This Kentucky campus offers a glimpse of what colleges, schools may be like in fall
Aris Cedeño is under the guillotine.
At least that’s how he sees it. As the man in charge of one of the few, and likely the largest, in-person learning experiments in the state, Cedeño knows that a COVID-19 outbreak among the students under his staff’s care this summer could have significant ramifications for other educational institutions across the commonwealth come fall.
“The guillotine is above our heads no matter what and it will be above our heads until we close this summer,” said Cedeño, the executive director and academic dean of the Governor’s Scholars Program — better known as GSP. “Everybody will be looking at the governor’s scholars.”
Under normal circumstances, GSP takes the brightest in-state high schoolers from every county and tries to give them a five-week, on-campus, collegelike experience for a summer. This year, the program is moving forward with a drastically modified, pandemic-inspired plan that will give scholars a week-long, socially distant taste of what the program is typically like.
The program, taking place at Centre College in Danville and Bellarmine University in Louisville, offers a sneak peek at what a socially distant college campus could look like. Higher learning institutions across the state and country have been busy making campus plans to safely conduct classes while preventing the spread of coronavirus. GSP is a plan in action.
From late June into early August, about 625 students will have rotated through Centre, Cedeño said. Each week, a group of 125 students arrives on Sunday and stays through Friday. On Saturday, the dorms they stayed in are cleaned and readied for the next group. Students who were selected for GSP, but didn’t want to attend in person out of concern for themselves or others are still considered governor’s scholars, Cedeño said. In-person participation wasn’t necessary.
“We’re taking very careful notes,” said Michael Strysick, the school’s chief communications officer. The school has said Centre is happy to have GSP as a “test run” for the fall.
Is a socially distant campus possible?
Both Cedeño and Strysick acknowledged that there are some differences in the challenges that GSP and Centre will have to face.
In terms of size, GSP has fewer students and will operate for a shorter period compared to Centre’s potentially semester-long, 1,300-student challenge, Strysick said. But the summer GSP test run at least gives administrators the chance to see how students might operate in a socially distant learning environment — a common issue for schools as large as the University of Kentucky or as small as neighborhood schools.
At lunchtime on the Danville campus on Tuesday, anyone who wasn’t eating was wearing a mask. Typically packed dining halls were filled with students standing on taped down blue X’s. Single chairs sat behind tables meant for one, while some larger booths allowed for a higher capacity.
But social distancing didn’t stop socializing. Students at single tables turned to talk to those nearby. Many seemed to prefer to eat outside, sitting on green grass feet apart from their nearest dining partner. After eating, several students took to the campus green spaces to play schoolyard games that required no equipment and no touching.
The lunch configuration was similar to ones planned at larger universities. Self-service, buffet-style dining halls — common at many universities — have been largely eliminated in many schools’ plans. Centre, like UK and others, are mainly serving dishes that are prepackaged and disposable.
“It’s doable,” Cedeño said of in-person education. “Life needs to continue. We cannot afford not to do this and simply sit down and not do anything. I guess if we comply, we will be successful. That’s the story that we want this year to be.”
Student compliance may prove to be the greatest wild card facing schools this fall. Compliance with social distancing rules during and after classes has already become a major headache for college administrators across the country. This summer, some universities have already recorded major spikes in COVID-19 cases among students. Administrators have been quick to blame reopening college bars and tightly packed parties.
At GSP, student compliance isn’t much of a worry, Cedeño said. The high school students attending are committed to success, he said, and so far, students are following the rules.
Cedeño said GSP requires masks for the duration of the program, not just for safety, but also to set “the tone and set the example for what’s coming up in education very soon after we close here.”
Students will return to their high schools and can say, “this is important,” Cedeño said while gesturing toward his mask. “These are the kids who are going to be members of the graduating senior class, officers and all that.”
Aside from the occasional directive to spread out or mask up, students typically don’t have to be told to follow the rules, said Price Wilborn, a Shelby County High School student focusing on music theory and performance.
During the 14 days before arriving on campus, students are required to take their temperatures daily and record them on a document that they sign and turn in. One student had to opt out ahead of time, Cedeño said, because they were notified by a contact tracer that they were potentially exposed and needed to isolate.
What’s the classroom experience like?
On campus, masks are required. Program directors procured masks that they expected to have to hand out. But so far, barely any have been distributed because virtually every student — and almost every parent who dropped them off — came with masks, Cedeño said.
Every day, students get their temperatures checked before breakfast and again before dinner, said Kristen Harris, one of the GSP campus directors.
Wilborn said he didn’t mind the health and safety rules because he understood the purpose. The rules didn’t prevent him from learning, and many of the students were happy to meet new people after months of local lockdown.
“It’s not seeing the same four people, and seeing people that are new, and get new ideas all while doing the same thing and being as careful as we can,” Wilborn said.
Wilborn, who was placed on his high school’s coronavirus planning committee, said GSP’s social distancing operation was something he could take back to his high school.
Once in classrooms at 9 a.m., students join a communitywide Zoom call before jumping into in-person instruction. After lunch, students have afternoon downtime before dinner, another class and then return to their single-occupant dorm rooms. Before bed, students participate in a dorm hall Zoom call to go over the next day and to help build community in the dorms without getting too close.
“We’re getting the most cooperative, engaged, compliant kids out of each and every school,” said John Wilcox, a GSP faculty member who teaches philosophy and is also a professor at Spalding University. “You’re dealing with a select group here. But maybe that’s the group that you want to run the test with?”
Classroom capacity is capped at 10 — including the instructor, Cedeño said. Desks are spread apart.
Teaching in front of a socially distant classroom for the first time was “a little different,” Wilcox said. Happy to be back in the classroom, he adjusted quickly. Masks can slightly muffle voices, but students learned to project their voices.
“Real learning can happen online, and real teaching can occur online. I don’t have any doubt about that, but it’s not the same,” Wilcox said. “... I’m not saying that one is better than the other, and a mix of both of them is probably the best because there are things you can do face to face that don’t work as well online.”
In a discussion-based class, Wilcox said in-person instruction allows people to see the full nuance of body language in communicating ideas. In an online setting, he said the quietest students can sometimes feel more freedom to speak when they’re behind a keyboard.
“Now that (distance learning) is here, I think it’s changed education,” Wilcox said. “I don’t think we’re going to go back to the way we were. It’s just going to be more online.”
Centre, other schools may need to adjust COVID-19 plans
Centre officials said having GSP on campus helped them realize that some of their classroom spaces will be too small.
Brian Hutzley, Centre’s chief financial officer, said Tuesday that the school is considering getting outdoor tents as classroom spaces after seeing how often GSP students liked to use green spaces.When the program finishes in early August, administrators will sit down with GSP leaders to analyze needs.
Centre will have block scheduling in the fall, Strysick said, meaning a typically 14-week semester with four courses will be cut in half. Students will take two courses over the first seven weeks, then will take another two courses over the remaining seven weeks.
Strysick emphasized that there’s no “one size fits all” for college COVID-19 plans. Different institutions have different challenges, he said. Centre’s generally small class sizes — student-to-faculty ratio is 10:1 — will fit into more spaces than some of the larger classes at public universities. While UK now has some small classes, the practice of packing hundreds of undergraduates into a lecture hall may be a thing of the past. UK’s plans include breaking up large classes into smaller ones to be able to ensure social distancing.
For student compliance, Strysick said the college is hoping to rely more on the carrot as opposed to the stick. Student leaders are currently working on a social contract that will hopefully encourage peer-to-peer student accountability, Strysick said. He said the college’s small size allows for a greater sense of community and combined social responsibility.
The college is also banking on its location and the fact that many students live in dorms on the campus.
“We don’t have any 800- or 1,200-people dorms. They’re spread out more than they normally would be,” Hutzley said. “... If something were to happen, we could isolate a lot more than at UK or at any other big school. And we don’t have any college bars in Danville. They’re not hanging out in those places.”
So far, the college’s enrollment for the fall looks good, given the circumstances, Strysick said. The college normally gets about 1,400 students per semester, and they’re currently projecting around 1,325 for the fall. They’ve seen a noticeable uptick in in-state students with many newcomers coming from within 50 miles of Danville. The college is working through the details, but Centre officials fully intend on an in-person education come fall.
“We’ll just hope to be lucky and fortunate,” Strysick said. “But I guess some people say that you kind of make your luck, and I think we’ve put ourselves in a position, and we worked very hard to be successful given the challenging circumstances.”
This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 1:56 PM.