semester, the college may also ask students to quarantine before they return to campus, implement a shorter quarantine period when they arrive, and potentially test and retest the students to prevent risk of viral spread.
One scenario the college is desperately trying to avoid is a repeat of the spring shutdown, when students had one week to pack up their belongings and leave campus because of fears about what an unmitigated viral spread might mean for the community.
“Nine months ago, it was all-or-nothing, ‘time to shut it all down’ because nobody knew what was going to happen once the virus got to campus,” Brown said. “Now we kind of have a pretty good understanding of how we can keep a lid on things and keep it to a low simmer. That’s the goal.”
Yet things can’t simmer forever, and Brown also worries that people might stop following strict health guidelines because of COVID fatigue.
“We’re all tired of this,” Brown said. “How long can people keep up these protocols and these behaviors? ... At some point, it’s hard to avoid socializing with people that you care about.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Isabel Hicks, and Esteban Candelaria 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.