University of Kentucky students return to spaced-out classrooms, masks in vending machines
The University of Kentucky returned to some degree of a tenuous normalcy on Monday.
Desk chairs grated against tile floors and backpacks thudded against the side of desks as students took their seats for the first day of class in Prof. Jennifer Smith’s introductory journalism course. The ordinariness of a first day mixed in with the bizarreness of college during a pandemic.
Plexiglass rolled in front of Smith as she looked over the class of about 80 students, which was meeting in a large ballroom that the university converted into one of the largest classrooms on campus.
The university created nearly 35,000 signs encouraging social distancing, removed nearly 10,000 chairs and furniture from classrooms, said Mary Vosevich, the vice president for facilities management and chief facilities officer. Dozens of classrooms have had cameras installed so students can watch online if preferred. Some vending machines are stocked with hand sanitizer and masks.
“Can you guys in the back row hear me?” Smith said through her mask into a microphone, her face and Powerpoint slides projected on a large screen at the front of the room.
Compared to a normal year, the students sitting in the class had to jump through many more hoops to make it into the classroom. Starting in early August, students had to be tested for COVID-19 within seven days of their arrival on-campus. Through Thursday of last week, UK has reported 160 positive COVID-19 cases among students, with a positivity rate of 0.9 percent. The university’s data lags behind other public virus data, because it chooses to do contact tracing prior to releasing statistics.
The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department reported Monday that there have been at least 240 students who have tested positive and are quarantining within the county. Health department data does not include students who may choose to isolate outside the county.
On Monday, the similarly sized University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced a return to online classes after just one week of in-person instruction. UNC recorded four COVID-19 clusters over the weekend, and announced 130 positive cases in a week with a positivity rate of 13.6 percent. Currently, UNC has 177 students in isolation.
UK does have students in its isolation dorms, but the number is small, UK spokesperson Jay Blanton said last week. The university won’t release the current number in an effort to protect the privacy of those students. After learning of a positive COVID-19 test, it’s common for students who live on-campus to choose to isolate at home, instead of in the university’s dorms, said Nick Kehrwald, the acting assistant provost for student well-being.
A spaced-out dorm move-in was completed last week and was followed by the beginning of an altered K-Week — a week of orientation events put on by campus organizations aimed at getting first-year students involved.
The student return to Lexington has not been without complications. Last weekend, the university received reports of house parties in near-campus neighborhoods from police. UK re-iterated its plans to enforce its Student Code of Conduct — which now includes social distancing rules — at off-campus events. On Saturday, the Christian Student Fellowship, one of the largest student organizations on campus, was banned from continuing its annual K Week events after a late night barbecue attracted too many attendees and administrators feared the event was out of compliance, the Kentucky Kernel first reported.
“University officials had what we hope was productive dialogue with CSF about how critically important it is to have events that strictly adhere to federal, state and university public health standards in place to protect the health, safety and well-being of everyone,” Blanton said. “CSF agreed on Saturday night to end an event early when the crowd became too large and when we became concerned about the lack of adherence to those standards. We all want the same things – the health and safety of our students and our entire community.”
In the classroom, there was hardly a hair out of place when it came to social-distancing measures. Masked students sat in six-feet-apart desks, with some stopping at the hand sanitizer stations at the door as they entered. Smith took the class through the ordinariness of a normal first day, going through the syllabus, setting classroom expectations and encouraging a quiet class into hand-raising and participation. Smith’s class is a hybrid course, meaning they’ll meet in-person for part of the week and online for the rest.
John Olt, a freshmen finance major, left Smith’s socially distant class — his first-ever college course — with a positive impression. Olt said the class was “smooth.” He personally didn’t have any worries about exposure to COVID-19 in the class, in part because it’s the only course he has in-person this semester. Life in his dorm was “pretty simple,” Olt said. “A lot of people just stay inside.”
Custodians are cleaning public spaces more often, while employees have been given cleaning kits to clean their offices. Vosevich said the university lacks enough staff to clean classrooms between every class, but placed wipes in rooms for students to clean desks before sitting down.
When asked, Vosevich said she didn’t immediately know how much the university had spent on facilities changes in preparation for the semester.
“We don’t want to say that finances aren’t important to us, but finances came second for us,” Vosevich said. “The well-being of our campus community was our priority.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2020 at 1:40 PM.