As dedicated Miami Dade College faculty, we find ourselves compelled to manifest deep concern about the College administration’s decision to reopen our campuses in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

We are, as educators, driven by these core principles:

1.     Safety and Security. First and foremost, we strive to ensure, promote and advocate for the safety and security of our students. In the short run, this means providing an educational setting that improves their quality of life while avoiding exposure to any kind of threat. In the long run, this means guiding them towards resilience and providing them the tools for pursuing a fulfilled and just life through the power of education. In this regard, we were thankful for the College’s swift decision to move to a remote learning environment as soon as the potential threat of the novel coronavirus came to the Miami area last Spring.

2.     Flexibility. We know that we all must adapt, over the short and long term, as evolutionary change is part of the human condition and part of how our world and our universe operate. In this regard, we are committed to flexibility, be it during a single class where we take advantage of teachable moments, or in helping students to achieve their educational, life, and career goals while caring for their overall well-being. Thus, we were willing and ready to adapt our pedagogy to the online environment and make our classes even stronger as the novel coronavirus, and the accompanying changes to so many aspects of daily life, presented many interesting and valuable learning opportunities.  

3.     Continuity and Predictability. At the same time, we know that education works best in a stable learning environment. This is truer than ever as the novel coronavirus, economic hardships, social unrest, and a highly politicized election year environment create instability and even chaos, for some of our students. In this regard, we were glad to continue to offer them high quality online classes during the summer and are doing the same as the coronavirus continues to ravage our county this Fall.

4.     Leveraging Challenges into Opportunities. We know that this concept is at the core of what Miami Dade College is about and the reason we are so dedicated to our work and to the institution. We reach into the lives of the most challenged members of our community and provide them with opportunities that cannot be found anywhere else. This results in a synergistic and energized educational environment where people from all walks of life seek to better themselves, their colleagues, and society at large. As educators, and guides for our students, we seek to model this same approach. When the move to remote learning presented so many challenges to our empathetic connection with our students, we sought and found ways to overcome that barrier and provided multiple creative new ways to reach them, without putting their safety, security, or health in jeopardy. In fact, many faculty and students have expressed a stronger sense of connection, and the resulting motivation to learn, as a corollary result of going online during the pandemic.

We come before you now, from across many disciplines, united by a common desire to understand the circumstances presented by the novel coronavirus using a rational, analytical, evidence- and science-based approach. With this in mind, we are quite concerned about many aspects of the MDC administration’s plans to reopen our campuses on September 28^th. The MDC Pandemic Outbreak Recovery Plan is found to be lacking in the following areas (we can gladly provide quality, evidence-based sources to back up our concerns):

·     Inadequate Pre-Screening Before Coming to Campus. Other colleges and institutions report much greater compliance with symptom, behavior, and test reporting via an online application with questions that are answered daily before arriving on campus. The “green light” to enter campus is provided through the user’s ID, which can be swiped on arrival, with no need for a questioning station or a bracelet.

·     Ineffective Screening Stations upon Campus Arrival. Temperature checks have been shown to be minimally effective and reveal only a small percentage of COVID-19 positive individuals. They can be more effective in conjunction with anonymous, app-based questionnaires. Point of entry questions may violate personal privacy and may often be answered untruthfully. Ironically, one of the College’s suggested questions is whether the individual has traveled to a high-risk area. For the last six months, Miami-Dade County would have been in that category, making anyone who arrives at our campuses an automatic reject for entering.  

·     Inadequate Preparation for How to Handle Symptomatic, High-Risk Behavior, and COVID-19 Positive Reporting. The College’s so-called reporting protocol is simply a flowchart with no indication of what decisions are to be made for COVID-19 positive students or employees, and how those decisions are to be implemented. The first step for reporting, in every case, is to either the student’s classroom instructor, or the employee’s immediate manager. This violates every norm for safeguarding the privacy of personal medical information and will greatly reduce reporting compliance. The roles of the Dean of Student’s Office and Human Resources are not clear or complete in these flow-chart documents.

·     Lack of Any Testing Regimen. The College’s plan does not mention any routine testing for students or employees. Virtually the only colleges that report any success in controlling the spread of the virus on campus have implemented a robust system of multiple weekly tests for every individual, with a strong follow-up contact tracing system.

·     No Contact Tracing System is mentioned in the Campus Reopening Plan. Vague reference is made to an older infectious disease policy that is completely inadequate for current circumstances.

·     Unclear Provisioning and Use of Personal Protective Equipment. It is not clear what kinds of masks or other equipment might be required or suggested, whether individuals are to provide protection for themselves, who will check if the equipment is of good quality, and what resources the College has to provide PPE. The College’s plan also lacks guidance on whether or how the faculty are to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing in the classroom.

·     Inadequate Crowd Flow Procedures with Little Provision for Maintaining Social Distancing. The plan mentions signage to try to control movement between classrooms and buildings. However, no indication is given of how this will operate, who will enforce it, or whether students will be oriented to the new building movement restrictions. Additionally, the plan does not adequately cover use of elevators and escalators, and no additional time has been provided in class schedules for what will inevitably be slower transitions if social distancing is to be maintained.  

·     Botched Scheduling System. Faculty and students are now receiving room and time schedules that, rather than minimize their time and movement on campus, appear to sometimes increase travel between classes and do not account, in any way, for students being required, on a single day, to move back and forth between remote and on-campus classes.

·     Building Ventilation and Cleaning Protocols. The plan gives more details on these subjects than any other, even though they may not be the most important mechanisms to prevention spread of the virus. And while details are given, the standards and guidelines that are being used are not always clear or appropriate.  

Why reopen our campuses, given the risks and knowing that the remote learning alternative is safe and effective?

Hybrid partial attendance in masked, distanced, partially populated, poorly scheduled classrooms amidst an atmosphere of fear on campus will not be, in any way, an improvement upon our current well-managed remote learning online classrooms. We are the ones who are on the front lines, with our fingers on the pulse of our students and colleagues. Every indication is that they are fearful, dreading a return to campus, suspicious of the circumstances upon which the College is attempting to reopen, and very reluctant to participate in this guaranteed-to-fail operation. Reopening our campuses now may additionally compromise the safety and security of those very few classes and programs that absolutely require hands-on training, which have been functioning under more restricted campus access.

We know and understand that some students feel they are missing out on something by not being physically present in the classroom and on campus. However, our informal polling suggests that the vast majority are glad to be safe in the online environment, are finding it equally or more valuable to their learning and their career goals, and can see no justification for risking exposure to the novel coronavirus by going to campus. We refer you to the online “Keep MDC Online for Fall 2020” petition with over 16,000 signatures, the 130 plus universally negative, yet insightful and thoughtful, comments on Dr. Rodicio’s campus reopening YouTube message and the lack of any counter-balancing social messaging in favor of reopening our campuses.  

Every day, all of us who work in education, or at any institution for that matter, must make risk-based decisions. In education, these are rarely life-and-death choices. However, that is no longer the case when it comes to COVID-19, the potentially fatal disease that the novel coronavirus causes. Although our campus community may be of a younger average age that has shown lower mortality with COVID-19, Miami households very often include elderly relatives, and students as well as employees may, after exposure on campus, take the virus with them to their homes. At the same time, younger people seem to be facing long-term health consequences that will not be fully understood until we know the complete etiology of the disease. The decision to open campuses, therefore, is a decision to open our Miami Dade College population, and their families and loved ones, to potentially severe long-term health consequences, and even death. Given our proven ability to provide quality safe education remotely, and given these facts about the virus, we cannot see any justification for returning to the on-the-ground classroom at this time. Obviously, our administration sees otherwise, but they have yet to make their case. Additionally, they are not providing the safeguards that essential service institutions, and some other colleges and universities, have found to be effective at minimizing exposure to, and spread of, the virus.