Zooming Back Home: CC pivots to online learning, asks most students to leave campus in next three weeks

‘It’s hard to become overly frustrated when it seems so inevitable,’ one student said

Photo by Colorado College student Bibi Powers-McCormack ’21. 

COVID-19: 1

Colorado College: 0 

This week, Colorado College became the latest higher-ed institution to scrap their plans for Pandemic Fall and embrace online learning. For the rest of Block 1, students will attend classes remotely, and most classes will be online only for the rest of the semester. 

The college is asking most students currently living on campus to leave by Sept. 20. Students experiencing hardship, international students currently on campus or on their way to campus, and students already enrolled in an in-person course, a hybrid lab class, or a senior art seminar may remain on campus or return to campus starting Block 2. Additionally, CC Director of Athletics Lesley Irvine told The Gazette that members of the men’s ice hockey team will remain on campus because their season is still scheduled to begin Oct. 9. 

An excerpt from Tuesday’s email announcement signed by co-presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore read:

“The El Paso County Public Health Department required the recent quarantines of Loomis, Mathias, and South halls due to 11 students receiving positive COVID-19 test results. The quarantines of entire residential halls significantly limit our ability to provide a quality residential and academic experience for students. For this reason we have adjusted our plans.”

Other highlights from the emails:

• CC will provide credit to the accounts of students living in South, Mathias, or Loomis Halls for their Block 1 housing fees.

• Students living in South and Mathias Halls can leave when their quarantine ends at noon on Sept. 12. If a quarantined student lives within a few hours of campus and can drive home without stopping, a family member or responsible adult can pick them up at any time.

• The Registrar’s Office will extend the deadline to drop a Block 1 class by a week to Sept. 8.

• Expect an announcement in October about what the college plans for the spring semester.

• The college will establish its own testing lab on campus within the next month, where trained CC staff will perform rapid tests that can deliver results in 5-15 minutes. 

How did we get here?

Since Aug. 15, Colorado College has reported 13 positive COVID-19 cases. One positive case during move-in resulted in a two-week quarantine for Loomis Hall. An additional 10 cases reported between Aug. 25 and Aug. 29 put Mathias and South Halls, the other two large dorms on campus, into their own two-week quarantines. 

On Monday, the college announced two more positive COVID-19 cases in the community: a student living off-campus and a staff member who works in Spencer Center, the building across from Armstrong Hall that houses a number of offices including communications, financial aid, and advancement. The sudden increase in positive COVID-19 cases on CC’s campus concerned public health officials, said Rochelle Dickey, acting Dean of Students and acting Vice President for Student Life.

“That was something that certainly raised an alarm with the health department and even up to the state level,” Dickey told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.

According to the public COVID-19 data dashboard from El Paso County Public Health, there have been 647 new COVID-19 cases in the county since Aug. 15. CC’s 13 cases represent about 2% of the total reported cases over the past 17 days. During the past six months, the county has reported 6,102 positive COVID-19 cases. There are about 720,000 residents of El Paso County, and as of Sept. 1, 672 students were living on CC’s campus. During the past week, the college placed 332 of those students in quarantine, according to the COVID-19 dashboard.

But based on early guides to higher-ed planning, Colorado College checked a lot of the right boxes. 

They developed a campus contact-tracing team and a symptom-screening app. They reviewed the ventilation systems of campus buildings and took steps to improve air circulation. They communicated expectations for social distancing, reduced density in residence halls, and created multiple modes of instruction for all courses.

The college tested each student when they arrived on campus, and they conducted 1,365 tests as of Sept. 1. CC has also been conducting “surveillance testing,” where they randomly choose about one-third of the student population to test each week, according to Andrea Bruder, chair of the campus Scientific Advisory Group. 

Bruder said the best outcome was to keep viral spread low and hopefully manageable — but that it was never going to completely disappear from campus because of the pandemic’s prevalence in El Paso County.

“CC is not a bubble, so there [are] always people coming and going and interacting outside of CC,” Bruder said. “People have to go to the grocery store, and so zero interaction is not possible.”

Since they initially announced plans for Pandemic Fall, nearly 200 colleges and universities across the country have reversed, opting instead for entirely remote semesters, delayed starts, and on-campus populations that resemble a mere fraction of what they once hoped would be possible.  

Even Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who changed guidance in June to give higher-ed increased flexibility for in-person instruction, recently said he was worried about college students returning to campuses in Colorado.

“I’m very concerned about our residential colleges in particular for a couple reasons,” Polis said in a briefing. “One is that they’re residential, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that congregate living facilities are at greater risk for spread of the virus.”

Across classes, some students react with resignation, saying they saw change coming

Mathias Residential Advisor Ian Widmann ’23 was on Zoom for his music composition class when the email landed in his inbox yesterday. He began getting questions from students in his hall, but he didn’t have any answers for them. 

He found out about the quarantine on Saturday from Mathias Residential Life Coordinator Kaylee Crivello about 15 minutes before the rest of campus, but had no other advance warning about the announcement. When one of his residents moved to the off-campus quarantine housing at Bijou West last week, Widmann only heard about it from the student’s roommate. 

“A lot of stuff is coming down from our RLC,” Widmann told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “A lot of the time it feels like the sort of chain of information is: she receives something, and then she sends it to us, and we send it to our residents — which can feel a bit weird sometimes because then the residents ask us questions, like specifics about something that we just don’t know. And then we have to ask Kaylee, and then Kaylee has to ask her superiors and then, you know, information takes three times as long to get around.”

Emir Suhaime ’24, a quarantined first-year student in Mathias, said he had a feeling that something was about to happen. He was doing his laundry when he saw some moving boxes in the building. 

“I was actually kind of expecting it, so I was already kind of preparing myself,” Suhaime told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “But, yeah, I’m just kind of frustrated that, like, I thought we in the Mathias community had it under control.” 

After watching first-year students start their college experience in quarantine, some seniors are seeing a silver lining.

“I think that we’re in a pretty good position being seniors and not being in any other year because … we can just do this year and then we're done,” Charlie Robinson ’21, who lives about a block away from campus, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “We had three years of not being quarantined.”

The final stage of grief over the end of a college career — acceptance — sometimes doesn’t set in for seniors until they toss their caps at commencement. However, some members of the class of 2021 said they reached that stage long before they received yesterday’s announcement. 

“It’s hard to become overly frustrated when it seems so inevitable, right?” Benjamin Gelderloos ’21 told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.

Gelderloos is living in one of the college’s East Campus apartments. While his friends living in off-campus houses across the street will be largely unaffected by yesterday’s announcement, Gelderloos is preparing back-up plans for what he’ll do if the college doesn’t let him stay. Still, moving mid-year might not be the hardest part. 

“There are going to be people who won’t come back to campus,” he said. “Maybe I won’t see them for the rest of my life.”

This newsletter required all hands on deck. Special thanks to Colorado College student Colin Suszynski for contributing to this report.

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. 

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