PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Brown University will move to a three-term model for the next academic year, students will live alone in dorm rooms, and classes with more than 20 students will be taught remotely to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the Ivy League university announced Tuesday.
Undergraduates will be required to be on campus for two of the three terms — fall, spring and summer — but no first-year students will attend the fall term, President Christina Paxson said in a letter to students and made public by the school.
Giving students who live on campus a single room, and limiting in-person class sizes to 20 students will enable safe distancing of students and instructors in classrooms, the school said.
“Although I am deeply disappointed that we can’t welcome our first-year students to campus in the fall, we simply don’t think that it is safe to have all undergraduates on campus simultaneously,” Paxson said. “We hope that by the time the spring term begins, the public health situation will have improved enough that we no longer need a de-densified campus.”
All graduate students will have the option to study in person or remotely.
All students will be tested for COVID-19 when they return to Brown, and students will be required to participate in random testing to monitor for community spread of the coronavirus, the school announced.
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EVICTION SURGE EXPECTED
Hundreds of Rhode Island families who lost income during the coronavirus pandemic could lose their rented homes now that the state moratorium on evictions has been lifted, housing advocates say.
“Evictions were a crisis in the state long before the pandemic,” Kristina Contreras Fox, a senior policy analyst with the Rhode Island Coalition for Homelessness, told The Providence Journal.
A total of 420 eviction cases were filed from June 2 through June 30 for nonpayment, according to Kara Picozzi, a spokeswoman for the state courts. That adds to the 360 that remained pending prior to the courts shutting down March 17.
Those numbers are expected to climb in the coming months as the federal unemployment supplement runs out at the end of July.
Some assistance programs have been established to help provide rent relief.
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BLOCK ISLAND WORKER POSITIVE
A summer worker on Block Island has tested positive for the coronavirus, the first confirmed case of the disease on the vacation destination since March.
The worker’s test result came back late Sunday, according to a posting on the town of New Shoreham’s website Monday.
The worker’s employer activated the business’s COVID-19 response plan, the employee was isolated, and the state Department of Health was notified, according to the statement. Contact tracing has started.
Neither the worker nor the business was publicly identified.
It was the first confirmed case of the disease on the island since late March, when a resident who had visited New York tested positive.
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