SARASOTA, Fla. — Move in day for students at New College of Florida is this Friday, and the Florida Board of Governors has already approved their reopening plan.
“We are really trying to integrate and have every possible option that we can think of to try and mitigate the risk,” Dr. Anne Fisher said.
Dr. Fisher is a licensed clinical psychologist and the program director for counseling and wellness at New College of Florida.
“We are doing primarily telehealth and tele mental health, so counseling sessions are going to be done remotely on a HIPPA compliant platform,” Fisher said.
This year, Fisher also has another title. She’s the incident commander and task force leader for their COVID response at New College.
“The way we are developing and the way we are doing things is going to be really quite different this fall,” Fisher said.
For starters, you won't see as many students living on campus. Normally there's around 700, but this fall there's only about 400 students in dorm rooms.
"I got lucky enough to be placed in a single dorm this year, so there is a single bathroom, a single room so I wouldn't have to be sharing any communal space with anybody,” said rising third year student Aleah Colon-Alfonso.
This will be the case for the majority of those in student housing, unless they requested a roommate.
“Before anybody gets back to campus everybody is required to get a viral test and then they are providing us that negative test result and then we clear them to come to campus,” Fisher said.
Because of this measure, the school had identified a few positive cases among its students.
Students and faculty have a choice to either come for in-person classes or learn or work remotely. All classes will be available online.
If you're on campus you must wear a face mask inside and outside where more than 10 people are gathered.
“We are not trying to be draconian,” Fisher said. “I’m describing you the plans, but what we are really trying to do is do a lot of community messaging because the key to this is going to be the mask wearing, the social distancing and just behaving appropriately.”
Fisher says they also plan to have everyone coming to campus to fill out a daily symptom tracker. It'll be a questionnaire you can do on your phone that runs through the COVID symptoms.
“So, in the morning before they come to campus, they are going to do a little thing on their phone that just runs the COVID symptoms and asks them to self-monitor,” Fisher said.
If you mark any symptoms you’ll be asked to remain home or if you’re living on campus, to remain in your dorm room.
“The app we are using for the students actually ties in with our Student Health Service so as soon as they report a symptom it will trigger our service to reach out to them,” Fisher said.
They'll then be tested right on campus. If you test positive you will be required to quarantine for 10 days, plus another three days of being symptom-free before you can return to campus.
And since New College had been told you can spread coronavirus and not even know it, they plan to randomly test 10% of their population every week to hopefully weed out those asymptomatic carriers.
"We're just trying to do the best mitigation of the virus spread as we can and what we hope is that we can do as well if not better than our surrounding community, which is really all we can hope for,” Fisher said.
She says they will also hold some of their classes outside to help reduce the spread of the virus.
New College says it's still tallying up the number of students who are choosing to stay home and learn remotely. As for the professors, around 60% of them have decided to teach their classes virtually from home.
“For everybody on the New College campus, if you are able to do your job remotely and you want to, you can,” Fisher said.
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