What Are HBCUs Doing To Stay Safe for Re-opening?
Why Re-Opening is Hard for HBCUs in particular
During this pandemic, Morehouse College, one of the most reputable and well funded HBCUs, is predicting enrollment will drop 25 percent in the Fall of 2020. This has prompted furloughs, layoffs, and everything in between to manage labor costs. It can be hard to understate the kind of monetary help that HBCUs all across the US needed before the pandemic. So with COVID-19 slashing enrollment rates, HBCUs are looking to make coming back to school as appealing and safe..
Staying Remote
First and foremost it should be noted that out of an abundance of caution many HBCUs have elected to go all remote in the Fall. Spelman College, Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University have already made the pledge to go remote after the massive COVID-19 resurgence in their home state of Georgia. Outside of the south east, Colette Pierce Burnette, the president of Huston-Tillotson University, a small HBCU in Austin, Texas announced plans to go remote as well.
"We must have looked at over a dozen different scenarios — from being fully online to being fully on ground here on campus," Burnette told All Things Considered. "The students' health, the safety of our faculty, our staff, the people who work here, was paramount."
Hybrid Learning
Tuskegee University, located in rural Alabama, has a plan to open using a combination of in person and remote learning.Tuskegee University isn’t just going in blind and hoping everything goes well. They’ve prepared for this. Given their reputation as a research scientific institution, the university administration actually took great steps to aid in local COVID-19 testing and education.
Providing PPE
St. Augustine's University in North Carolina claims to not be having an enrollment problem and still plans to open its doors to new and returning students this Fall under the condition that there be distance in classrooms, hybrid learning, extended dining hall hours, and mandatory masks. This agenda seems well and good for now until the student affairs staff might be challenged with having mandatory masks in a dining hall for people who want to gather and congregate? Dining means taking the mask off. Taking the mask off means a greater risk of exposure to the virus.
Retha Ferguson via Pexels
What's Could be Problem with More PPE?
There is nothing wrong with providing PPE, but the need for it highlights the problem with pretty much every single plan to reopen schools, colleges, and businesses everywhere. Yes, wearing masks is a great way to limit the spread, hybrid learning is a great way to limit time in a single room, but the only other method proven to be more effective than both of those things is to keep people social distancing and at home. For some, there is no logic to reopening in any capacity beyond the fact that not reopening is tantamount to money left on the floor — money HBCUs didn’t have to start with.
While some schools are struggling to get students enrolled, Grambling State in Louisiana has almost sold out their male dorms and have totally sold out of their female dorms.
Despite the potential danger, many HBCU presidents feel like the only way to serve their students in totality is to reopen. While it may feel wrong to shut the students out, schools like Albany State University link are still weighing the options.“We have had students reach out to say, ‘My home life is not conducive to learning,”said Marion Fedrick the president of Albany S. “Some students are now taking care of siblings or others that they did not have to do while they were living on campus. Some of the environments that students went back to – we were the safe place, and we learned that quickly as we were asking students to move. We had students who just told us, ‘No, we’re not moving,’ and we told them, ‘Yes, you have to move, and move back home or wherever it is you go.’ ”
African-American deaths from COVID-19 are close to two times as high as they should be given the proportion of the population they make up. This has a lot to do with preexisting inequalities that stem from a lack of access to quality health care as well as the fact that Black people make up a disproportionate number of frontline workers. Those inequalities will invariably bleed into every level of our education system, and the stakes are simply too high for Black students. One Gallup-Purdue poll found that Black students at HBCUs were "significantly more likely to have felt supported while in college and to be thriving afterward than their black peers who graduated from predominantly white institutions."
What is does this all show? It shows that HBCUs are safe and positive spaces for Black students and that Black students are the ones who are disproportionally harmed by the COVID-19 crisis. When students return to HBCUs this Fall, there will surely be tails of loss and hardship. HBCUs have to be in a positron to address that no matter how they choose to open or not open.
*Article by Raz Robinson, journalist and freelance writer, based in New York City. Connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter @razrobinson or send an email to Rrob0904 (at) Gmail (dot) com.