Getting back to normal: CC's plans for returning to in-person learning
Plus, how one CC club team is climbing out of pandemic boredom
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pandemic date last year, Colorado College announced that Block 8 would be taught via distance learning. (This year, the college is expecting roughly 35% of Block 8 courses will be offered in either hybrid or fully in-person formats.)
Today, we break down the decision behind CC’s Friday announcement that it would be going back to in-person learning in the fall. Plus, CC’s club climbing team on getting their practices started again after a hiatus.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained who really deserves the most credit for getting the national vaccine distribution process rolling.
✉️In Your Inbox:
On Saturday, an on-campus student, who was in the Western Ridge apartments, received a positive test result for COVID-19.
On Tuesday, CC sent out an email on behalf of Bon Appetit answering recent questions the catering company has received this semester.
Also on Tuesday, an on-campus student, who was on west campus, received a positive test result for COVID-19.
📰On Friday, The Catalyst reported on CC students jumping the vaccine line ahead of frontline workers and vulnerable groups. Read that story here.
Photo courtesy of Dova Zilly ‘23
💉Vaccines into arms means CC students are back in classrooms
Last Friday, Colorado College’s Acting Co-Presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore announced that the college would be returning to in-person learning in the fall semester, provided that local, state, and federal guidelines allowed it to do so.
“We’re not quite yet back to normal, but we can have more in-person instruction,” Andrea Bruder, the chair of CC’s Scientific Advisory Group, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “And I’m very excited about that.”
The decision to return to in-person learning was the latest in several similar announcements across the United States from institutions of higher education, and came after Gov. Jared Polis adjusted Colorado’s vaccine distribution plan to include higher education faculty and staff in Phase 1b.4. According to Maggie Santos, that phase will also include student employees that deal with the general public on a regular basis.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The first sign of hope that CC would be able to return to in-person learning came for Bruder a few weeks ago.
“When we crossed two million doses per day that were administered, that threshold made me feel more optimistic, and seemed like it would be more realistic to think that we might reach community immunity,” Bruder said.
For CC leadership, the success of local and national vaccine distribution is key for returning to the in-person campus format the college had before the pandemic. Brian Young, Vice President for Information Technology, said that Colorado’s effectiveness at getting vaccines into arms was a major source of assurance in deciding to return to an in-person campus.
“The transparency with the state of Colorado has been good with the vaccine, the fact that all three doses of vaccine are now available in Colorado … that’s a benefit,” Young told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “So that’s all great optimism for us.”
Bruder also said she was keeping her fingers crossed that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine would receive emergency authorization, which would give her and Young additional confidence in the supply chain and vaccine rollout.
“It could be a real game changer,” Bruder said. “If the single dose vaccine became widely available.”
Socially-Distanced Spring (again)
Even before CC returns to in-person learning and activities this fall, college leadership expects to increase in-person classes and events for Blocks 7 and 8 this spring by sending people outdoors.
“As weather turns better, we have greater access to outdoor classrooms, such as large tents that we purchased,” Young said. “Obviously, each day passes, we also know more and more people get vaccines, which is good, we want that. And so, all those added up mean we can continue to see more and more normality.”
According to Bruder, around 35% of the courses CC will be offering in Block 8 will either be in person or in a hybrid format.
Bruder said that as part of the efforts to return to some sense of normalcy this semester, the college would also be bringing some of its pre-pandemic events back, with just a few modifications. For example, this spring, CC’s Residential Experience will be bringing back Llamapalooza, but Bruder said this year the festival will be held over three consecutive weekends.
In general, Bruder said the college plans for more outdoor activities to be available for people to gather and spend time together safely and in person.
“We hope that people will use those outdoor spaces and prioritize outdoor activities, getting together outdoors with friends, as opposed to indoors,” Bruder said.
Some things, however, won’t be changing — students, faculty, and staff will still need to abide by health and safety procedures that have been the standard throughout the pandemic. For example, even after members of the CC community have been fully vaccinated, they will still be asked to adhere to guidelines like testing and quarantining after being exposed to the virus.
“We are a congregate living setting with dorms and residence halls,” Young said. “That puts us in a very different category when it comes to the quarantine efforts, even with those that are potentially vaccinated.”
So what will next year look like?
Despite the security herd immunity might bring, Bruder said it is too soon to know exactly what an in-person campus will look like for CC in 2021, and it depends on who will be “winning the race” — the vaccines or the new variants.
“It kind of depends — will it be the vaccines winning the race, or potentially the new variants slowing things down, at least temporarily,” Bruder said. “If I had a crystal ball, then I would take a look.”
Still, Bruder said there is a “good chance” the CC community will have to abide by fewer safety protocols next year.
“I don’t think that we’ll switch off the protocols overnight, but I think with more and more people being vaccinated, the population will build immunity gradually over time,” Bruder said.
Of course, another factor playing into the success of an in-person campus will be the amount of students that actually receive the vaccine when eligible.
While Young said the college cannot currently require students to receive vaccines, he said that CC and other higher education partners in the community have come to an agreement to strongly encourage each campus to get the vaccine when it becomes available to them.
“As of today, it is the CC stance that we are going to be strongly encouraging the access and taking the vaccine,” Young said.
Not getting too ahead of ourselves
In the midst of all this optimism, there are still some things that Bruder and Young said will be on their minds as in-person learning and activities resume.
“If a vaccine-evading variant of the virus were to become dominant in the US, then the vaccines would need to be modified to be effective against those variants again and so that that would delay things,” Bruder said. “So that’s something that we’re concerned about.”
Young said there are a few things that worry him for the coming semester. The first is the fatigue the pandemic has given everyone, which Young fears might cause people to give up on precautions that keep them safe from the virus. The second thing, he said, is travel, which always opens up the possibility of bringing the virus back home.
Finally, Young also worries that people may feel like a “superhero” after getting the vaccine and take more risks. He said the college is still asking people to wait two weeks before assuming they are fully vaccinated.
“So, just a lot of those things added together that we still just need to make sure that as a community, we are as aggressive as we have been with the protocols to try to maintain a safe environment,” Young said.
🧗CC’s climbing team hopping back on the wall
As vaccine rollout has increased in Colorado and CC returned to “Alert Level 1,” the college was able to bring back some in-person club sports after a frustrating fall of virtual meetings and little to no practice with teammates.
So when the CC club climbing team received an email from Director of Recreation & Fitness Center Chris Starr informing them the they could start practices back up again, the team’s student leaders eagerly began planning to make that happen.
Getting back into the climbing gym
To start practicing in person, the team’s leaders first had to figure out how they would be able to do so safely.
In accordance with CC’s pandemic safety protocols, Ben Sokol ‘22, who handles issues related to competitions and safety for the climbing team, said he and other leaders decided that practices would need to be held outside of peak hours and stay within a two-hour time limit, in order to cut down on time spent in the gym.
“We’ve been keeping it to two hours since then, just trying to limit the time that people are spending around each other outside of their bubbles,” Will Abbey ‘22, the captain of the club team, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Team leaders also told their athletes not to carpool to practices off campus at the CityROCK climbing gym or the Springs Climbing Center, and regularly check to make sure students are enrolled in CC’s mandatory testing program before they enter practices.
Dova Zilly ‘23, another one of the team’s leaders, said that the Ritt Kellogg Climbing Gym caps the amount of people allowed to climb at once at eight.
High gravity days
The biggest drawback of the pandemic for the team, the group said, is the lack of time they are able to spend together. Sokol said that because of this, team cohesion has been difficult this year.
“It feels like you have to put in a lot more work to make any sort of social interaction happen with the team, which sucks because it is really a community sport, everyone’s trying to help each other out,” Abbey said. “So the lack or decrease in that has definitely been hard.”
Zilly also said that the team still being relatively new has been a challenge for her and other leaders, and retention of returning students is low. She’s seen more first-year students coming to her practices than students who were on the team last year.
“I didn’t expect to feel so challenged by the physical distance, and my ability to participate with the team,” Katherine Hade ‘22, the team’s head coach, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Beside missing the social aspect of the team, Sokol said the biggest loss has been that there are no competitions this semester. While USA Climbing held collegiate competitions during Pandemic Fall, Sokol said that the CC climbing team wasn’t practicing at the time, and thus was not able to compete. USA Climbing then cancelled the collegiate regional and national championships, ending the CC team’s hopes for competing at all this year.
“That’s been a big blow,” Sokol said. “Those are always super fun events and an accumulation of our season, like what everyone is sort of working towards and it’s just a fun time to go and have this bigger competition against a bunch of different schools and just see what your season amounted to.
Still sending it though
But even with the limits the pandemic has brought to their season, the team said they were happy to be meeting again, and that not much has changed in terms of the practices themselves.
“From a perspective of training, and everything, not that much has changed. We’re still able to do pretty much all our exercises,” Sokol said. “Climbing training is nice because it can be so individual and so you don’t really need to have this whole group of people in one area. Each person can be working on a route and a separate part of the gym.”
Abbey also said that despite the difficulties of the pandemic, the team’s morale is high.
“I think the fact that kids are showing up at 7 a.m. to practice is a really positive sign, because that’s really early in the morning,” Zilly told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Ultimately, the team’s leaders are excited just to be climbing and meeting again.
“Climbing is like my second family,” Hade said. “So I’m constantly thinking about being back there.”
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.
📬 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.