App State faces pressure to pivot as COVID-19 cases spike. But is that the right move?
COVID-19 cases are spiking and new clusters are being reported in dorms at Appalachian State University, where a 19-year-old student recently died due to coronavirus complications.
Some faculty and students are asking the Boone university to pivot to online-only instruction and close dorms, as other universities like UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State have done. But others say that won’t fix the problem at Appalachian — and could actually make things worse.
“What App State should definitely not do is send everybody home,” said Chris Marsicano, assistant professor of higher ed and director of the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College. His research looks at the spread of COVID-19 at and around college campuses, as well as how universities have responded to the pandemic.
“Any time you are moving people from one place to another, the greater the likelihood you spread the disease,” Marsicano said.
He said if he were App State Chancellor Sheri Everts, he would worry about sending students home to small, rural counties that do not have the medical facilities to deal with this. Instead, Marsicano suggested putting classes online for two weeks and limiting traffic to and from campus to help curb the spread.
“Take this pause, hope case counts go down and then reevaluate as you get close to the end of the semester,” he said.
Off-campus spread in COVID-19 cases
App State reported more than 220 active cases among students and employees this week and 18 active clusters in residence halls, at fraternity and sorority houses and within athletics teams. Four new clusters were announced Thursday and seven were announced last week. App State also announced four new positive cases associated with the active cluster on the football team. The university has canceled athletics events, including a football game, and added free pop-up COVID-19 testing sites in response to the recent rise
Moss Brennan, a senior at App State, said the spread is happening off campus, where hundreds of students are still going to parties at apartment complexes and Greek Life houses. Popular bars still attract crowds and students still tailgate for sporting events, he said.
Shutting down residence halls would stop those cases, but Brennan doesn’t think that alone would keep the overall coronavirus numbers from rising in Watauga County, home of Boone.
“It’s up to us as students to not party, to wear a mask, to not hangout with large numbers of people,” he said. “If students at App State did that, I think that we would be in a lot better place than we are now.”
The number of COVID-19 cases on campus has been exponentially increasing in the past couple of weeks, with dozens of new cases reported daily and nearly 50 new cases one day, according to App State’s COVID-19 dashboard. So far, the university is using less than 30% of its available space for isolation and quarantine rooms, which are in hotels off campus.
Watagua County cases continue to rise, with the largest percentage of cases in the 18-24 age group, according to the local health officials.
“As our case numbers have gone up and up, we’re just sticking to the same old plan,” said Quinn Morris, an assistant professor of mathematical sciences.
He and his wife are both faculty members at App State and they have a 6-month-old daughter, which makes working from home difficult. He said he goes to campus sometimes for a quiet space to work. He checks the COVID-19 dashboard every morning, and trips to campus get scarier as he sees the numbers continuously going up, he said.
Though Morris said students don’t seem to be safe right now on campus, he said, they could be sent home to a situation that’s not good either, particularly for a student who has a difficult home life or will struggle with internet access.
“I don’t envy anyone who’s in the decision making position,” Morris said, “but I think we’re at the point where we have to admit that what we’re doing right now isn’t working and we’ve got to try something else.”
Testing more students needs to be part of that action, Morris said. It’s expensive, he acknowledged, but it would be better than not testing and not knowing how many cases there are.
“I understand it’s not easy, but if students’ lives are on the line it seems like something that we ought to be pursuing with every fiber of our being,” he said.
In a recent message to the campus community, Everts said she and her team have considered doing more targeted testing on campus and at off-campus apartment complexes with high student populations. Of App State’s more than 20,000 students, about three-fourths live off campus.
The university is working with local law enforcement to monitor and respond to off-campus gatherings. Students who are not following local ordinances and campus policies could also face disciplinary action through the student conduct process.
“We need better compliance with wearing face coverings off campus, adhering to quarantine and isolation instructions, and answering contact tracing calls from public health,” Everts said.
Pressure to pivot online
Faculty at App State have been concerned about campus re-opening with in-person classes and students living on campus since the summer. They feared the plans would backfire and cases would spike.
Most students are taking classes remotely, with just about 20% of classes are in-person. Classrooms are set up for physical distancing, and the spaces are regularly sanitized. Face masks are required on campus.
But as the situation worsened this fall, professors started an online petition asking administrators to pivot to fully online learning for the rest of the fall semester, as UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State University and East Carolina University did in August.
Hundreds of people have signed the petition, which says the university’s approach to the pandemic is “not working and is in fact, endangering the entire town of Boone.”
Chloe Dorin, a graduate student and teaching assistant, wrote a letter to Everts and the university Board of Trustees expressing her concerns about the growing outbreak and what she viewed as a lack of action after student Chad Dorrill, an athletic 19-year-old, died of complications related to the virus last month.
Dorin outlined four steps the university should take:
▪ moving classes online.
▪ suspending athletics programs for the 2020-21 seasons.
▪ temporarily disbanding Greek Life organizations.
▪ closing all dormitories and providing alternative living arrangements for students who need it.
“They need to work to curb the spread, immediately, while there’s still the opportunity to do so,” Dorin said.
Since posting the letter on Facebook, Dorin said she’s received an outpouring of messages from students looking for some kind of help or leadership.
“They’re scared,” Dorin said. “They see what’s happening, and they’re very afraid because they don’t feel like anyone is listening to them.”
Asked about considering the move to online classes, university spokesperson Megan Hayes said there’s no playbook for a global pandemic. She said university leaders are meeting daily with local public health officials, as well as UNC System leaders, to review data and discuss what next steps might be most effective.
“The majority of our students are learning in hybrid or fully remote formats and to date, we have no confirmed cases of classroom transmission,” Hayes said. “We are watching very closely the numbers of clusters, which includes, cumulative and active cases, in residence halls.”
Will students heed ‘wake-up call’?
Jackie Park, a senior from Charlotte, said Chad Dorrill’s death could have a bigger impact on how students act, particularly off campus.
“I think a lot of people are just kind of really sad or scared,” Park said. “For some it may have been kind of a wake-up call like ‘oh this can happen.’ ... That could be any one of us, just by chance.”
Park said she has been limiting the people she sees, is getting tested regularly and is taking precautions to stay safe. She said she would stay in Boone if classes moved online and campus operations changed.
And she thinks most students would do the same.
“Why take 20,000 people and send them across the state while maybe they’re infected with COVID-19 and spread it to wherever they are,” Park said.
Sarah Carmichael, an App State professor of geological and environmental sciences, said while some other professors and friends really want the university to go fully online and close dorms, she just doesn’t see that it would fix anything.
Carmichael said it was horrible when students were sent home and classes went online without much warning last spring. Some students didn’t have access to internet or had to care for siblings or cousins back home, she said. Others lost campus jobs and had to find work at businesses that weren’t flexible with students’ class schedules.
“The main concern I have about sending students home is what situations they are going back to,” Carmichael said. “Forcing everybody out just seems really full of inequality.“
There’s just not that much the university can do at this point to stop the spread of the virus off campus, Carmichael said.
“No matter what they do, they’re in a no-win situation,” she said.
The two-week switch idea
Marsicano, the Davidson researcher, said what Appalachian leaders need now are “time and options.” A two-week switch to online only would offer that, he said, while keeping students nearby with the promise of reopening again.
“Having people on campus at all or classes on campus at all draws students to the campus and then sends them back out into the community,” Marsicano said. “Just by pausing in-person instruction, you are limiting mobility.”
The university can take the pause, hope case counts go down and then reevaluate as it gets closer to the end of the semester, he said. At other universities, including the University of Notre Dame, a temporary switch to online education has started reducing the number of cases.
A two-week switch is the best tool universities have right now, even if they don’t know how effective it’ll be, Marsicano said. It also acts like a two-week quarantine for students, which lowers the likelihood of them contracting the disease themselves, he added.
“At that point you can be more sure that you’re not going to create a super-spreader event just by sending students home.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 11:32 AM.
