"Now imagine 20,000 students back on our campus. Or half that. Or a quarter...."

Saddleback staff and faculty get a letter which includes a vision of the future...



May 1, 2020 | Saddleback College

Happy May, everyone!

There has been a loud drumbeat in the air this week for returning to normal. The economy is in tatters. 30 million people are newly unemployed. Many of us are feeling housebound. We’re sick of the new normal. We crave the old normal.

Some of our students are frustrated and struggling with online learning. They want to come back to our campus. Many of our faculty are frustrated and are still working like crazy to adapt to online teaching. They, too, want to come back to real classrooms. I hear it.

Our college’s Emergency Operations Policy Team has been discussing how to create a pathway back to normal (or our improved normal!). But bear in mind that we have no decision-making authority until criteria have been fulfilled for the lifting of restrictions at the State, County and District levels. Among the criteria still to be fulfilled:

(1) Increased testing so that public health officials can identify the patients that need to be traced, tracked, treated and isolated. Right now, we’re confirming only a fraction of all cases; so we don’t know where the dangers lurk around us, making social contact without distancing very risky. 60,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 and a million have tested positive. That would suggest a death rate of 6%, which we know is not true. If the death rate is really between 1 and 2%, this means that the number of cases should be closer to 3-6 million. (Most think the real number is bigger than that.) We cannot bring back thousands of students to campus if most people with Covid-19 still aren’t even tested.

(2) Reduce the transmission of disease to the point where the people infected, on average, infect less than one person each, such that the “curve” descends steadily and to the point where we have enough public health officials to trace, track and isolate all who become ill. Despite the drumbeat for getting people back to work, we have barely started to descend the curve at this point, and the rate of descent is much slower than our climb up to this plateau. (Flattening the curve lessens the severity of the peak but actually extends the time it takes to descend to levels that can be “contained” rather than “mitigated.”) If mitigation measures are lifted before the incidence of disease is low enough to contain, we will see another surge, potentially worse than the first.

This week, Governor Newsom drew the very rough outline of a 4-stage pathway back to normal for Californians. In the second stage, which he said was close at hand, he indicated that more offices might open and consideration could be given to opening schools, perhaps in July. But there’s a whole lot still missing from this broad outline, and some may be interpreting his statements, shall we say, a bit optimistically. More specifically, Governor Newsom said that those additional offices which might open are those in which “telecommuting isn’t possible.” And his “schools” reference was not likely intended for higher ed, but rather for lower and middle grades in K-12, where distance learning isn’t working well and isn’t practical for the long haul.

If and when the Governor does lift restrictions on colleges, and assuming the State and District follow suit, we will make decisions about Saddleback’s phased return to normal based on “internal” goals/criteria, set out by the policy team and intended to be utilized in our Covid-19 response planning:

(1) Preventing Covid-19 transmission on our campus, and, more broadly, protecting the physical safety and well-being of our students and employees (read: social distancing);

(2) Maintaining psychological well-being and wellness of our students and employees (not creating high risk environments that generate anxiety);

(3) Learning continuity (with integrity) for all students (so that learning outcomes can be achieved, including those that require hands-on activity for which virtual experiences cannot be substituted);

(4) Student achievement and completion (because we don’t want our response to this crisis to reverse the progress we’re making in helping more students reach their goals);

(5) Equitable access and achievement for all students (because we don’t stop looking at our work through an equity lens just because we’re in crisis mode).

Accordingly, with the assumption that State, County and District restrictions on our ability to return to campus are lifted in the next few months as we reach containable levels of disease and are testing sufficient numbers in the population, we view fall semester as the earliest time at which we might bring back students--but in numbers that will permit social distancing.

Our students and some of you will ask: If and when authorities lift restrictions on campus, why wouldn’t we bring back all who want to resume on-ground learning? (Perhaps some schools will do so or at least publish fall schedules that suggest that they intend to do so.) To answer this question, I ask you to think about (and start to picture) how we will facilitate social distancing when we bring students back to campus.

Right now you’re visualizing a classroom with the desks set farther apart than normal. That’s the visual that most people conjure.

But now think about how you’re going to get these students in and out of this classroom through a common door. How will you get them through the halls, in and out of bathrooms, and through doors to the building?

Think about how your local grocery store has set up waiting areas and one-way aisles and limits traffic in the store. Picture all that red adhesive tape. And that’s to bring 20 people into a Trader Joe’s! Now do it with--let’s start small--just a couple hundred students (say a half dozen classes) in one building. That’s a lot of red adhesive tape and staff needed to direct traffic.

Now imagine 20,000 students back on our campus. Or half that. Or a quarter. Picture the walkways, the quad, the halls and offices in the SSC, gatherings of students in halls, waiting for classes to start while another group tries to leave. We’re still social distancing in your vision, right?

We will not be bringing 20,000 students back to our campus this fall. Nor 10,000. Nor 5,000. Because we cannot do so without compromising safety and running the risk of creating a nidus of infection in our community. Because we cannot do so without creating anxiety in all who have direct contact with our students, faculty in particular. Because we cannot achieve learning continuity or ensure student achievement and equity if we force fearful students to miss class to avoid a health risk to themselves, or to those with whom they live or care for.

What we will try is to bring back students for applied learning that needs to happen on campus because of certification requirements or because special equipment is required or because fulfillment of learning outcomes cannot otherwise be achieved virtually.

We will also try to create options for students and faculty who would want to come back if conditions improved faster than we expect. We hope to build some of our online classes with schedules for synchronous learning sessions, so that if students enrolled in these classes receive word that they are moving to on-ground from online, they would already have a class schedule that would not conflict with other classes on their schedule.

Conversely, we will all be ready to clear students back out and step back, once again, if conditions in our community worsen or if we have an outbreak on our campus. All of our on-campus hands-on learning experiences are being planned and scheduled in such a way that would allow us to start them late or end them early if conditions worsened. And it is easier to move 1-2000 or so students back online, once again, than it is to move 20,000, as you recall.

I have spoken of this broad vision for fall semester before, and I will speak of it again. And each time I do, I know that there will be some who will hear it and question whether we are being too cautious in not planning to bring more students back in fall; and I know that there will be some who will question whether we should have any students back if we were able to get through this semester without doing so.

I will remind the latter group that we cannot achieve all student learning outcomes in all courses or obtain certifications through virtual environments. I will remind the former group that we will do our part, in service of our community, to rebuild our local economy and retrain workers for re-employment; but we will not sacrifice the health and safety of our students or our employees to re-open sooner or at a faster pace. We can be a strong nidus for economic growth in our community only if we do not let ourselves become a nidus of infection.

We are Saddleback. We are an aggregate of beautiful faces, brilliant minds and giant hearts filled with love for learning and students. We collaborate. We think critically. We use data and science in our decision-making. We will return to normal the right way, along the right timeline, for all the right reasons. We got this.

Elliot