Gulf Coast Covid-19 Regulations
Since the pandemic has started within January in the United States, many public schools and colleges have had to change the ways they approach learning and this hasn’t been an exception for Gulf Coast State College. Today on Campus, students are required to wear masks and be at least 6 feet apart from each other. These are guidelines you can see across the campus telling everyone what they should do if they have covid-19 and how to stay safe. Any and all equipment used during classes has to be wiped down before leaving.
Also, countless hand sanitizing stations have been added around the campus to fight against the virus and to keep students safe. On top of all that, there is a maintenance crew that goes around and tries to clean all of the facilities on campus too. So, the question now is how has education faired at Gulf Coast?
Interview with Dr. Goines
To help shine a light on this, I scheduled an interview with Dr. Goines, who is a teacher that oversees a great bit of the Digital Media program at Gulf Coast. One of the first questions asked was about how both her work life and personal life had been since the virus. “Well, Covid has really changed a lot within my personal life more so for my daughter because she didn’t go back to school after spring break. They had to go completely online. A good bit of her activities that she does ended up getting canceled at the end of year. She is back in school finally but it is with the typical restrictions, where parents aren’t allowed within the school and you can’t do any activities with them. So that is probably the biggest impact to me personally.” mentioned Dr. Goines.
She then continued by describing her work life by saying “work life has really changed because there is a drastic reduction of the amount of students I get to see everyday. You know, very few classes are being conducted within the face to face environment. So, having that interaction with the students has really gone down this semester as compared to other semesters.”
The School Environment
I asked a follow-up question to see if students were struggling or not with the changes. “I think so, I think that there are a lot of students who would prefer the face to face environment, who are now in an online environment. I have definitely seen an increase in student responses to online advising sessions or meeting sessions. There does seem to be some hesitancy in some students moving forward in the online learning environment.”
For the last question, I asked her if Covid-19 affected Commodore Productions in any way, which is a video production club at the college. She said that the club is still thriving and that she believes that the college has sort of recognized more just how much they still need them. “As a college, we took our welcome back week completely virtually. So, we had to film all of the footage for the event. It was like a 4 to 5-hour event that we filmed within the studio.” said Dr. Goines. This was just one of the events she mentioned that the college recently needed.
There have been many changes here at Gulf Coast State College but it is still a community of people to feel safe around and to learn from, whether it be online or in person. It is a place that the teachers and staff care about the safety of their students while welcoming them inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jakob Monroe
Student Author - Fall 2020
