Emerson College’s student newspaper since 1947 • berkeleybeacon.com
Thursday, April 15, 2021 • Volume 74, Issue 25
@berkeleybeacon // @beaconupdate
Stay-at-home order lifted despite potential virus variant spread Dana Gerber, Camilo Fonseca, Ann E. Matica, Alec Klusza Beacon Staff
Emerson will lift most of the restrictions implemented on April 7 to slow down the unprecedented spread of COVID-19 amongst the community since late March on Thursday morning, college officials announced Wednesday. With just over two weeks left in the spring semester, most policies will revert to the regulations set in place at the start of the semester on 7 a.m. Thursday morning, a Wednesday afternoon email from Assistant Vice President for Campus Life and “COVID Lead” Erik Muurisepp said. This includes lifting the stay-at-home order, restoring limited seating in the Dining Center, reopening the Max, Backstage Cafe, and Fitness Center, permitting academically required project work like film shoots, reinstating meeting room reservations, and allowing in-season outdoor athletic practices and competitions to take place. “The last week of health and safety restrictions has shown us that when we follow the guidance and increase our vigilance to ensure our community’s health and wellbeing, we can manage the spread of the COVID -19 virus,” Muurisepp said in the email. Last week, all in-person non-academic activities were put on hold in an effort to curb the virus’s spread. As a result, students were not allowed to leave their dorms or off-campus residences to go to class, get mandatory COVID-19 testing, pick up food, go to work, seek medical care, or go outside for socially distanced exercise. The Max Grill and Backstage Cafe were closed in order to limit the amount of exposure and divert employees to help with the grab-and-go services at the Dining Center, Muurisepp said. Student travel was also prohibited, as Pandemic, Pg. 2
Emerson, inclusivity in musical theater starts with us Amaris Rios
Beacon Correspondent If someone asks me to sing “Breath” from In The Heights one more time, I think I might actually escort myself back to Puerto Rico. When I auditioned for Emerson’s musical theatre program, I remember sitting in the Paramount dance studio—it was being used as a waiting room. If you ever want to see a sea of Rachel Berry ingenues, crowded into a room, all screlting at once, you should audition for a musical theatre program. I promise you all of your worst Glee nightmares will come true. Sitting next to me was the only Black performer in the room. She was from the Bronx, N.Y. and I, a brown Latina from Miami, Florida. I felt incredibly isolated, it felt separate but equal, but much to our blessing in disguise, we stuck out like sore thumbs. When I finally arrived in the audition room, I completed my dramatic monologue by Jose Rivera from Sonnets of an Old Century. My auditioner stared deep into the pit of my soul. They smirked and said “you got the chops kid’’ and followed up with a “so what’s your story?” I couldn’t help but give them the sob story version. It was all true, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that a sob story is exactly what they wanted to hear. Pursuing a theatre degree is all dreamy and glamorous— until a faculty member breaks the news that Summer Stock won’t be doing any Lin-Manuel Miranda productions this summer, so “don’t get your hopes up.” Or when musical theatre majors of color get all shaky and awkward when they talk about the EmStage casting process. Or when you missed the age requirement to audition for Marisol so your theater and performance friend says “don’t worry! MTS always does at least one performance that caters to the BIPOC community, you’ll love it” In a myriad of different micro-aggressive ways, there’s always someone who defines you as they see fit. Well, guess what? I refuse to suffer in silence and perpetuate a culture of ‘minority complacency.’ I’m here, I exist, and I matter because I am. As a predominantly white institution, Emerson College has a lot of catching up to do in terms of amplifying the voices of the BIPOC community. Because of the economic disparities that exist in this country, higher institutions of learning are overwhelmingly white. Diversification within such institutions Theater, Pg. 4
OPINION
Sanitation workers cleaning campus buildings and bathrooms / Courtesy Nestor Carranza
To protect others, maintenance staff put themselves at risk Ann E. Matica Beacon Staff
When maintenance worker Ramiro Soto returns home after a long day of cleaning Emerson buildings, he disinfects his backpack, jumps in the shower, and places the clothes he wore that day in a plastic bag in the basement to be cleaned later. Only after this routine does he sit down with his wife and daughter to eat dinner. The responsibilities of maintenance workers at Emerson have ballooned during the pandemic as the importance of cleanliness has risen. Their new list of tasks includes sanitizing all campus spaces and cleaning the rooms in the Paramount residence hall that students who tested positive for COVID-19 once occupied. There are currently 15 Emerson maintenance staff members who clean residence halls, Paramount quarantine and isolation rooms, and the Dining Center during the day from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. The college also employs 32 third-party contract workers from Done Right Building Services and Compass Facility Services who work from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and sanitize all classrooms, studios, the
gymnasium, and 172 Tremont meeting spaces, according to Duncan Pollock, interim assistant vice president of facilities management and campus services. Emerson conducted a series of training sessions over the summer to ensure the safety and new responsibilities of maintenance staff employed by the college as well as third-party workers, Pollock said. “There’s a specific group of people that are trained for specific areas,” Pollock said. “We have specific staff that goes in and does the room cleaning or the office cleaning or wherever the space is. And they’ve been trained on both the [Clorox] 360 machine, as well as how to do deep cleaning, and the products that they use and the safety precautions, what they need to wear for [personal protective equipment] and so forth.” Sanitation workers use Clorox 360 machines—which spray disinfecting liquid on surfaces and is effective against the SARSCoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19—in all on-campus spaces, Pollock said. Emerson owned two Clorox 360 machines and purchased an additional five over the summer. The machines cost approximately $5,000 per unit, Manager of Custodial Services Nestor Carranza said.
“We saw what other colleges and universities were doing,” Carranza said. “So we contacted our vendors and those machines were sold out and it took us two months to get the other three.” Staff members can sanitize all surfaces in a room in less than a minute with a Clorox 360 machine, but cannot reenter the room for 30 to 45 minutes after use due to the danger posed by chemicals used, according to Carranza. Before the pandemic, Carranza would arrive on campus between 5:30 and 6 a.m. to start his shift. Now, he arrives on campus as early as 4:30 a.m. “I walk the buildings with all the nighttime supervisors because our focus [is] the classrooms and also the dorms,” he said. “We have to make sure everything has been cleaned, sanitized, the whole nine yards because it is important—extremely important.” Maintenance staff are required to wait 24 hours before sanitizing rooms that were formerly occupied by Emerson community members that tested positive for COVID-19, Pollock said. “They lockdown the space for 24 hours, that’s supposedly how long the COVID can exist and live,” Pollock said. “What they do Sanitation, Pg. 2
Candlelit COVID vigil creates space for grieving students
INSIDE THIS EDITION Students supplement expenses with GoFundMe Pg. 2 Exchange students adapt to pandemic-era Boston Pg. 3 Editorial: How to get vaccinated in Mass. Pg. 4 Op-Ed: The struggle to address misogyny in India Pg. 5
The display also includes stickers with the names of those who died. Alec Klusza / Beacon Staff
Bailey Allen Beacon Staff In the lobby of 172 Tremont stands a small table adorned with electric candles and stickers with names of people and experiences lost over the past year—a space of reflection and remembrance for Emerson community members grieving during the COVID-19 pandemic. Erected by the Center for Spiritual Life, the display commemorates the one year mark of the pandemic, which has caused the deaths of over 500,000 people in the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. CSL also hosted a Zoom gathering on March 26 where Emersonians could meet virtually to mourn all that has been lost this year, as a community. Patty Tamayo, a senior political communications major, collaborated with CSL to develop the physical remembrance space that will stand until the end of the semester. She modeled it after a similar space she previously created—also in 172 Tremont—for Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated in Mexico and parts of Latin America to honor dead loved ones and accept the inevitability of death, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Vigil, Pg. 3
Boston-based filmmaker crafts documentary on Capitol riots Pg. 7 Podcast, Fifa, and bed. A reflection on quarantine Pg. 8
222
positive COVID-19 tests
.19% positivity rate
*Accumulated from 2020-2021 school year