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Education Dive
As Thanksgiving break nears, colleges prepare to cut students loose
Hallie Busta
Nov. 10, 2020
Dive Brief:
Colleges across the country are preparing to send students home for
Thanksgiving break, but their plans are inconsistent, public health
experts say.
Many colleges will end in-person instruction before the holiday, though
others intend to welcome students back to finish the term and are
beginning to set expectations around coming and going from campus.
Public health experts advise quarantines, coronavirus tests and flu shots for students headed home.
Dive Insight:
The American College Health Association offered several recommendations
for institutions and students in guidance posted late last month —
including that colleges hosting in-person classes after Thanksgiving
encourage students to remain on campus for the holiday.
"One important strategy for these campuses to consider is to actively
discourage students from traveling over the Thanksgiving break and
encourage students to have a virtual Thanksgiving event with family
members instead," it states.
Boston University is among the colleges heeding that advice. In a
mid-October message to students, school officials encouraged them to
"stick around." Students who leave campus for Thanksgiving will be
asked to finish the term remotely. Students at nearby Tufts University
who leave campus for the break will generally have to do the same.
"It doesn't matter whether you're going off-campus to go 300 miles home
or ... into town to have Thanksgiving with a family friend," said A.
David Paltiel, a public health professor at Yale University. "It's not
the distance you're going, it's the fact that you're exposing yourself
and everybody back on campus to a risk."
Paltiel advises that colleges sending students home follow the best
practices for bringing them to campus this fall, including a return to
quarantine and coronavirus testing. Paltiel, along with ACHA, also
recommends students get a flu shot.
Testing all students for the virus, not just those with symptoms, has
been encouraged ahead of the break. ACHA instructs colleges to be ready
to provide housing and services to students who are sick or have been
exposed to the virus and thus need to delay their trip home.
"It's really been no mystery that we were likely to see a surge in
infections right around this time of year anyway, and that COVID would
become more difficult to control as the fall and winter came on," said
Stephen Kissler, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's school
of public health.
Keeping students home after Thanksgiving is a "pretty sensible
strategy," and one that some schools have also implemented, Kissler
said.
Paul Niekamp, an economics professor at Ball State University who
studied coronavirus spread from students' spring break travel,
recommended in an email that colleges advise students to self-isolate
or stay away from high-risk family members once they are home. He
echoed Kissler in suggesting that ending in-person instruction at
Thanksgiving could help limit virus spread.
Still, colleges' protocols around coronavirus safety vary. And it's
hard to measure whether students are following them, said Annette
Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and
Healthy Schools. More discussion of best practices among colleges for
sending students home for break could help, she noted.
Sending students home also will require additional testing and
containment efforts upon their return. "After the holiday break you're
going to bring all these students back again and you won't have been
able to contain much of the exposure," she said.
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