The latest cancellation forced by the coronavirus pandemic: spring break for many Texas college students.
Baylor, Rice, and Texas A&M universities plan to eliminate spring break in 2021, opting to host off-days throughout the year or move to a condensed semester in hopes of preventing students from bringing the virus back to campus.
For these schools, allowing students a week to possibly travel just seems too risky. It’s the same reason why many colleges plan to send students home ahead of Thanksgiving and resume classes remotely this fall — to minimize travel and thus the spread of the virus.
“It’s not the greatest idea,” Baylor’s vice provost of undergraduate education Wesley Null said of permitting spring break.
Null, who leads Baylor’s academic planning, said the college will eliminate spring break and condense the semester calendar, instead incorporating a couple days off that were historically holidays. An incentive structure could be added for students to earn a day off, and officials are now considering how the college might safely host “Dia del Oso,” or the “Day of the Bear,” a traditional day of activities at Baylor.
Rice University will also eliminate spring break, instead starting their semester roughly two weeks earlier and implementing five “sprinkle days” that will be distributed throughout the semester as two long weekends and three set off-days that will fall on different days of the week.
“It’s giving students a break that we know they need” but without the worries that a week of a break or travel could bring, Rice Provost Reginald DesRoches said.
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Rice sophomore Emily Elison said there’s been a consensus on campus that canceling spring break makes sense. While it works to send students home before Thanksgiving toward the end of the fall semester, cutting classes after spring break in March, wouldn’t be as feasible and would cut a semester too short, she said.
“We are just grateful in general to have those days in there somewhere. This semester has been kind of difficult not having any real breaks anywhere,” Elison said. “This tries to kind of make the best of both worlds.”
But at Texas A&M University, where the college has reduced its week-long spring break to one day in March and has added Texas Independence Day as a holiday to allow the semester to start on time and end earlier, sentiments differ.
“In theory, I understand what they’re trying to do. They're trying to reduce travel … but in practicality, it’s going to be hard mentally on students. We’re just going to have to power through that semester,” said A&M junior Anaissa Diaz, 20, who said she would have likely used and needed a few days of rest.
“This semester is already hard as it is,” Diaz said. “To think of next semester, if we don’t have that semester break, it’s a little alarming.”
Elsewhere, colleges like University of St. Thomas in Houston are monitoring pandemic conditions on a daily basis, while others like University of Houston and University of Texas are both keeping their spring calendars as is, meaning so far, spring break remains in-tact.
“We do know that we don’t necessarily want people going away, partly because you may come into contact with other people,” said Art Markman, a professor of psychology and chair of the academic planning work group at UT. “We certainly don’t want that, and we don’t know what the situation will be.”
But with the spring semester typically a week longer than fall, Markman, who oversees academic planning at UT, said the administration knew a break would be important to give students some relief from work and long slog of the semester.
“To have no break at all would be pretty overwhelming,” Markman said, but even with a full week of consecutive days off, spring break at UT is bound to look a little different. Officials are now looking to plan fun or alternative activities, like concerts, during the week, in hopes of preserving some of the traditional feeling “without the invitation of doing things that might not be safe.”
At Houston Baptist University, the possible scrapping of spring break has led to some spirited conversations among students and staff, said James Steen, vice president for enrollment management. For officials, it’s been a difficult choice for those wanting to honor staff and faculty desires and keeping them safe. No decision has been made thus far, but the hope is that there will be some breakthroughs in vaccines by spring break, Steen said.
Already, pharmaceutical company Pfizer estimates it will have 50 million doses of its vaccine available globally by the end of 2020, enough to inoculate 25 million people with two doses each. The data, contained in a press release, suggested the company’s vaccine may be more than 90 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19.
But Steen also realizes there might be considerable spikes in the virus between now and then.
“We might have to make some hard decisions again and go fully remote,” Steen said, a transition between in-person to online that has been made easier thanks to new protocols and methods implemented for most schools during the pandemic.
“We’re prepared. If there is this subsequent spike or if cases get out of hand again, we’re definitely ready and prepared to flip that switch again if we have to,” Steen said.
Many other college campuses have similarly gained confidence in their abilities to manage their campuses amid the pandemic, and so their spring semesters will likely resemble the fall, with continued social distancing, required face coverings, courses offered in-person, online and dual or hybrid-delivery formats — but with slight modifications.
Both UT and Houston Community College, the latter which operated largely online, will likely up its in-person courses.
A&M will aim to host around 50 percent of courses face-to-face and allowing undergraduates to take at least two classes in-person.
Houston Baptist will continue to operate on an alternating schedule, with roughly half the campus attending courses on campus on Monday’s and Tuesdays, while the other half takes courses that are recorded online. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the campus will alternate, and on Fridays, the entire campus will conduct and attend classes remotely.
Rice will continue with its various formats of courses, but will up its in-person class size maximum from 25 to 40 people. Faculty again will get to choose how they want to teach, and the requirement on face coverings has been upgraded to require face masks specifically.
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Baylor is expected to see the number of students engaged in classes solely online drop from 1,400 to 1,000 out of 18,000 students total, according to Null.
As for the initial return early next year, many college are urging students to take precautions. UT will encourage students to get tested before they return and to limit their activities the week before and after they get back to campus, so as to avoid spreading a virus is infected.
‘We’ve surveyed our students … want and students would definitely have more face-to-face (classes),” said UH President Renu Khator. “We are hoping that the virus will stay contained, because that’s where everything starts.”
Null said no decisions have been made about whether Baylor students will be required to do pre-arrival testing this spring, as was required before the fall semester, but a two-step process is being considered, with would require students to get tested before they arrive and again 48-hours after arrival will be implemented. Positive cases will be isolated.
“All the signals are the winter is going to be the toughest time for the virus, particularly the December and January time frame,” he said.
“We’re always going to be ready if things flare up. If things get really bad, we are in the position to pull back and put that class completely online. We haven’t had to do that this fall,” said DesRoches, adding that students have been following protocol.
brittany.britto@chron.com
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