1. Spring Break

Episode one explores how members of Fitchburg State's community learned about the Covid-19 pandemic and university closure.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I think I was in class, it was right before spring break. So it was March of two thousand twenty, I believe. Like the week before, even though we had been joking about it for weeks during class and then they basically told us we weren't coming back that semester. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 0:14

Initially I think some people thought, Oh, this is this is pretty good, but it turned out not to such.

SPEAKER_08 0:20

It was odd. I remember the feeling saying goodbye to certain people and thinking like it's gonna be a long time before I see this person.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

It was kind of like overnight all of a sudden everyone needed to have a PhD in virology and public health or something like that in order to understand what was going on in the world.

SPEAKER_06 0:35

I'll probably always remember when it first happened, which I believe was March of that year. And so when we first heard about what was going on, you can of course no one really knew what was happening yet.

SPEAKER_04 1:16

I'm your host, Maddie Waterson, and this is Episode 1, Spring Break. Fitchburg State was five days into its spring break when University President Richard Lapitas sent an email to the student body. To the campus community. In the face of this rapidly developing global health emergency, our highest priority remains the health and welfare of our students, faculty, and staff. While Fitchburg State has received no confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 infection, we need to act now to slow the spread of the virus. To further that goal, we are preparing and planning for the possibility of temporarily delivering course material remotely for all face-to-face courses. Therefore, we are going to cancel classes until Monday, March 23rd. Students should not return to campus the week of March 16th to March 20th. That email was followed a few days later by this, also from the President's office. No decisions have been made about the remainder of the semester. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring students back in residence and resume our vibrant campus life. The circumstances of the spread of the coronavirus will determine whether this is possible. I am so sorry that your college experience is being altered in this way. Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we join the world in responding to this pandemic. Many students were rushed with a wave of emotions. Gabby Callahan, a sophomore nursing major at the time, describes her initial confusion.

SPEAKER_03 2:38

And it was kind of scary. It was just am I going to be able to finish? Am I going to be able to finish my classes? Do school online? What's going on? When is this going to end? It was just scary.

SPEAKER_04 2:49

Similarly, Ben Sacramone and the Fitchburg State track and field team were returning from a meet in Boston when the news broke about the initial cases.

SPEAKER_08 2:57

I don't think I'll ever forget we were coming back from a track meet. I think it was in Boston. And somebody on the bus had said, Oh my god, there's a COVID case in Boston. Like the first COVID case hit Boston. And everybody on the bus turned around and went to the city. Was that UMass Boston, right? Wasn't it? I think it was UMass Boston. And we were all like, oh my God, this is crazy. And then weeks after that, we just kept hearing about more and more and more. And I think we went to a meet at Wesleyan where there was a rumored one student who had happened. And I remember everybody was terrified. Nobody went to the bathroom. And the only reason to go to the bathroom was to wash your hands. Everybody stayed away from each other. And I don't think I'll ever forget like that feeling of oh my God, this might actually be a real thing. Like we weren't too serious about it, but at the same time, it was holy crap.

SPEAKER_04 3:42

Administrators struggled with the immediate aftermath just as much as students did. Almost every member of the executive cabinet worked tirelessly to ensure the transition went as smoothly as possible. Nobody was more concerned about the pandemic than Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Laura Bayless.

SPEAKER_05 3:59

So I was watching the news and seeing this thing starting to develop in China. And you know, I've been part of emergency management my entire career. And so we've prepped many times for bird flu and all different kinds of things. And I was like, this seems pretty serious. And I pulled together the first group. Well, actually, I spoke with our then director of health services and her supervisor, assistant dean of students and director of counseling services, in probably mid-January just to say, hey, Martha, what are you seeing? All that kind of thing. And on January 28th, I pulled together the first group of people across campus to start talking about the possibility of COVID.

SPEAKER_04 4:47

Even student leaders were aware of the dangers of the new virus. From student trustee Steven Olson.

SPEAKER_10 4:53

So when I drive to school every day, I listened to NPR, and I was listening to the show at the time, their nine o'clock shows the BBC Radio News Hour, something along those lines. And they were covering the coronavirus pandemic. The what the angle they took on it was it seemed like it was going to be an economic issue because it was affecting China, it was affecting manufacturing. It was gonna hurt, but it wasn't gonna be a pandemic because the idea that they had, and that was November 2019 through December 2019.

SPEAKER_04 5:22

Student government treasurer Joe Cotello III, who was on trip to Washington, DC at the time.

SPEAKER_09 5:28

I knew there was something going on with coronavirus. I didn't really know what it was, no one really knew what it was at that time. But I knew something was getting a bit weird when I would go to see monuments of different areas in DC go to different museums and there weren't that many people. And I thought it was a great time. I'm like, wow, I'm able to see the Jefferson Memorial with nobody there. Have a picture, just me and the monument.

SPEAKER_04 5:52

Despite their fears, the pandemic still caught the administration a little off guard. The university extended spring break another week to try and catch up. Here's University President Richard Lapitas.

SPEAKER_07 6:03

So that was a big planning week for us. One, we obviously had to think about transitioning students to a remote format for which none of the classes or very few of the classes were designed. And so we needed time to give faculty the opportunity to do that. We were extraordinarily fortunate because maybe a semester or two prior, I had made the decision to move to a Google format. And so everything was already in that format and an enterprise system kind of way. So part of it was just to learn how to navigate Google Meets, and we were very fortunate in that regard. Faculty had the obviously the most amount of work do in figuring out how they were going to convert their lectures and all their materials to that format. Just a phenomenal amount of work. We were working 18, 20 hour days for at least two weeks just to get the bare minimum up, and then for once on end, it you know, I'm sure that students have said, but I know the faculty and staff would say the same. We we worked harder during that semester probably than any time in our lives. It was just challenging and stressful.

SPEAKER_04 7:22

Faculty faced a strange cross between the students' experience and the administrators' experience.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Should we meet in person? I mean, that was totally disorienting.

SPEAKER_04 8:04

From Matt Burke, Senior Director of Athletics and Recreation.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

I had a conversation with my boss who's Laura Bayless, the vice president for student affairs, and I was like, So I'm still working on the end-of-year athletic banquet. And she was like, No, you're not. And I was like, What do you mean? She's like, There's not gonna be an end-of-year athletic banquet. And I was like, wait, what? I'm like, but I figured we were gonna shut down for like a week or two and then be back. And she was like, No, we're shutting down the semester.

SPEAKER_04 8:29

So Persperentia is a production of Fitchburg State University. I'm your narrator, Maddie Waterson. This podcast was produced as part of Dr. Catherine Jewell's honor seminar in history in the spring of 2022. Special thanks to Asher Jackson and the staff at the Amelia V. Gallucci Ciro Library, Keisha Tracy, and the Fitchburg State University Economics, History and Political Science Department, and the Fitchburg State University Honors Program. You can find all episodes of Perseverantia as well as our bibliographies in our entire archive on our website, sites.google.comslash Fitchburgstate.edu slash FSU COVID 19.