Students Play The Covid Heavy

Essence Boyd could hear the music blasting before she even got off the elevator in her dorm. She had just received a noise complaint from another student, and she was heading to check it out.

The music was so loud, she felt sure the students inside couldn’t hear her when she knocked and announced herself — ​“RA!” — before opening the door. Inside, she found ten to 15 of her peers partying. None of them wore masks.

She had a choice to make.

She could follow RA (resident assistant) protocol and disperse the party, making sure to follow through with an incident report. Or she could follow her gut — and escape as quickly as she could.

Boyd recalls thinking: Oh my God, I have to get out of here. There are so many of them. I don’t know where they’ve been. They don’t have masks on, and I feel like I’m not safe in this situation.

She took a step back.

“Whoever doesn’t live here has to go,” she announced. ​“You have to turn the music off.”

Then she left, hoping that the students wouldn’t reconvene.

While she doesn’t regret becoming an RA, she said, ​“there are a lot of times when you have to choose between doing your job and keeping yourself safe.”

National Dilemma

Boyd, a Southern Connecticut State University senior who is serving her second year as an RA, isn’t alone in facing this predicament. At colleges across the country, the task of enforcing social distancing mandates has fallen to RAs.

And how they carry out that job may determine how well campuses fare in keeping students safe and continuing operations during the Covid-19 epidemic.

Even at some schools that claim otherwise, social distancing regulation is often built into the nature of a job that entails breaking up parties and ensuring that residents feel comfortable in their dorms. At Cornell University last month, RAs organized a strike advocating for more PPE, hazard pay, and administrative support.

When colleges across the country announced decisions to reopen in-person campus life, the message that their plans depended on students’ responsible behavior resounded in emails, signage, online training. Each campus is a big collective action problem, and every individual is reliant on the good behavior of everyone else. As one Southern sign states, ​“My Mask Protects You. Your Mask Protects Me.”

At some schools, parties and social gatherings among students have ensued anyway, proving to be significant spreader events for Covid.

Quinnipiac University has suspended or sent home 23 students so far this semester.

Some critics claim that outbreaks at universities like University of North Carolina were foreseeable. ​“If the success of your plan relies on 18- to 24-year-olds being responsible, then maybe it’s not a very good plan,” UNC student Anna Pogarcic told NPR in August.

Others maintain that closures aren’t inevitable. ​“Our on-campus positive tests are very low right now and in general, students are following the health and safety protocols,” said Dilger, Southern’s spokesperson.

The need to enforce social distancing can be ​“annoying,” in Boyd’s view. ​“We’re not put in place to make sure that everyone is following Covid guidelines. We’re put in place to make sure that everyone is following the residence hall guidelines,” she said.

She paused, then added, ​“I guess Covid guidelines have become the new residence hall guidelines.”

”Look Out For Yourself”

Boyd said she feels adequately supported by Southern in her role as an RA. The majority of RA training focused on how to enforce social distancing regulations on campus, she said. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she has permission from administrators to prioritize her own safety over her RA duties in moments like these.

“They flat out told us, if you don’t feel safe, don’t feel pressure to do it,” she said.

Students caught not social distancing can be suspended or expelled for hosting parties or otherwise violating Covid-related rules, according to university spokesperson Patrick Dilger.

Dilger said he did not know how many students have faced these consequences. Boyd said she has heard of students who have been kicked off campus, forced to finish the semester remotely.

Even with these punishments aimed at promoting social distancing, it’s not always easy to avoid the risk of exposure in campus dorms. Boyd said that in her West Campus complex, her team has had particular difficulty enforcing mask-wearing in common spaces, like the first-floor kitchen and laundry room.

“Residents think, ​‘Oh, if i’m just running out really quick, it shouldn’t matter,’” Boyd said.

Repeatedly, Boyd said, maskless students have come to RAs saying that they’ve locked themselves outside of their rooms, without access to their face masks.

In previous years, according to Boyd, RAs would walk with students to unlock their doors using a master key. This year, due to Covid, RAs were given a new protocol: Give locked-out students a spare key to their rooms, so that those students can unlock their doors, retrieve their original keys, and return the spare key to the RA desk. This new procedure limits the amount of exposure that RAs have to other students.

Most students are ​“compliant,” Boyd said. Some aren’t. She said that some students have pressed for her to go by the old process of accompanying them to their dorms with a master key, reluctant to make the extra trip back down to the desk.

“We’ve had residents be like, ​‘I don’t want to talk to you, give me a different R.A. … I don’t feel like you’re helping me,’” she said. ​“It’s like, I can get someone else for you, but they’re going to tell you the same exact thing.”

Several students interviewed by the Independent said they were unaware of parties occurring on campus. Sam Ocken, a freshman living in Farnham Hall, said that he’s seen ​“not a single party.” He and his friends mostly meet up outdoors, he said.

For Boyd, meanwhile, ​“the real question is how many have we caught.” She estimated that across the dormitories on campus, there’s one unsanctioned gathering occurring each night.

The extent to which on-campus rules can be enforced in students’ lives off campus has also been murky. Boyd said she heard of an off-campus party that some dormitory residents attended; campus police told RAs that because the gathering occurred outside of campus bounds, it was out of their jurisdiction, she said.

“In off-campus situations, University Police and Student Affairs staff coordinate with the city police and public health departments, depending on the situation,” Dilger wrote in an email. ​“We are active players in working to preserve the health of the wider community and have been very proactive in preempting large off-campus gatherings.”

The high stakes of her job as an RA require Boyd to set firm boundaries.

“I think that’s what this whole Covid thing is showing you: self-preservation is the best thing,” she said. ​“You have to look out for yourself, regardless of how other people may feel about it.”

“High-Risk Job”

Xiomari Cabań Garcia (pictured), another RA in Southern’s West Campus dorm, sends out weekly email reminders to her students: ​“Be quiet during quiet hours, respect the rules, be clean, we’re in the middle of the pandemic …” she listed casually from inside her dorm room.

When Cabań Garcia first moved on campus, she said she expected a massive outbreak within a month. But so far, Southern’s Covid positive numbers remain low. The university is now randomly testing 25 percent of its residential student population weekly. According to Southern’s Covid-19 Dashboard, as of Tuesday, 3 out of 1,044 residential students tested positive for Covid, while 14 commuters self-reported positive test results.

Cabań Garcia said she has been pleasantly surprised by how well the semester has gone so far. Still, she knows that if people aren’t social distancing, ​“it takes one person … to get that whole entire floor sick, to get this whole entire dorm sick.” She said she hasn’t seen many parties, but ​“we’ve had to be a little bit hard-headed with the students, because they’re so used to coming to college, having the freedom to come wherever they want, with whoever they want.”

In her experience, most students have been listening to RAs when it comes to social distancing. ​“It takes one knock and it spooks the heck out of them,” she laughed. ​“We’re nice and all, but they know they can get in trouble.”

Cabań Garcia said she knows her position as an RA is a ​“high-risk job,” but she said she trusts university staff and the training she received. As long as she does what she can to control her own exposure, she’s not too stressed about catching Covid. She carries a ​“self-care package” containing an extra mask, hand sanitizer, and alcohol wipes wherever she goes.

”No, You Can’t Come In”

RAs aren’t the only ones tasked with regulating their fellow students’ behavior.

As students wander in and out of the classroom designated for Southern’s student newspaper, Jess Guerrucci keeps count. The room has a maximum capacity of 11 people due to SCSU’s social distancing requirements — and it’s not fun to have to turn the 12th person away.

Guerrucci, an SCSU senior who serves as the editor-in-chief of the Southern News, wants the newsroom to be a space where anyone feels comfortable walking in.

“You always want to be so welcoming, I’m trying to invite everyone in and keep everyone involved, but I have to be like, ​‘No, you can’t come in,’” she said.

Not even the whole Southern News staff can fit inside the newsroom at one time. In order to accommodate as many people as possible, Guerrucci holds staff meetings outside, right by the student center, as frequently as possible. She posts the location on social media so that people know where to go.

As of last week, they hadn’t experienced any bad weather. Guerrucci anticipates needing to pivot to half-in person, half-remote meetings as the season changes.

Occasionally, Guerrucci said, she has experienced moments when she felt uncomfortable with someone else’s behavior. But it’s awkward to ask someone to stand further away or pull up their mask. ​“They have their noses out sometimes, and you don’t want to be the one to be like ​‘Hey, come on, pick that up,’” she said. ​“You just want everyone to do their part.”

Guerrucci tries her best to ensure that the group is social distancing. Her peers do, too.

Still, whenever the news staff hears an unexpected knock on the newsroom door, she said, they tense up.

“We’re like, ​‘Is everyone doing the right thing?’ We kinda go into panic mode.”

No one officially designated Guerrucci as the person in charge of regulating social distancing at newspaper meetings. But as the editor-in-chief, Guerrucci is acutely aware of the potential consequences for disregarding the rules. ​“They can literally say, ​‘No more Southern News’ if we get caught not social distancing,” she said, ​“so I’m very careful about it.”

In Cabań Garcia’s eyes, Southern’s policies and procedures are working well. That’s why there hasn’t been an outbreak yet, she said.

She expressed particular pride in the work that she and her fellow RAs do to enforce the rules: ​“It’s keeping our school open.”

The system of peer-to-peer enforcement isn’t perfect. ​“The doors aren’t transparent,” Boyd said. ​“We can’t see if there’s ten people in a room that’s meant for only two people. And most times there are, just because residents are trying to adjust the best way they know how.”

“Let’s be completely honest: college is made for social life,” she added. ​“And Covid isn’t really stopping that.”

This story was produced with financial support from Solutions Journalism Network.

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