A key to Vermont colleges’ mostly-successful reopenings this fall was an altered semester schedule that officials credit for curbing infection numbers: Campuses eliminated pre-Thanksgiving breaks, and sent students home early — just before Vermont’s second Covid-19 wave struck.
However, the truncated schedule, and the campus case counts it helped keep low — in stark contrast to colleges elsewhere in the country — came at a cost.
Students and professors alike felt burned out by semester’s end, pushed to their limits by having to adapt to pandemic-friendly learning methods while coping with universal pandemic anxieties. Before Thanksgiving, break days this fall were few and far between, as colleges sought to capitalize on face-to-face learning time before students were sent home to finish finals remotely.
“We’re really happy with the robust effort from everyone this fall, and we had a very low Covid count on our campuses,” said Sophie Zdatny, chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System. (Three state college campuses that housed students had 20 cases this fall, according to state data.) “But at the same time, we heard loud and clear from our students and employees that the stress resulting from the pandemic this fall has really taken a toll.”
Most schools plan to bring students back to campuses in the spring, and they’re looking for ways to give students more time for respite from the pressures of a second pandemic semester.
However, they face a dilemma: “Traditional” weeklong midsemester spring breaks is prohibited by the state’s reopening guidelines for colleges. Officials fear offering those breaks could lead students to travel to far-flung locations and bring infections back to campuses.
“We all know that if students leave us [for a traditional spring break], they have to follow the state travel guidance when they come back,” said Richard Schneider, former Norwich University president and the head of Vermont’s college reopening team. That guidance would require students to quarantine upon returning to campus, likely a further disruption to academic scheduling, he said.
Rather than having students bite the bullet again, colleges are planning “alternative” spring breaks, as recommended by the guidelines, by spreading break days throughout the semester.
Middlebury College will hold a four-day weekend during midterms, a long weekend in early May and will give students a Tuesday off later that month.
Champlain College will hold “Wellness Wednesdays” each week of the semester, a continuation from the fall, giving students those days off from classes.
UVM plans to give students four “respite/reading days” throughout the semester, including Town Meeting Day, and the state colleges are scheduling midweek breaks, too, Zdatny said.
“This fall has shown us that working straight through without breaks is not advisable for either students or faculty,” Middlebury administrators wrote in an announcement about the spring schedule.
Spring break days are likely to come as a relief to students planning to return to campuses next semester. Not having a break until Thanksgiving this fall “was like tripping the first week and not having the chance to get back up,” said Paul Flores-Cavel, a junior and residential life assistant at Middlebury College.
Adapting to Covid-friendly learning methods, like altered classroom setups and Zoom teaching, was a challenge in itself, he said. But doing so while coping with the broader stressors of the pandemic, with little time to unwind, at times doubled students’ stress.
“I think just the notion of having a break, even if you don’t do anything quote-unquote productive during that time, gives you a sense of peace and relaxation,” Flores-Cavel said. “I think that when you take that away … it made it feel like there was no end in sight” to the fall semester.
Flores-Cavel, who studies English and religion at Middlebury, said his professors were mostly understanding of the stressors of the fall — in part because they, too, were relearning how to do their jobs during the pandemic.
“I think faculty felt the exhaustion, as well as the students,” said Rich Clark, a political science professor at Castleton University. “This semester has been a drain. Many things got put aside as I tried to figure out how to operate Canvas and Aviso and all these other new programs that we’re working with, and I feel like I’m still catching up.”
Officials are looking for other ways beyond expanded break time to support student mental health this spring. The state’s guidelines allow colleges to decide what constitutes a “household” on their individual campuses, so that students who live alone can be allowed to form “pods” with other students.
Those students could hypothetically “pick the six people that they’re the closest with, and that’s their household,” Schneider said. “We hope will alleviate some isolation students living alone may feel.”
Schneider hopes the state might relax the guidelines once the spring semester is underway, if enough college students and staff members have access to the Covid-19 vaccine by then.
The state colleges are taking a wait-and-see approach to vaccine planning, Zdatny said; they don’t yet have enough information on when vaccinations might be available to their students to factor it into their guidelines.
For now, Clark said he’s grateful for the expanded break time slated for the spring semester. He’s sympathetic to the scheduling challenges administrators faced in removing breaks from the fall, he said — but without breaks during the spring, a second semester of pandemic teaching might have been even more daunting than the first.
“I think students need to have that time,” he said. “We’ve taken it away not for bad reasons — we’ve done so for very good reasons, actually. But it was still lacking this fall nevertheless.”
