Education |

Colorado College shifts to remote learning after dorms placed under COVID-19 quarantine

Colorado College is switching to remote learning and asking on-campus students to leave after a dozen positive COVID-19 cases led the school to quarantine its freshman dorms for two weeks, the school’s leaders announced Tuesday.

The private Colorado Springs college, which enrolls about 2,200 students, is the first higher-education institution in the state to switch to remote operations after reopening its campus to in-person learning in the midst of the pandemic.

But the college is largely placing the blame for its about-face on El Paso County Public Health, which school officials said is behind the stringent quarantine guidelines that left 155 freshmen stuck inside their dorm rooms for two weeks last month after a single positive COVID-19 case was confirmed on campus.

Over the weekend, the school’s other two dorms were placed on quarantine, too, after 10 more student infections were confirmed.

El Paso County health officials did not return an interview request Tuesday.

“Despite our rigorous and successful testing, retesting and response protocol, and our low incidence of positive cases, the El Paso County Public Health Department has required us to quarantine entire residence halls. The department tells us to expect rolling waves of large quarantines going forward,” acting co-presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore wrote in a letter to the campus community. “The residential liberal arts experience is a special element of life at CC, but we can’t offer a quality residential experience to our students under these circumstances.”

The college, which has about 800 students living on campus, uses a block system for classes, so all Block 1 classes will now move to remote instruction, with most courses staying that way for the remainder of the fall semester, school officials said. Colleges leaders said they hope a limited number of students will be able to take in-person or hybrid fall courses later in the semester, depending on their degree.

On-campus students are expected to move out of their dorms by Sept. 20, unless they are already enrolled in one of the few in-person or hybrid courses the college was providing. International students and those with “dire need” can continue living on campus, officials said.

Brian Young, Colorado College’s vice president for informational technology and a member of the college’s COVID response team, said even though the school had contract tracing in place and other COVID-19 protocols under control, El Paso County had its own directives to quarantine students.

Colorado College allowed students to move into their dorms before their COVID-19 tests results had come back, Young said. Students were told to practice social distancing while waiting for their test results to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Conversely, the University of Colorado Boulder — the largest college in the state — rapid-tested students living on campus before clearing them to move in, so those who tested positive could be quarantined in separate housing facilities before mixing with other students in large dorm settings. CU Boulder reports 15 positive student cases since classes began.

When asked what went wrong this semester, Young said Colorado College will take this time to work with public health officials to come to a better understanding of their guidelines moving forward.

“I think part of what we’re hoping to do is to be able to sit and review the directives from our local county health group and sort of understand the thinking and the strategies that they asked us to employ,” Young said. “This already wasn’t going to be a college experience that you and I probably remember from when we went to college, so I want to work with our partners here to really understand what are the thresholds so we can work with them within the guidance so that these types of recommendations don’t continue.”

In total, 11 students living on campus and one staff member have tested positive for the contagious respiratory illness since move-in began on Aug. 14, said Leslie Weddell, spokeswoman for Colorado College.

Right as the first two-week quarantine was ending for residents of Loomis Hall, 10 more students tested positive for the coronavirus last week, leading the college on Saturday to place South and Mathias halls on two-week quarantines at the behest of El Paso County Public Health and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, according to the school.

Martha Shoultz said her Colorado College freshman son was too worked up to talk about the situation, which has caused him and his family to bounce back and forth between their Texas home and Colorado Springs multiple times in recent weeks as they navigated the quarantine and, now, the switch to remote learning.

Shoultz dropped her son off at the school on Aug. 16 and took him back home to Dallas, Texas, the next morning after the family found out he would be under quarantine.

“I didn’t want him sitting alone in a 90-degree room without any exercise time getting meals delivered to him three times a day from someone in a hazmat suit,” Shoultz said. “I think even in prison they get air conditioning and in prison they get exercise time. This was literally worse than prison.”

The Shoultz family returned to Colorado College on Saturday, soon learning more dorms were under quarantine. Shoultz returned to Texas on Sunday, and days later learned the whole campus was headed for remote learning with students being asked to leave campus.

“These poor kids have been through so much and now this is their college experience,” Shoultz said. “These kids lost their senior year and still were just trying to get over that. Now this.”

During a Tuesday news conference, Gov. Jared Polis addressed the situation, saying he believes Colorado College moving to remote learning exemplifies the importance of cohorting — a practice some universities are implementing so that the same group of students can live and learn together and, hopefully, reduce virus spread.

“When cohorting is done well and someone contracts the virus, ideally you shouldn’t have to shut everything down,” Polis said. “All of our colleges, CSU Pueblo, CU Colorado Springs, other colleges, have real thoughtful processes, including testing, including making sure we can contain it with as few infections as possible.”

Mati Pitkanen, the mother of a Colorado College freshman whose dorm was placed under quarantine Saturday, said she was glad the college at least tried to bring students back, but frustrated that county health officials recommended such strict quarantine policies.

“The quarantine is a bit of an overreaction, I think, as far as who is to quarantine,” Pitkanen said. “They’re quarantining entire dorms over 10 cases. I’m not worried about the 10 cases. I’m heartbroken because my daughter wants to stay, and we want her to stay. I think they will get to go back in January. That’s all we can hope for.”

Updated 4:30 p.m. Sept. 2, 2020 This story was updated to clarify that Colorado College’s freshman dorms, but not all of the school’s residential options, were placed under quarantine.