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All three main campuses in the Contra Costa Community College District reopened this week following the winter break, continuing to offer the option of in-person learning and amenities to students amidst the emergence of the omicron variant that took hold over prior to the start of the term.
The spring semester kicked off on Monday (Jan. 24) with a combination of online, hybrid and in-person classes, and Diablo Valley, Contra Costa and Los Medanos colleges opened their doors for students electing to study in person.
“I think we’re pretty good at this point at creating a safe environment,” said Jeffrey Michels, executive director of United Faculty at the district. “We have medical-grade masks, more N95 masks, the vaccine requirement in our district … It really depends on one’s comfort level and risk tolerance. I think for a number of faculty and students and staff, these measures feel pretty safe and we don’t feel like it’s a high-risk environment.”
Prior to the emergence of omicron, the district had already announced a vaccine requirement, approved by the governing board on Sept. 8 last year, and in effect as of Nov. 1, as well as protocols for staff, students and faculty to check for symptoms before coming to campuses.
Ventilation and air filtration technology have also been upgraded throughout campuses in the district. In addition to having these measures in place, district officials pointed to the need to offer in-person classes and campus facilities to students who need them, and raised concerns about declining enrollment since the start of the pandemic.
“I have received feedback from the community asking questions about what are you doing with omicron, are you delaying opening in-person, are you going to go back all online? And my initial instinct, particularly with our vaccine mandate, is to try to avoid going back all online, because we know there is a portion of our student population that we will just lose,” Trustee Rebecca Barrett said at the board’s most recent meeting on Jan. 12.
Barrett noted, however, that serving students needed to be balanced with public health measures, and said she’d come to be concerned that community colleges were being left out of state- and countywide efforts, pointing to the distribution of free testing kits to K-12 districts statewide ahead of the return from winter break, yet not to community colleges, as an example.
CCCCD campuses are able to offer on-site testing, which is particularly important at a time when at-home tests are hard to come by, and as residents wait to see the benefits of measures meant to mitigate this issue at the national scale, such as free tests being sent to households and the new requirement that health insurers offer reimbursement for at-home tests. However, testing options remain limited to certain hours, making testing a continued challenge for community college students with a wide range of schedules and lifestyles.
Student trustee Austin Green said that while he was personally excited to return to campus this week, he called on district officials to prioritize safety in order to make in-person learning productive and possible in the pandemic.
“Any measure we can take to provide an experience where students don’t have to sit and worry about getting COVID, where they can sit and learn, I’m glad,” Green said on Jan. 12.
While lauding the district’s safety precautions and prioritization on campuses, Michels acknowledged that not everyone was comfortable returning to campus.
He noted that for his part, he had decided to flip his hybrid class from “in-person with online options” to “online with in-person” in light of the omicron wave, and that he planned to stay entirely online the first two weeks of classes. Other classes in his English department were adjusted as well, given the most recent pandemic developments.
“We wound up converting some in-person classes to online, and I think we will wind up with a larger late start schedule than usual where we’ll offer some eight- and 12-week classes,” Michels said.
Michels said that what United Faculty members wanted from the district wasn’t all online classes or all in-person classes, but flexibility to be nimble in adapting to the latest developments in the pandemic, and the needs of their students.
Despite the loss of enrollment the district faced with campus shutdowns and fully remote teaching earlier in the pandemic, Michels said that online and hybrid classes had come to be more popular than in-person classes, particularly this semester, as students grappled with uncertainty over the omicron variant during registration.
For faculty teaching in person this semester, whose classes are generally canceled if not enough students are enrolled, this has proven to be a challenge, sometimes leading to an abrupt loss of employment and benefits.
“I had a 14-year faculty member write me today very angrily,” Michels said. “He was signed up to teach three classes; all three were canceled. It’s very frustrating because again, in some departments there have been alternate assignments or late starting classes, but there are areas where people are definitely losing jobs, and that’s hard.”
As it stands, Michels said faculty are being asked to start planning their schedules for summer and fall in the coming months, and deciding whether they would like to teach in person, effectively “guessing about student demand.”
Michels added that while pandemic shutdowns and online teaching have not been easy for faculty, they have risen to the occasion, and online pedagogy has come a long way from the abrupt, early days of remote learning.
“I don’t think we got the word out as well as we could have about how good we are at online instruction,” Michels said. “A vast majority of faculty have now had specialized training in online pedagogy. We have laptops students can borrow; at Contra Costa College we have high-speed internet access; we can get you a year of free Comcast.”
Nonetheless, Michels added that “it would really be nice to be making pedagogical choices instead of choices driven by the pandemic.”
While he said he continued to miss the sense of community that being on campus with students was able to foster, Michels also noted that there were unexpected bright sides to online and hybrid learning that he hadn’t expected.
Despite omicron, challenges within the district, and years of teaching, Michels said he was still excited to meet his students on the first day of his film class this semester.
“Teaching is always inspiring, and the start of the semester is always very exciting, for all the stuff that’s going on and all the politics … but when you get to see the students it’s always energizing,” Michels said. “That keeps you going.”
