Spring break of 2020 was a huge turning point in a lot of people’s lives. After a year of the pandemic, schools are still trying to figure out the best way to handle breaks. Luckily, I got to talk to two students about what their break looks like this year.
(Keehli Campbell) “I don’t have a spring break and we got an extra long winter break, I feel like I don’t like it but I understand why they have to do that.”
(Campbell) “I think that it’s good to give students time off. As I said they gave us a really long winter break which helped a lot and I think that it’s just important for the schools to communicate the expectations.”
(Hannah Debok) “My school split spring break up into two long weekends.”
(Debok) “Which, I think it’s a decent way to do it just because I feel like students really do need a break just to like let their brain rest and everything but obviously the alternative would be better and it’s kind of frustrating because teachers are still assigning things during our break.”
Schools claim their one of their main focuses is to reduce the amount of cases on campus, in-person classes and splitting up breaks, can hopefully deter people from traveling and bringing in more cases.
(Campbell) “Since they moved some classes back to in-person it’s kind of hard to still try to do one so I’m not doing anything and I don’t know anyone else that is either.”
(Debok) “I’m hoping just to try and get ahead on homework even though I still will have some assignments that I need to be doing it would be nice to like get some of the smaller things out of the way while on break.”
A few weeks ago, five KU frats were ordered a ten day ban for public health violations. The question is, is this enough to keep students safe. And what will schools do if cases do rise after spring break?
(Campbell) “They already sent an email saying that next year in the fall we’re going to be pretty much completely back in person and we already have a lot of classes that are in person right now we still have the football games and the basketball games going as normal so I think that they are trying.”
(Debok) “I definitely think they could’ve handled it better. They’ve already announced that there won’t be graduation this year for seniors but they’re allowing basketball games to pretty much continue on almost normal and so I know a lot of people were really upset by that and also just with housing and everything they announced that only freshman could live on campus so everybody else had to find an apartment off-campus so everybody did that and then they announced that school was going to be fully online so a lot of people ended up paying for apartments that they either don’t use or didn’t even really want in the first place so things just got really sticky I wish they would’ve been more thoughtful about it.”
Reporting from the Campus Ledger, this has been Paige Winters.