Twenty percent of Trinity Washington University students have had a close relative or friend die from COVID 19. Nearly 40 percent are worried about paying their bills and need more support. And more than one-third are responsible for caring for other members of their family.
Those striking data points from the university’s February community survey don’t even address the school-related anxieties and pressures facing Trinity students, faculty and staff. They’re also facing the challenge of figuring out the logistics of returning students and faculty safely to the classrooms and resuming normal college life.
The community survey is one tool being used by university president Patricia McGuire to stay in touch with students, faculty and staff, who remain scattered around the country, working and studying online from wherever home is. She also holds a weekly online town hall session, open to anyone connected with the university, where topics are wide ranging.
“They have really helped me do a ‘temperature check,’ on our far-flung community,” McGuire told the Catholic Standard in a phone interview. The February survey, the first since school resumed after the winter break, “showed me there are some pretty strong feelings about reopening.”
The community survey asked questions about people’s circumstances, ranging from their financial stability to whether they have had COVID themselves, as well as gauging their comfort level with returning to on-campus learning. More than 275 people responded to the February survey, about half of them students, the rest a mixture of faculty and staff.
In addition to 20 percent of students who responded to the survey having lost someone close to COVID, 16 percent of faculty also have had a COVID death close to them. The survey also showed that 11 percent of students and 6 percent of faculty had tested positive for the illness and recovered completely. Another 1 percent of responding students and 2 percent of faculty said they currently had symptoms of COVID.
Yoseline Rodriguez is one student who has dealt with the death of a relative from COVID in the last year. Her family also struggled last summer with the suicide of a teenage neighbor, a close friend of Rodriguez’s younger sisters. A senior majoring in health services as well as business and political science, Rodriguez is back living on campus this semester after returning home to Apopka, Florida, last year while working in a fellowship.
Her uncle Cesár died in May, after contracting COVID at his job in a Florida warehouse where spices are packaged.
Everything about her uncle’s illness was difficult, she said. His employer knew someone in the factory was infected but provided no protective equipment for workers, she said. When her uncle became sick, he couldn’t afford to take time off and continued to go into work.
“Three at the factory died,” she said. When her uncle finally was admitted to a hospital, his wife and teenage daughter couldn’t go inside to be with him. When he died, “we had to have a Zoom funeral,” Rodriguez said. That meant her grandmother, his mother, couldn’t come to Florida or even participate from her home in Mexico.
Hardest for her family, she said, was that they couldn’t take time to grieve. “My parents continued to go to work,” she said. Rodriguez and her family are undocumented immigrants, though she has DACA protection from deportation. “In our undocumented community, they had to put on a face that everything was fine,” out of fear that any attention might get them targeted for deportation, she said.
Throughout, she said, the Trinity faculty and staff have been supportive. “Sister Ann (Howard, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur who serves as the director of campus ministry) was in charge of my fellowship, and she told me to take time off. She told me to grieve.”
Back on campus, Rodriguez has a small circle of friends she sees for walks or going to the gym, but she’s still lonely in a dorm room by herself and misses her family. “The Student Affairs office has been trying to do a lot to keep students involved,” she said. “And the professors are very understanding.” For example, she said, after she got a bad grade while struggling with her grief, her instructor gave her additional time to redo the assignment to get a better grade.
McGuire said she knew Trinity’s predominantly African American student body and their families are especially vulnerable to COVID, but the statistics from the community survey were startling. There was a definite uptick in the number of people affiliated with Trinity who reported having been sick with COVID after the Christmas break. To date, however, only one case had surfaced of anyone contracting COVID through a connection to the campus, she said.
While no students or employees of Trinity had died, among the people connected with Trinity there’s been a high toll of those who reported losing relatives to COVID. “One staffer lost five members of their family,” she said. “A faculty member lost both his brother and his wife.”
As campus ministry director, Sister Ann Howard said many aspects of university life continue to plug along in the virtual world.
About one-half the usual number of dorm residents are back on campus, living one to a room instead of the normal multiples. Nearly all classes are held online, however, except for some labs and courses such as some in the nursing school that require hands-on work.
Dorm residents “go out to get a box meal and go home to eat it. It’s not great, but they’re managing,” she said.
Though they can’t do many of the usual service projects out in the city, there is still an opportunity to help outdoors with the urban farm on the grounds of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land, a mile and one-half from campus, she said. There also are online Bible study sessions, a weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel and a weekly Mass on campus.
And preparation for some students to receive sacraments at Easter continues, said Sister Ann. Two of the students preparing for Confirmation this spring are back living with their families not far from campus. Leif Jackson, a junior majoring in human relations, is living with her mother and aunt in Washington.
Jackson said she has found the Trinity counseling community helpful over the last year, especially while being at home all day, every day.
“It’s such a drastic change when you’re used to going out all the time,” Jackson said. “You forget what day it is.”
Trinity Washington University senior Claudia Portillo-Diaz (CS photo/Andrew Biraj)
Claudia Portillo-Diaz, a senior majoring in psychology with an education minor, also is living with her parents and brother in Hyattsville, Maryland. Before the pandemic, she worked in the same Washington restaurant where her dad was a chef. He was laid off last spring and has had to go into construction work. Her mother has been able to continue her job in a food packing warehouse. But Portillo-Diaz herself has pretty much been home.
“I work best with in-person teaching,” she said. “Now I’m on-screen half of every day and in the same room every day.”
Early in the pandemic, Portillo-Diaz’s grandfather in El Salvador died from a heart attack, unrelated to COVID. But while normally she and her parents would have rushed to be with him, that wasn’t possible. Within hours of his death he had already been buried. Lockdowns meant that nobody who lived farther than a city bus ride away could get there. Delaying the funeral was pointless. “We understand,” she said, “but it hurt a lot.”
As of late February, the plan was for her and her father to travel to El Salvador at the end of March to mark the one year anniversary of her grandfather’s death.
Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University (Photo courtesy of Trinity Washington University)
In McGuire’s March 7 blog, she reported on information she’s gleaned from the weekly Campus Conversations, which are joined by 75-100 people, typically.
“People need a place to vent,” McGuire told the Catholic Standard. “They tell me it’s the one place they can see each other.”
Recently, the discussions focused on the COVID-19 vaccines, including one session in which Trinity alumna Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services and former Kansas governor, spent an hour discussing vaccines, McGuire reported in her blog.
