A number of students who depended on boarding facilities at various schools last year will this year find themselves competing for space on campus due to the distancing protocols brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Kasan Troupe, acting chief education officer, addressing queries from parents on those arrangements during the first virtual parent consultation held recently, said entities which offer boarding were holding their own discussions on the issue but indicated that “some students will have to travel”.

Mark Smith, principal of Munro College, a boarding school for boys in St Elizabeth, is one of those institutions that will have fewer student residents come September when schools officially reopen their doors.

“We have reduced our boarding population from the over 250 that we normally host and we are looking at somewhere around 160 to 200 based on the distancing protocols. It has really pinched us hard in terms of the finances but we have to do what is in the best interest of the students. We started to look at the other spaces that we have on campus and started repurposing some of the spaces, being very creative with the layout to ensure we maintain the six-feet distancing on the dormitories while at the same time maximising space but everything is in keeping with the best practices,” Smith told the Jamaica Observer.

He said the institution, which has some 1,032 students in total, will be reducing the number of boarders per room.

“Typically there would be four students per room, now there are only two. We would have 12 in the larger dorms [but] those have been reduced to six and in some cases seven. Fortunately most of our rooms do not use bunk beds but in those rooms that do we cannot use both bunks,” Smith said.

He said the school’s leadership, from as early as March 20, began reimagining what a boarding operation would look like in the context of a COVID-19 world.

“I met with my senior management team and told them to put in place plans for what the reopening would look like. We did a lot of research looking at what was happening in Asia in particular [as] the numbers have been relatively low in that side of the world in terms of managing, relative to what we see happening in the [United] States, so we started looking at the safety protocols issued by the World Health Organization and our own Ministry of Health, and we pulled together a document that outlines the protocols which would be necessary,” Smith said. He said the temporary reopening of schools in June for preparations and the hosting of the Caribbean Secondary Examination Council exams served as a good test run.

Other safety measures, he said, include the creation of two isolation rooms, extensive training for dorm supervisors and the repurposing of other spaces on the campus.

“We are being very creative with the layout to ensure we maintain the six-foot distancing on the dormitories, while at the same time maximising space, but everything is in keeping with the best practices. We have looked at extending the times the students go to the dining halls to ensure that there are less persons there. The sanitation stations have been placed throughout the campus, we have invested in automated dispensers all over as well as wash stations. There is a lot of signage on campus,” Smith outlined.

In addition, students will be expected to sign a contract upon entering the school, pledging to abide by the social distancing guidelines and other safety protocols.

“The wearing of masks is compulsory. When coming on, all the luggage is sanitised, medical officers are present and they are screened when entering the campus and during that screening students have to complete a questionnaire and will be required to state whether anyone in their household travelled or has been quarantined,” the principal said.

“Our big concept is to ensure that we create a safety bubble. If there is a spike (in the number of cases), we have embarked on a digital classroom model which has seen us integrating online teaching and learning with our regular classroom operations. So if there is a change in the situation and parents don’t feel comfortable sending their children out, they will be able to access online classes,” Smith told the Observer.

Principal for the neighbouring Hampton School, one of the oldest all-girls’ boarding schools in Jamaica, Mahvell Charlton Brown, told the Observer that on campus residency will be an even more competitive process this year.

“We see where we will have to operate at 50 per cent occupancy, so instead of the 14 in the rooms we will be looking at just seven persons. At this point we do not see ourselves being able to accommodate more than 160 young ladies. Under normal circumstances we can accommodate a maximum 300 young ladies. At the start of last year we had 264. We will now need to reduce that,” she said.

The Hampton principal said while cognisant of the “interest and the demand” for boarding accommodation the school “will have to prioritise applications, based on where the young ladies live”.

“ So for this year we have had to request reapplications, so all students who boarded last year and want to board this year will have to reapply so that we can know how to prioritise. We are using a 30 to 45 mile radius as our guide, so we have assessed the distance from our school to various towns. So we look at a Mandeville, a Santa Cruz, a Christiana and we will seek to accommodate those persons who live beyond first and then where there might be other extenuating circumstances we hope to be able to facilitate. Right now we are going through the short-listing and we do hope to get to parents by next week so that they will know,” she said.

As far as physical preparations go, she said the school has done the prescribed installation of the hand washing stations outside every dormitory and sanitiser dispensers installed on the inside of every building. A number of classrooms have also been converted with collapsible walls taken down to create larger spaces. “We converted a number of our classrooms, collapsed walls to create larger classrooms,” Charlton Brown however said. But even with that some groups will have to be further subdivided.

In the meantime, she said Hampton, which ended the last school year with 1,236 students is currently refining its COVID-19 operational manual.

“We had to prepare an action plan for the Ministry of Education and we are pulling from that the operational plan and it will indicate what days a particular grade will attend, what number of days there will be face-to-face classes, etcetera. We are seeing where the average grade will attend for three days but there are certain priority grades where we will allow for four-day attendance,” she said, noting that some lessons will have to be supplemented by distance learning arrangements.

And the University of Technology, Jamaica, in St Andrew, has indicated that it will be restricting dormitory accommodations to one person per room and that accommodations for international students, students from rural Jamaica and students with peculiar difficulties in accessing the Internet will be prioritised.

Students whose courses of study require face-to-face and the use of laboratories and clinical activities will be allowed short-term accommodations on designated halls of residence, while new and returning international students will be required to observe the requirement to be quarantined for a period of 14 days, in keeping with the Government’s COVID-19 protocols. Teaching will commence on August 24, and special provisions will be made during the first week to enable full integration of students in the use of the online teaching and learning platforms, the university said in a recent statement.

The University of the West Indies, Mona, meanwhile, said halls of residence will prioritise students who are required to do face-to-face classes, based on distance from campus, students who live outside of Jamaica, or those who have Internet access challenges. “The campus will commence teaching on September 7 and will offer a blended delivery mode, with some programmes/courses to be offered in a face-to-face mode, while others will be offered remotely/online.