With Covid-19 cases already spiking in college towns this summer, institutions are scrambling to find ways to ensure student and employee safety as fall approaches. And encouraging college students to practice social distancing is no easy task.
Experts say student buy-in is essential for such policies to work — something the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor took to heart.
Its school of engineering invited all Michigan students to propose their own social-distancing solutions through a new Covid-19 Campus Challenge, which drew 89 submissions that proposed measures ranging from bus-system contact tracing to subscription services for masks.
“As students we have more insight about what’s going on in our campus life,” said Michelle Byun, a Challenge participant whose team proposed support groups for students of color. Students understand what will resonate with their peers, she said, and will live the changes in transportation, academics, and co-curriculars.
Though the university made no guarantees it would carry out the students’ proposals, some are already in the works. These include a redesign of the fall activities fair, a student-led social-media campaign to encourage mask use, virtual study groups, and a peer-led lunch series.
The top 30 teams presented their proposals last week. Here are a few of their suggestions:
Bus-System Contact Tracing
As currently designed, Michigan’s system of Blue Buses would threaten public health, one team said. Space on the buses is limited, and ridership isn’t tracked. So the team proposed BlueTrace, a QR-code system to track bus occupancy and maintain a contact-tracing database.
With the BlueTrace system, students would scan a QR code on their smartphones as they enter and exit the bus. When users scan their code, their ride information would be logged, making it easier to track them down if they rode the bus with someone who later tested positive for Covid-19.
When the team surveyed 88 students, they found 80 percent supported contact tracing, a method to identify people who might have come in contact with an infected person and could themselves be carrying the virus. Their solution would be sustainable, the team said, because QR-code scanners are relatively cheap, and anyone with a smartphone could participate. Additionally, because scanners are universal, the university could sell back the materials when contact tracing was no longer needed.
Zain Sultan, a rising senior and one member of the five-student team, said many students he knows use the buses on a daily basis. When he spoke to students about his proposal, they said their big concern was the potential increase in wait time. However, Sultan said that because of social distancing, the buses will carry fewer passengers, which will lessen wait time. The Ann Arbor campus will use a hybrid format this fall, which means there may not be as many students on campus as there normally are.
Sultan said his team wanted to come up with something that was both realistic and feasible for the university, and also more tangible than policy-based.
“We’re going to be dealing with this situation for the entirety of next semester,” Sultan said.
Mask Check-Out and Cleaning Services
Inspired by popular subscription services, one team proposed a system where students can check out a mask as they leave their dorms and then drop off the mask in a bin at the end of the day for cleaning.
The system would solve two problems: encouraging students to wear masks, and limiting crowds in the laundry room when students need to wash them.
“Being a student myself, it feels like we don’t have time for everything, so having to wash a mask everyday seems like a big ask,” said Bruna Iunes Sanches,
a graduate student in architecture. “I think it’s convenient, and that’s the No. 1 thing. It’s so easy, how could you not?”
Students aren’t likely to wear masks unless they’re incentivized, Sanches said, and classmates she spoke with were particularly concerned about access to clean masks as an equity issue. She suggested this service be covered in students’ housing costs.
Scheduling for Safe Food-Pantry Access
Two undergraduate student teams proposed modifying the university’s Maize & Blue Cupboard, a food pantrylike service for students. Over 30 percent of Michigan students are “food insecure” according to the university, and a growing number of college students across the country experience hunger. So one team proposed a scheduling app for accessing the Maize & Blue Cupboard, a food pantry for students.
The Maize & Blue Cupboard is located in the basement of a residence hall and will be operating a little differently this semester, offering household goods and limiting the number of students who can enter at a time. The university said that it made these changes in part because some of the food pantries in the area have closed.
The Challenge team said its focus was on convenience: Scheduling could be integrated into the existing U-M app that most students already have. It could also have an option to see how many spots are available if students want to go at a less-busy time.
Mental-Health Support for Students of Color
Michigan lacks enough individualized, identity-based mental-health support for people of color, one team found. A lot of the available resources were designed to be “white people to white people,” they said.
To solve this problem, they suggested support groups tailored to people of varying identities to deal with loneliness in a remote world, lessen anxiety about Covid-19, and serve as a platform for people to connect with one another. A peer-led lunch series the team proposed would allow students to share and reflect on their experiences to a network that could provide emotional support.
The support groups would be fully virtual for maximum accessibility. Chelsea Cheung, one of the team’s members, said that people of different identities are experiencing the pandemic in different ways: African Americans are dealing with higher rates of Covid-19, and Asian Americans have to combat xenophobia around the pandemic, which originated in China.
The team conducted a survey of roughly 30 students (80 percent of whom were students of color) and found that most said they felt more comfortable speaking with others who shared their experiences and identities. Over 70 percent of respondents said their identity affected how Covid-19 impacted them.
Building Connections at a Distance
With a proposal they called “All Wolverines Assemble,” another team focused on socially distanced and remote ways for first-year and international students to form connections on campus.
The team suggested incoming students get “Wolverpals” — pen pals, in other words — and proposed an art showcase of students’ creative reactions to the pandemic. They also proposed friendly competitions, such as a scavenger hunts students could do independently, to explore the university landscape.
The team said these are low-cost solutions that would be easy to continue beyond this fall semester.
