COVID-19: On-Campus During a Pandemic

As any non-essential business closes down, resturuants remain open in New York City for deliveries. Check out more photos of New York City at the time of COVID-19 here. || Photo credit to Bethany Johnson.

As students packed up and headed home for the semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some students stayed behind. The King’s College reported that around 40 students are still on campus, while New York’s death rate is the highest in the United States.

“At least in Greenwich, you know, you have people here,” said Hannah Sarenpa, a student living at DeVos. “Whereas I feel like if you were in any of the other Manhattan housing you would have been a lot more isolated.” 

Students were notified by the school on March 13 about the switch to online classes for the rest of the semester, following Spring Break. The Center for Disease Control recently announced that it is highly recommended to wear a cloth face mask in all public settings to slow the spread of the virus. Upon this news, one student decided to head home to Foxborough, Mass. 

“It started out pretty good because we could still hang out with each other, go outside like things weren't totally closed but then they [the CDC] were like, ‘You guys shouldn't be hanging out with each other, you can't go out for walks together. If you're going to go outside. You have to wear a mask,’” said Glory McCoy, who returned to Mass. last week. “I feel like at that point, I was like, ‘Oh I don't like being here anymore.’ Now I'm just like completely secluded … it kind of started to be really crappy after that. So I came home.” 

New York University made it a requirement for all students to move out of their on-campus housing within 48 hours of their announcement. Anything the students could not take with them, they were required to box up so that the school could ship it to them. NYU also announced that room and board costs will be pro-rated for the remainder of the semester for all students leaving campus. 

The school addressed this concern in an email to the EST, describing how there is a distinction between remote instruction and online instruction. 

“Our remote instruction is attempting to combine the best of synchronous (real-time) instruction and asynchronous methods to bear on finishing courses this semester successfully,” said Dr. Mark Hiljeh, Provost. “So the King's faculty are creating new value by bringing these elements together in new ways in this moment. They are building on the traditional face-to-face instruction from the first half of the semester, which is a documented way to add more value when instructional modalities must shift, as they have now. Like our peer schools, we are not issuing tuition refunds because of the outstanding work faculty are doing to continue to preserve and to add value as the semester comes to a conclusion. For King's this only highlights the excellence and commitment of our faculty, which is the real value of our instruction.”

Some students are in situations where it is not recommended for them to return home. Ford, a freshman at King’s, has decided to stay in New York City because her family is in the medical field. 

“My family's all medical workers, so if I go home, I would also be isolated and quarantined because my family's coming back to and from the hospital,” Ford said. “So I'd much rather be bored in New York City than be bored in Florida.” 

Ford’s mother is an anesthesiologist and since they canceled all elective surgeries and Ford’s family still has to make money, Ford’s mother is now helping with the Coronavirus. She's going to come up to New York because Ford says New York “really needs health care workers.”

With Ford’s mother, grandmother and stepdad working in the medical field in Florida, she believes she would be more likely to come in contact with the virus at home than in New York. 

Megan Lassiter, the Housing Director in the Financial District, said that DeVos housing has a member of facilities coming in daily. The other student housing locations, such as Albee Square and West, have their own cleaning services.

“They wipe down all public surfaces: elevator buttons, individual room handles, front door handles, etc.,” Lassiter said in an email to EST. “Take out trash, mop, and dust. We also have a hand sanitizer station at the front desk. I imagine that the other buildings are doing the exact same thing.” 

Some students have shared fear that the school is making a mistake by allowing students to stay in on-campus housing while COVID-19 spreads through the city. 

“I have been confused why King’s didn’t make students go home,” said Darian Huxtable, a student that left DeVos the day after school went fully online for the rest of the semester. “There seems to be no precaution set in place. But their reasoning for letting students stay on campus was that they ‘gave students a choice.’ Which really shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

The Dean of Students, David Leedy, remarked that there are two reasons why the college chose not to close campus housing altogether.

“First, unlike dormitories with shared bathrooms and dining halls where viruses spread quickly, all King’s housing units are apartments with private restrooms and kitchens. This arrangement allows residents to control who comes and goes and to keep their spaces sanitized,” Leedy said in an email to the EST. “Second, a number of students were unable to leave campus housing for various reasons; we wanted to keep housing open for them. Thus, since King’s housing remains open and accessible to students, the College has not refunded the housing fees for the Spring 2020 semester. A number of larger universities, at Governor Cuomo’s request, closed their dormitories in order to convert them to temporary hospitals. Because most of our housing consists of apartments in luxury rental buildings, King’s could not do this.” 

Park Slope Whole Foods experienced low stock on fresh vegetables and fruits. || Photo credit to Jonathan Rothermel.

Leedy also added that there is a resource for students at the college called the Community Fund. This fun is to assist students with immediate financial hardships. This fund provides short-term relief for students who rely on income from jobs or services that have been lost or suspended as a result of COVID-19. Students may submit an appeal for short-term essential needs (groceries, rent assistance, emergency transportation, etc.).

New Yorkers, making up a population of around 8.7 million according to the United State Census Bureau, have been posting on Twitter revealing the low stock of food, toilet paper and other essentials at grocery stores. Students are still able to go shopping for food despite the situation.

“Grocery shopping wasn't bad,” McCoy said. “ I just walked to Target and then I wait in the line. Trying to order groceries online, which is what I usually did, is nearly impossible. At midnight I would put my order through and Whole Foods so I could get a delivery for like two days from then.” 

Another New York essential is the subway, which Ford is still able to use when she goes grocery shopping. The subway is notably empty, she says, so she often gets an entire cart to herself. Certain stations of the subway are no longer making people pay to get through the turnstile, sometimes the door is left open, Ford said. 

With college classes suddenly moving online in the time of COVID-19, these new virtual classrooms are a struggle for some students. 

Packaged meat was another low-supply item at the Park Slope Whole Foods. || Photo credit to Jonathan Rothermel.

“I have no motivation to do anything,” Ford said. “I think we've gotten so good at making ourselves a school because King's is just so academically rigorous and they say with academics you have to have school-time and home-time and those are very much, I think, spatially differentiated. Now that I'm home or like in my apartment, I'm not in the headspace to do school at all.”

At King’s, students have a variety of different new online teaching techniques. Some classes are a simple pre-recorded lecture with slides, others are lectures on Schoology or Zoom and some are trying to recreate the discussion-based classes. At the beginning, some classes were not meeting online at all and students had to read and take quizzes on their own. 

“I don't mind Zoom. I don't like the Schoology one because you can't see anybody unless they make you a Presenter. It was kind of a bummer knowing that I still to pay the on-campus prices for an online school,” McCoy said. Ford shared the same sentiment and added that it is a “big shame that we're paying so much ... Many students come to King's because of our Socratic classroom style and it's a big shame that we're not getting that through Zoom lectures.” 

Students have voiced their concerns about having more work to do than before, such as extra writing assignments or quizzes, in order to recreate an in-class assignment. However, Ford believes the school is something she is not really focused on right now. 

“Especially with all that's going on at home, my main concern now is not all The King's College,” Ford said. “So it's really, really hard to do classes now. I love my professors so much. The only time I cried was because I miss my professors.” 

These students in New York housing are in the middle of the state that has the highest COVID-19 death count in the United States. The state continues to have four times more than the next state with the highest count, their neighbor, New Jersey. In total, as of early Saturday, the novel coronavirus has taken more than 8,600 lives in New York, Cuomo said. New York is flattening the curve, but the state still lost 783 lives on April 11, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at his daily news briefing on Saturday. That marks the fifth straight day of more than 700 deaths per day.

"These are just incredible numbers, depicting incredible loss and pain," Cuomo said.

Sarenpa shares that she is sentimental for the energy she used to feel in the city: “I keep thinking the last time I walked through this area, you know, it was bustling. There was tourists everywhere. So it's just like when you walk by familiar places, you're like, this is supposed to be energetic. And this, you know, like energy of the city is just gone. Like, it's just so it's so weird.” 

Immersed in the negative reality of the city, the students are still finding some ways to remain positive. Ford noticed that New Yorkers are coming together and helping each other out, more so than before.

“In the daytime, there's such a sense of camaraderie among New Yorkers. Like my grocery bag fell open and this lady just gave me her nice grocery bag and it's like stuff like that. Or people who are homeless, what they actually do is they actually open all the doors for you so you don't touch it. And if you want to buy them something, they'll open all the doors for you,” Ford said.

Regardless, people find it difficult to be positive all the time, especially when they are unsure about when the epidemic will end.  

“In some ways, I'm positive, but at the same time, I don't feel like everything is just going to pop back to normal right away like people are still going to be super fearful,” Sarenpa said. “We're going to hear about, still be hearing about, you know, these sprinkling of cases like it's not going to go away overnight.”

Ford, who sees the medical perspective, feels more negative about how this might play out for everyone in the city.

“New York is having to choose who gets a ventilator and who doesn't,” Ford said. “I feel pretty negative about the situation because we don't have medical professionals and we're not equipping our medical professionals …  It made me really lean into God a lot more because you cannot get through this without believing in a higher power that is good and that is in your life, that is wanting the best for you. No matter what happens, God's plan is what's going to play out.” 

“At least in Greenwich, you know, you have people here. Whereas I feel like if you were in any of the other Manhattan housing you would have been a lot more isolated.” 

- Hannah Sarenpa

Despite how isolating the situation can be for those living in other student housing locations, Jolie Richardson finds community in hearing the 7:00 p.m. clapping every evening for essential workers facing the pandemic. 

“It is a nice reminder to stop doing homework, playing video games, making dinner and clap along,”  Richardson said.