Work-Study Grants, Emergency Funds, and Refund Checks: CC Financial Aid discusses new plans for online fall

Also, a recap of the latest Town Hall and why some students aren’t taking classes this fall

Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2018, Susan G. Komen Colorado was hosting a Race for the Cure in Colorado Springs to raise money for breast cancer research. (This year’s event is virtual.) 

Today, we talk with Shannon Amundson, Colorado College’s Director of Financial Aid, about how last week’s announcement affects financial aid and student employment this semester, and we recap Thursday’s Virtual Information session. As a bonus, we also profile three students who made alternate plans for this semester long before CC announced updates last week.

We packed a lot into this newsletter, so buckle up.

➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained a possible heart complication from COVID-19.   

✉️In Your Inbox: Members of the CC community receive a lot of emails. Let us declutter your inbox for you:

• After being selected for random retesting, a student living in Mathias Hall tested positive for COVID-19 on Sept. 5. The student had already been quarantining for a week when they received the result and is now isolated.

• Students moving out by the end of Block 1 should not leave any food items or personal belongings, and on-campus storage is not available because the college is “at capacity with student belongings from spring move-out,” a recent email read. Students who have already left campus should email ccmoveout@coloradocollege.edu to develop a plan to retrieve belongings.

• First-year students and their families received an email from Vice Provost Pedro de Araujo stating that the deadline to request a gap semester or gap year is now Sept. 14. Students also have until Sept. 14 to drop their CC100 class. Administrators will host an information session for first-year students at 1 p.m. MT today.

• The college has completed the recruitment phase of its presidential search and is now working to assess candidates and conduct interviews, with the new president set to join CC’s community by the summer of 2021. 

• Members of the CC Residential Experience team are hosting a virtual information session on housing tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. MT. You can register here.

Navigating student employment and financial aid during a pandemic with some ‘meet-in-the-middle’ solutions

Last week’s announcement about the new fall plans probably left you with some questions about how student employment and financial aid will work this semester. We also had some questions, so we spoke to CC Director of Financial Aid Shannon Amundson about remote work policies for student workers, the college’s emergency fund, and financial aid disbursements. 

Updated student employment guidelines 

CC students are still only allowed to work two “regular” jobs this semester, and they must provide documentation to prove they are living in Colorado to work remotely starting Sept. 21. The college is working on possibly allowing some students to work on-campus, but those plans are not finalized. Students living outside Colorado, including work-study eligible students, will not be allowed to work remotely.

“We will be doing a grant for half of their work-study award for the fall to try to make up those funds that they’re not able to work,” Amundson told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “Not everybody earns their full award, and so we’re trying to find some reasonable, meet-in-the-middle kind of thing.” 

In July, the college announced that supervisors should only hire students with work-study awards until Block 3. If a supervisor has not received any applications from work-study students, they can appeal for an exception on an individual basis. Amundson said they have received appeals from supervisors looking to hire upper-level tutors or other specialized positions. 

The status of CC’s emergency fund   

Colorado College received $1,151,391 as part of the CARES Act, and the college is required to provide 50% of that money (or about $575,000) directly to students. As of Aug. 9, the college has given $304,359.40 to students. The Department of Education approved CC’s funding request on May 4, and the college’s award period lasts until April 19, 2021.  

In March, the college established a COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund to cover unanticipated costs associated with the pandemic including travel, housing, food, and internet access expenses. In addition to money from CARES Act, the emergency fund is supported by gifts, global education funds, and contributions from members of the CC community. Students can request support from the emergency fund at any time, but they must be currently enrolled at CC to receive funding. Additionally, students can apply for funding from the CC Mutual Aid Fund, but they won’t receive requested funds until they are actively enrolled again, Amundson said. 

How CC’s updated plans impact financial aid  

The Office of Financial Aid is still doing financial aid appeals for families who have been affected by the pandemic, and each appeal is considered individually, Amundson said. 

According to Amundson, there haven’t been any conversations about the college not continuing to meet demonstrated need. “We will continue to meet full demonstrated eligibility for students that are admitted,” she said.

Students who are not approved to stay on campus but decide to stay in the Springs will still receive financial aid to help cover their housing costs. Students will submit copies of their lease or rental agreement, and the Office of Financial Aid will send them a refund check, keeping their financial aid award the same.

The college is offering 12 blocks during the 2020-21 academic year since J-Block in January and summer Blocks A, B, and C are considered part of the regular academic calendar. If a student chooses not to take Blocks 1–4, they can still take a year’s worth of classes starting in January. Taking J-Block, Blocks 5–8, and Blocks A, B, and C amounts to eight units, resulting in a full year of charges and financial aid.  

However, just taking J-Block and Blocks 5–8 is still more than one semester of classes. Since CC gives each student eight semesters of aid, taking five Blocks in the spring could impact a student’s aid in the future. 

“That’s more than four units in a semester,” Amundson said. “At which point they’ve hit that second, another semester of aid, and we don’t recommend that unless they are still on track to graduate on time.”

Town Hall on Blocks 2–4: CC waives on-campus residency requirement for 2020–21 school year

Last Thursday, Colorado College held a Virtual Information Session about plans for the remainder of the fall semester with the following panelists: Lesley Irvine, vice president and director of athletics; Rochelle Dickey, acting dean of students and acting vice president for student life; Pedro de Araujo, vice provost; Brian Young, vice president for Information Technology; co-presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore. Here are the highlights:

HOUSING: 

For the 2020-21 academic year, the college has suspended the three-year on-campus residency requirement. About 780 students are currently approved to live on campus this semester, according to de Araujo. Students on campus for Block 2 can stay for the rest of the semester. Additionally, students may live in the college’s supplemental housing even if they are not taking classes, and can work through the leasing company to do so, said Dickey.

CHARGES:

For meal plans, the college will charge students for the amount of dollars they used until they left campus, in addition to a pro-rated fee, Dickey said. There will be more information coming about housing credits for students living in Loomis, Mathias, and South Halls.

QUARANTINES:

As long as they are monitored, Edmonds said students quarantined in South and Mathias Halls are now able to go outside at any time for as long as they would like, per recent approval from El Paso County Public Health. 

Public health officials told CC administrators to expect “rolling quarantines” moving forward into the spring semester, Dickey said. As a result, room assignments for spring will likely change as the college examines different ways to try to prevent dorm-wide quarantines from happening again, such as by putting students into cohorts or pods.

TESTING:

According to CC’s COVID-19 updates page, the college’s testing and contact tracing efforts will include all students who stay in Colorado Springs this semester, and the students will have access to the campus health center. However, during the information session, Dickey said that the college cannot provide daily check-ins or meal deliveries to off-campus students in isolation or quarantine. 

The college is also working with a CC parent to bring a COVID-19 molecular test to campus, Young said. The test will have a turnaround time of about 15-30 minutes and will be available in an on-site testing facility.

Gone but not forgotten: A look at some of the students who decided to take time off this fall

Even before Colorado College announced it was embracing online learning for Pandemic Fall, some students had decided to make alternate plans of their own. The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project spoke with three students who are largely spending the fall away from the (virtual) classroom.

Andrew Rodden ’21

Andrew Rodden ’21 wasn’t surprised by Colorado College’s sudden transition to mostly distance-learning for the rest of the fall semester. In fact, he’d been preparing for it.

“Everyone’s been saying it’s an unprecedented event in history,” Rodden told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “So ... why should we go in with a plan that’s never been tried or never been tested?”

Before the pandemic hit, Rodden had been planning to live on campus in a studio apartment, work in the college’s Audio-Visual department, and take courses he was interested in but didn’t necessarily need for academic progress. But then, he watched COVID-19 outbreaks spread across college campuses, and his plans shifted.

“It wasn’t looking like it would be very safe to go back to campus,” Rodden said. “Especially since I didn’t need to take all the courses I was signed up for, it just made the most amount of sense to just stay here.”

Now, Rodden is writing film reviews for The Catalyst, CC’s independent student newspaper, and working some other odd jobs from his home in Albuquerque, he said. He’ll only be taking one online course this semester because as a film major, distance-learning has its difficulties.

“Since campus has a lot of video recording equipment, and filmmaking equipment, that ... I obviously don’t have access [to] here at home, it kind of — it sucks,” he said. Plus, filmmaking is a hands-on, collaborative field, so it is best in a social setting that is hard to replicate remotely, he added.

If the spring semester proceeds with a semblance of normalcy, Rodden will live in an apartment off-campus and finish his filmmaking courses in person. Needless to say, this isn’t the senior year he had hoped for.

“I was kind of looking forward to, like, the last hurrah of college, and it’s obvious it’s not going to look the same as in other years,” Rodden said. “I feel like it’s better to be disappointed about not having that experience on campus than to get coronavirus potentially,” he added.

Caitlin Blinkhorn ’22 

In another world, Caitlin Blinkhorn ’22 would be starting her junior year at CC studying neuroscience. Instead, she’s spending her Pandemic Fall in New Hampshire, working for ADIMAB, a biotechnology company that specializes in antibody production. 

Blinkhorn’s co-op (a longer internship opportunity) started in August and will end in January. She spends her days working in the lab at ADIMAB as a member of their molecular biology team, prepping and purifying plasmid DNA and also doing some DNA sequencing. 

Originally, Blinkhorn was only looking for summer work when ADIMAB responded to her cover letter, saying that a position had just opened up for the fall. 

“It was a pretty quick turnaround between deciding whether ... to go back to school or take the fall off to do this program,” Blinkhorn told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “And that was a really stressful week for me because I was really debating, you know, am I going to miss out socially? Are there even going to be in-person classes?” 

Part of what fueled Blinkhorn’s decision to take time off was her dislike of online classes. 

“My experience with online learning in the spring wasn’t the best,” she said. “One of the reasons I chose to go to CC was, because of how small it is, ... you can really have these meaningful connections in and outside of class with the teachers.” She felt those relationships were much more difficult to cultivate online. “Maybe it would have been a bit more enticing if CC had offered to reduce tuition,” she added.    

Blinkhorn said she’s now happy with her decision and enjoys the work at ADIMAB. 

“I think if you had told me at the beginning of quarantine, like when I first got home, that I would be working for a biotech company, and not going back to school, I would have told you you were crazy,” Blinkhorn said. “I would have said there’s no way. [But] I think that the fact that this opportunity is so unique, and ... it kind of just was plopped on my plate. ... I had this impulse to pursue it.” 

Matt Pirraglia ’23

For Matt Pirraglia ’23, online classes are unbearable.

“I have pretty severe ADHD, and even medicated, online classes are just absolute agony for me with my attention issues and executive dysfunction,” he said.  

Pirraglia is currently back home in Rhode Island solidifying plans for the fall. For now, their plan is to work and take General Chemistry II and Spanish online through the University of Rhode Island, so they can maximize the number of upper-level classes they can take at CC in person later.

Pirraglia currently works as a ranger for Colt State Park in Bristol, Rhode Island, a job that ends in October. Then he plans to work for DoorDash and Instacart and start applying to Certified Nursing Assistant positions for next summer. 

“I love the block plan more than anything else,” Pirraglia said. “It vibes perfectly with my neuro-type. I just get super into stuff. … But that level of intensity combined with online classes meant I was absorbing nothing.” They added that distance learning was “not what I signed up for,” and that “I got everything bad about the block with none of the good.”  

A dislike of online learning wasn’t the only factor in Pirraglia’s decision. 

“Right now, the only way I feel like I can really stay mentally healthy is to stay physically active, and being locked in a dorm in quarantine is not the vibe,” he said. “I don’t think that I could be stable in that position.” 

They also want to save some money by working this fall, and said that their parents, who are healthcare workers, encouraged them to push off school for a bit. 

Pirraglia said that in the early stages of planning his fall, he was worried about not seeing his friends and sorting through the logistics of taking classes at another school. The hardest part for him was working up the nerve to actually start the leave of absence process.

“Now I’m pretty comfortable that I’ve made the right decision,” he said. 

About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project

The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Arielle Gordon, and Isabel Hicks, 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 from time to time, as will infographics by Colorado College students Rana Abdu, Aleesa Chua, Sara Dixon, Jia Mei, and Lindsey Smith.

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.