This fall, Vermont colleges have kept on-campus spread of Covid-19 to a minimum. So, they hope to replicate this semester’s success next spring by following nearly identical plans.
The state updated its college reopening guidelines on Oct. 15 to include baseline requirements for the spring semester — and they’re largely a replica of the standards that officials credit for the success of fall reopenings.
In the spring, colleges must again test students for Covid-19 when they arrive on campus and once more seven days later. Students will be required to quarantine for 14 days in their home states before traveling to Vermont, like they did in August.
A critical piece of the spring guidelines, according to Richard Schneider, former Norwich University president and head of Vermont’s college reopenings task force, is a mandate that colleges not resume in-person classes until Feb. 1.
As Covid-19 cases surge nationwide and Vermont officials warn of “pandemic fatigue,” the task force wanted to avoid students returning to residential campuses during the coldest weeks of Vermont’s winter, when experts worry infection could rise further as people spend more time indoors. Colleges plan to send students home for the fall semester by Thanksgiving, leaving campuses vacant between late November and Feb. 1.
“We want to delay the spring start as long as we can so that we can get outside as quickly as we can,” Schneider said.
So far in the fall semester, institutions in the Green Mountain State have largely avoided the pitfalls of mid-pandemic reopenings that have plagued colleges nationwide.
The New York Times tracked more than 178,000 cases of Covid-19 at U.S. colleges through Oct. 8, with more than 300 schools recording at least 100 cases since the semester began. In Vermont, though, colleges recorded 51 cases total through Oct. 20, according to a report by Mike Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation; he’s a member of Gov. Phil Scott’s Covid-19 response team.
Officials attribute that success to colleges conducting over 125,000 Covid-19 tests (many of them processed by the Broad Institute), students coming from low-infection areas, and strict guidelines that students have mostly followed — all elements they say will be key to a successful spring.
The spring semester will present a new set of challenges as the possibility of a winter Covid-19 surge looms.
“We aren’t sure yet of which way the country’s going, but we’re not happy with where it looks like the country’s going,” Schneider said. “Every indicator is bad.”
Still, he said, colleges will enter the spring with a powerful asset that they lacked in August: two months of practice running testing programs, enforcing student conduct standards and collaborating with the Department of Health on contact tracing.
Schools announce spring plans
Colleges have announced varied spring semester plans in recent weeks that all bear similarities to the fall semester blueprint: mixes of in-person, hybrid and remote classes, requiring students to quarantine before traveling to school, and arrival-day and day-7 Covid-19 tests.
In an Oct. 8 announcement, President Laurie Patton said Middlebury College will again offer in-person classes on campus to all students next spring, with the option to take classes remotely.
The college’s one-month winter term will be fully remote, and in-person spring classes will not resume until March 1.
As in the fall, all Middlebury students will be tested for Covid-19 when they arrive and seven days later. The same will be true at the University of Vermont, which will also hold a mix of in-person and remote programming and resume in-person classes on Feb. 1, according to an Oct. 8 email to students from Provost Patricia Prelock.
Schools in the Vermont State Colleges’ system, whose students are mainly Vermonters and together had logged just six Covid-19 cases through Oct. 20, will begin classes on Feb. 1, per state guidelines.
“Our colleges are pretty much looking at doing the same thing as they did in the fall, because it’s worked and we’ve had very, very few cases,” said Chancellor Sophie Zdatny.
One break from that trend is Castleton University, which in the fall held nearly all of its classes online but will expand in-person options this spring. The university plans to offer roughly one-third of its classes in-person next semester. Northern Vermont University’s campuses in Johnson and Lyndon had success with a similar breakdown of in-person and remote programming this fall, Zdatny said.
According to Zdatny, one of the main challenges in making spring plans has been determining how to build vacation time into the semester.
The state’s Oct. 15 requirements call for colleges to eliminate “traditional” spring breaks to minimize travel to and from campuses; however, schools may organize “alternative” breaks that encourage students to remain in Vermont.
Through the fall, as colleges did away with vacations for the same reasons and to vacate campuses before cold weather arrives, Vermont State Colleges students have expressed feelings of exhaustion and burnout, Zdatny said. In response, NVU recently announced a surprise two-day break scheduled for the middle of next week.
By announcing the break at the last minute, NVU hoped to prevent students from scheduling far-flung vacations that could bring Covid-19 cases back to campus. In the spring, Zdatny said, the state colleges may similarly offer impromptu breaks to avoid those downsides.
“It’s a way to try to be sensitive to what students need without incentivizing them to travel out of state or going to hotspots,” Zdatny said.
Though eliminating breaks presents a clearcut way to shorten semesters and discourage travel, Zdatny said the fall has made clear that giving students rest will be key in running a sustainable spring semester.
“We’ve learned that taking classes in this setting is really draining, and we’re certainly getting the message from students about how challenging it’s been and that they feel they will need a break,” she said. “The question is how to do that in a responsible way.”
Besides posting Covid-19 case numbers to public dashboards this fall, colleges have been asked by the state to submit data on how many students have broken campus Covid-19-related policies.
As of Oct. 1 Vermont colleges had disciplined 1,062 students for violating Covid-related policies, including 44 students removed from campuses, according to Ted Brady, deputy secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.
Questions linger about impact of winter surge
Schneider worries that, by the winter, pandemic fatigue, rising national case numbers and flu season could mean the students who return to colleges in the spring could be less healthy than they were this fall.
Students will have to remain vigilant when they return home for the winter, away from the closely regulated campuses on which they lived this term, he said.
“Will students maintain the rigor of the protection at home that they’ve done in their dorms this fall? That’s a real question,” Schneider said. “What we don’t know — the big unknown, the big risk — is how healthy students are going to be when they come back” in the spring.
Department of Health spokesman Ben Truman agreed that there’s a sense of urgency in how students approach behavior before coming back to schools in the spring.
“This is a time for college students to take that extra care to protect themselves, their families and others,” Truman said of the winter months, which he called a “point of high risk.”
At the same time, the state is more prepared than ever to deal with outbreaks on campuses and off, Schneider said, citing contact tracing efforts during a recent Covid-19 outbreak in Montpelier as evidence.
The Department of Health has worked closely with colleges throughout the fall to trace infected students, one of the strong points of the reopening so far, Schneider said. From running surveillance testing programs to organizing dining halls, colleges now have robust systems in place to face outbreaks that in August had not yet been tested.
“We have proven time and again that our state knows how to handle it and contain the outbreaks,” Schneider said. “We’ve practiced it, now — we’ve done it.”
Come January, if viral cases are at a level that would make reopening too dangerous, the state is prepared to pivot toward a more limited college reopening, Schneider said.
The task force plans to continually re-evaluate the plan — and the national situation — in the coming months, he said.
