These schools made it work during the pandemic

BY WILL BAHR

Throughout the pandemic, colleges and universities have scrambled to provide academic programming while keeping their students, faculty and staff safe. But what if your students are your staff?

Such is the predicament of work colleges. At the eight federally recognized institutions in the U.S., work is a graduation requirement. For five to 15 hours per week, students work a variety of jobs — from sorting mail to weaning piglets — in exchange for reduced tuition, room and board.

At Blackburn College in Carlinville, Ill., students manage the work program itself. “A very high fraction of our student workers are also essential workers,” says Mark Biermann, president of Blackburn. “We can’t operate without ’em.”

When COVID-19 cases spiked and many students went into quarantine last fall, Blackburn faced a difficult choice. The college closed campus “about 10, 12 days early,” before Thanksgiving break, says Angie Morenz, the school’s dean of work. “We had such a small number (of student workers at school) that we literally could not have run campus.”

Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., coped with student shortages in a different way. “At the end of April, beginning of May (2020), we decided to outsource for the first time in the college’s history,” says Lynn Morton, the school’s president. “We outsourced cleaning, trash collection and landscaping. ... There was no way we were gonna be able to manage ... with not enough students on campus.”

These schools have since adjusted protocols to bring students safely back to campus, and new student jobs have sprung up in response to the pandemic. In addition to working his >

Pippa Passes, Ky.

Berea, Ky.

Bloomington, Minn.

Carlinville, Ill.

Point Lookout, Mo.

Dallas

Craftsbury Common, Vt.

Swannanoa, N.C.

regular hours in the Warren Wilson genetics lab, senior Bassam Shawamreh, a residential adviser, now also serves as a student health ambassador. Warren Wilson and five other nearby colleges developed joint COVID-19 protocols with input and advice from the Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) in Asheville, N.C.

MAHEC trained Bassam and other students to positively reinforce mask-wearing and social distancing on campus, as well as how to best disseminate virus and vaccine information. Students working in Warren Wilson’s remaining crews have been mostly compliant, Bassam says, sporting masks “even in the hot, sunny weather, working their tails off.”

Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt., offered its students the option to study remotely for the 2020 fall semester. Most didn’t take it. “Our retention from semester-tosemester has hovered between 85 to 90 percent,” says Matthew Derr, Sterling’s president. “People want to be there.”

Sterling’s faculty designed pods in which students like sophomore Dimitri Tytla live, work and study with a group of up to 18 peers for five weeks straight. In addition to his remote job as a learning center mentor, Tytla earns work hours cleaning and sanitizing his dorm. The more intimate model has benefits: “I’ve never made friends so quickly,” Tytla says.

The student work model coupled with Sterling adjusting its schedule due to the pandemic has afforded some new opportunities to give back to the local community as well. Instead of a spring break, explains Jeff Richardson, Sterling’s associate dean of work-learning, this year, students stayed around Craftsbury Common to minimize exposure from travel. During this “workweek,” students split firewood for residents unable to heat their homes, visited food pantries and assisted at local farms run by Sterling alums.

Whether this level of localization and intimacy with the surrounding community will remain once the pandemic subsides, Richardson says, is “the million-dollar question. ... It’s gonna be up to the students, really, to carry on that mission as they leave Sterling and take the lessons from COVID and take the lessons from what they’ve learned in the work program. ... Look for where Dimitri’s working in maybe six or seven years and see how he’s changed the world.” l