Colorado College announces plans for May Commencement celebrations
Also, the CC Children’s Center on being cautious through the pandemic
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pandemic date last year, the Wellness Resource Center (WRC) hosted a virtual event entitled “Men, Boys, Masculinity, and Self-Care in the Time of Coronavirus.” (This year, the WRC helped launch YOU at CC to further help students with their mental health during this time).
Today, we break down Colorado College’s announcement yesterday that it would be holding its May Commencement ceremonies in person. Also, how the Colorado College Cheryl Schlessman Bennett Children’s Center has managed to remain open over the last year.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained Colorado’s new Dial 3.0.
✉️In Your Inbox:
Last Wednesday, Rochelle Dickey, acting dean of students at Colorado College, shared a message of support following a shooting at a King Sooper’s grocery store in Boulder.
On Sunday, Colorado College was placed on lockout after suspicious activity was reported near campus by the Colorado Springs Police Department in which all doors were locked and individuals on or near campus were told to remain inside. That lockout began around 8:30 a.m., and ended around 9:20 a.m., at which point the college released communications ending the lockout.
Photo courtesy of Cameron Howell ‘23
🎓 May Commencement — this year it’s happening (twice)
After months of planning, yesterday Colorado College leadership released its plans for in-person Commencement ceremonies for the classes of 2020 and 2021.
Director of College Events Brenda Soto said that the process for planning in-person graduations started back in October.
“It’s been a really long haul to get where we are,” Soto told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “It was really important to the students to be able to have an in-person commencement, so that’s where I pushed the hardest was to be able to do this.”
Both ceremonies will be held outdoors on the Weidner Field, a stadium in downtown Colorado Springs used by the Switchbacks Football Club. For the class of 2020, commencement will be held May 30, and the ceremony for the class of 2021 will occur a week earlier on May 23.
CC has established several safety protocols in accordance with El Paso County public health guidelines to prevent the transmission of the virus. For Soto, “not being the event that causes a super spreader event” was among her biggest concerns for the ceremonies.
First, both events will require all graduates to be tested on campus two days before their respective ceremonies and receive negative results from those tests. Graduates will also be required to receive a check for symptoms and temperatures before lining up for graduation ceremonies.
Each graduate will be given two tickets for guests to attend, whom the college has requested to get a COVID-19 test before the event at a local testing center.
“Although we’re feeling better about where we are with COVID and the vaccines and the summertime here in Colorado Springs, we’ll continue to adhere to many protocols that we are familiar with,” Vice President for Information Technology Brian Young said in a video released with the announcement.
The college has required that attendees wear masks at the ceremonies, and has asked them to remain socially-distanced from others, use hand sanitizer, and refrain from shaking hands.
For students who don’t feel comfortable attending an in-person graduation, CC is in the process of getting an app in which students will be able to take a photo of themselves and have their name and degree appear in the photo when their name is called, Soto said.
What’s happening with other graduation-related festivities?
While May Commencement ceremonies are being held in person, other related events will be hosted in virtual formats or are not taking place this year.
For example, CC will be holding its annual Honors Convocation in a May 11 webinar, and the Baccalaureate address and the honorary degree ceremony will be pre-recorded and delivered virtually when they become available.
Departmental receptions and the President’s Reception will not be held this year due to public health recommendations.
“We’ll encourage families to gather in small groups of friends and family, encourage outdoor activity as much as possible, and encourage you to spend your time with your graduate — your son or daughter, your friend, your neighbor — in a way that is safe and COVID free,” Young said.
Things to remember
In the announcement, Young emphasized that plans change, and that the college will continue to monitor the pandemic alongside local and state health partners to ensure that CC is adhering to all protocols and procedures.
The college’s announcement also noted that because the graduation ceremonies will be held outdoors, backup plans for indoor gatherings have not been made in case weather interferes with the events.
Young thus urged attendees to watch for an official invitation to the Commencement ceremonies, as well as for updates to the events.
“All things considered, we are pleased to be able to have an in-person graduation ceremony, pleased to be able to have you join us, pleased that you will continue to help us follow all the protocols and procedures,” Young said.
👪 Child care continuing during the pandemic
While the COVID-19 pandemic has floored many industries, a particularly alarming one is the child care industry.
In a December press release, the United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation said the problems facing child care centers were “serious and wide-ranging,” and could have a lasting impact on the American workforce because of the decisions working parents were being forced to make to care for their children during work hours.
In September, the National Association for the Education of Young Children estimated that without government assistance, 40% of day cares would permanently close.
But while the Colorado College Cheryl Schlessman Bennett Children’s Center initially closed along with the college last March, the center quickly reopened on May 4, allowing the center to evade many of the challenges other facilities have faced and provide families with vital, if limited, child care services.
Operating safely
While many things have changed in the Children’s Center’s operations, Kimberly Foster, the assistant director of the children’s center, said staff has still managed to maintain a quality care and education facility.
In order to safely reopen their doors last May and stay open throughout the subsequent waves of the pandemic, the center had to implement a variety of new safety measures to accommodate county, state, and national guidelines.
“We’ve literally adjusted everything,” Danielle Martinez, director of the CC Children’s Center, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
In addition to implementing standard safety protocols like masks and socially-distanced classrooms, the center also had to implement a number of changes related to child care and education, including a cohort system in which students stick together in pod-like groups, and individually packaged meals for the children from Bon Appetit.
Foster said teachers also complete an “extra deep cleaning” of all the toys and surfaces touched by students at the end of every day.
Martinez said the center also completes health checks for students in which parents ask their children health-related questions at drop-off, and the center’s staff takes their temperatures and log them. Additionally, beside the children, only staff or people “completely necessary” for daily operations are allowed inside the building.
The costs of the pandemic
But providing a safe environment for the children has not been all sunshine and rainbows.
“I think that the biggest challenge is all of the extra stuff that we’re having to do, that leads to less responsive care-giving,” Foster said. “It leads to less of the emergent curriculum that we really enjoyed doing and it’s more cleaning, less nurturing.”
Additionally, the number of children the center cares for daily reduced dramatically when the pandemic began. When it closed down last March, Martinez said the center had 76 students that attended every day. Now, only about 30 children attend each day.
Staffing for the Children’s Center has also decreased. Before the pandemic, Martinez said she had 17 full-time staff members, nine on-call staff members, and five student workers. Now, there’s only 14 full-time, three on call, and one student worker.
“Making sure that state regulations for child care are still met and still having that contingency plan for staffing was a little bit hard for us,” Martinez said.
The center has also had to reduce their hours of operation by over four hours.
‘Hard to do a full-time job without full-time care’
Assistant professor of environmental science Lynne Gratz has a child who attends the center, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project the limited hours were a “real deterrent” for some people.
“It’s hard to do a full-time job when you don’t have full-time care,” Gratz said. “One of the biggest challenges of this pandemic is to figure out how to keep everything going and support one another.”
Neena Grover, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at CC, also has a daughter who attends the center. Last summer, Grover said her daughter was going to the Children’s Center three to four hours a day, which Grover said was helpful for her.
However, Grover said part-time child care hasn’t solved all the problems presented to her when she returned to work in the fall.
“I had to shift my work hours and child care impacts your whole life because your work is not separate, especially if everybody’s working from home,” Grover told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “You have to make sure that kids are getting your attention because they’re getting nobody else’s.”
Caution is paying off
So far, the safety measures the Children’s Center has implemented have paid off, with students, staff, and teachers avoiding any positive cases of COVID-19.
For Grover, the lack of cases at the center has made her feel safe sending her child back, and both Grover and Gratz emphasized their appreciation for the access they have to the center’s childcare.
“If the conditions were such that infections were rampant, I would have pulled the kid out,” Grover said. “So I’m glad that they were open and they were doing things carefully, so we didn’t have to worry.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Esteban Candelaria, Lorea Zabaleta, and Cameron Howell 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.
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