Southwestern College will not reopen anytime soon. Classes will be online for Fall 2020, and there is no telling what kind of stay-at-home restrictions will still be in place come August.
There is, however, a plan in the works to try to get some students back on campus for specialized hands-on training, according to Southwestern College President Dr. Kindred Murillo.
“We need nurses, we need EMT, we need fire, we need police,” she said. “So we’re working on creating the parameters (and) they’re setting up protocols for those programs.”
Governing Board President Nora Vargas said the concentration of coronavirus cases in the South Bay will be the ultimate deciding factor for how far the plan can advance.
As of May 15, Chula Vista has 759 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and a significant number of the 2,837 cases in the city of San Diego are in Otay Mesa and San Ysidro—both of which are home to SWC Higher Education Centers. National City, home to another HEC, has the highest rate of confirmed cases of any incorporated city in the county with 409.6 infections per 100,000 residents.
“Even if they are public safety students, all students’ health is our priority,” Vargas said. “So until the county actually orders and eases any restrictions for opening the schools, we are bound by those restrictions. And when they do start easing locally and we have the permission to actually hold courses, that’s when the leadership team and others will start looking at opportunities for other programs as well.”
California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley also supports bringing back hands-on training for first responders.
“I think President Murillo’s approach is exactly what we’re telling our colleges to do,” he said.
It is a good plan. County officials should allow it to move forward.
First responders first
Need is one of the reasons why the nursing, EMT, police and fire programs are being prioritized, Oakley said.
“First responder programs and other career education programs are considered as part of the essential infrastructure workforce that the governor issued guidance around, which allowed those programs to continue to function,” he said. “Because we want to ensure that first responders, nurses, (and) other essential infrastructure workers continue to receive instruction so that we don’t interrupt that pipeline of the workforce.”
Murillo said school officials have not used the term “essential” to define any programs. Instead, she said, the priority is helping students in these programs to get hired.
“We want to really make sure we have more first responders and that our students that are currently in the programs can complete those programs,” she said. “So that’s why I would call them priority. Because we don’t find a way to do the protocol so that they can complete their training, then we have students who have invested all this time and they haven’t finished yet.”
Both Murillo and Oakley pointed out several advantages first responder programs have that make it easier to get them back on campus before others.
One major selling point—these programs already include infectious disease and PPE training.
Murillo said no committee has been created. Instead, each program is working on its own protocols, which will in turn be used as guidelines to bring back other programs when the time comes.
“It’s really laying the groundwork for other protocols within the college (and) having these professionals that work with each program because each program has specific needs, so a large committee is really not going to be effective in this kind of situation.
Oakley said these programs are already required to have smaller class sizes and student to faculty ratios than most other classes, which should make it easier to incorporate physical distancing into the curriculum.
Murillo said Southwestern is already planning on how instruction may be affected by a potential second wave during flu season.
“Some of them may get frontloaded, and what we mean by that, we mean like the fall classes we may start them in August sometime and see how far we can get them through,” she said.
Initially, this viewpoint was going to call for a similar plan where general education courses and most transfer-oriented courses stay online, while bringing a wider variety of hands-on job training, like automotive repair, in the fall or spring.
Listening to Murillo’s plan changed my mind. It is reasonable to use the nursing, EMT, police and fire programs to test the waters while minimizing the potential spread of COVID-19 in South County. The programs fill a major need during the pandemic, and they’re better positioned to create and work within the protocols that will likely be required by county and local officials.
Learning from past mistakes
Agreeing with administration feels out of place at The Sun, let alone for me personally.
I attended Olympian High during the Sweetwater Union High School District pay-to-play scandal and remember how disheartening it was when indicted board members easily won re-election. During my first stint at Southwestern from 2012-15, the college was still reeling from the financial mess created during that same scandal. My first semester on The Sun immediately followed former SWCPD Chief Michael Cash’s accidental on-campus shooting in August 2013.
There was also, of course, the infamous 2014 Ebola scare.
On the morning of October 16, 2014, an SWC student claimed to have been exposed to an airline passenger with Ebola. Campus police taped off the set of buildings where the student’s class was held, but some students said officers encouraged them to leave before the quarantine became official.
Later in the day, a scrum of local reporters gathered around Cash for a press conference about 50 feet away from the quarantined area. At some point, journalists from The Sun decided to just walk up to the caution tape and interview students. There were no masks, no gloves and no social distancing—just a couple of police officers making sure no one crossed the tape.
It did not take long for professional media to notice interviews were happening right at the quarantine’s boundary. Soon “isolated” students were holding an impromptu press conference for a row of TV cameras and handheld audio recorders far less than six feet away.
In the end, the claim of Ebola exposure was predictably discovered to be untrue.
This time around the campus was closed before a single case of COVID-19 was confirmed at Southwestern. That may have seemed overly cautious to some, but it is a welcome change from what could have been.
Still, administration has not handled the coronavirus pandemic perfectly. There were some early hiccups, like when The Sun broke the news that Southwestern decided on a Tuesday morning to close campuses, but was not going to announce the closure until Friday afternoon—a three-day gap that should not have existed. College leaders’ attempts to disguise its lack of direction to instructors as “flexibility” also fell flat.
That being said, the current administration has made a noticeable effort to be transparent during the pandemic, at least compared to the low bar set by the people running campus during my first run at Southwestern.
Dr. Murillo kept her word to The Sun and continued to do a monthly interview with our news editor after campus closed, which is where her quotations in this article came from. Vargas also quickly responded to my request for an interview. As The Sun transitioned to a more timely online news format, Public Information Officer Lillian Leopold did an excellent job getting information to us and helping coordinating interviews. Likewise her assistant, Ernesto Rivera.
On the state level, Oakley has held regular press conferences with college media, and about 60 reporters from community college newspapers, radio stations and TV stations across the state (plus an entire Los Angeles City College journalism class) participated in Tuesday’s call.
Oakley briefly paused because so many questions began with the phrase “with classes being online this fall…” He said nobody knows where the pandemic is going and predicted online classes may be here for much, much longer than next semester.
“We need to be prepared to be online in some form or fashion for probably the rest of your academic experience,” he said. “Not only in community college, but at a four-year university if that’s where you’re going.”
2021 and beyond
Even if all goes according to plan and Southwestern’s first-responder programs get back on campus in some form this fall, Oakley is right. It is unlikely that in-person instruction will return anytime soon for most other classes.
The entire CSU system is online for the fall. And while other parts of the country are starting to reopen, other parts of the world that have already reopened are starting to reimpose restrictions after new spikes in coronavirus cases.
Dr. Murillo even said Southwestern could reopen later than other colleges in San Diego County.
“The county could open up and we could say, ‘Nope, we’re still going up,’” she said. “So then we check with the local agencies like Chula Vista and National City where our sites are, and we’ll look at that data and then we’ll make a determination and then we’ll make a move from there.”
Murillo said Southwestern’s connections to Tijuana, which has been ravaged by COVID-19, are one reason why. The school does not keep an official count, but it is estimated that thousands of SWC students and staffers regularly cross the border to attend classes or work at one of the college’s campuses.
Vargas, however, is focused on the number of cases north of the border. She said she believes the high concentration of COVID-19 in the South Bay has more to do with economics than the region’s proximity to Mexico.
“I actually believe that the reason why we have higher rates of COVID is really because of the inequities of the system that we have,” Vargas said. “Many of the folks who are experiencing or have contracted COVID-19 in the South Bay are folks who are our first responders. They’re the people who are essential workers.”
It would be foolish to rush back. Instead, administrators should continue to find creative methods to help students, like using the parking lot for drive-thru food distributions. Oakley specifically praised SWC’s decision to convert a section of the parking lot into a wifi hotspot.
Vargas said, when the time comes, the college will look into hosting a coronavirus testing site.
“I do believe that you cannot have a reentry plan that is an equitable reentry plan if you don’t include access to healthcare (and) testing sites for our communities,” she said. “We are in a situation that the college is able to this center in the heart of the South Bay where we would be able to provide that.”
Switching to online classes was heartbreaking. I learn best in the unscripted moments of classes—picking out the lesson from a professor’s seemingly unrelated tangent or when a classmate asks a good question. Even just overhearing Spanish speakers while waiting in line at Jason’s was like a free study session.
But after talking to SWC administrators, I can honestly say the college seems to have a solid plan in place.
Let’s just hope county officials allow it to happen.
