HJBR Nov/Dec 2020

DIALOGUE 10 NOV / DEC 2020 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   Editor What are your thoughts on how school/education systems at all lev- els statewide are doing in handling this pandemic for students, their parents and employees? LaVeist I can’t speak for all of the schools in Louisiana. I don’t know what everyone is doing. I have had some communication with some of the schools. I think so far, we’re doing well, so knock on wood that things continue to go well for us. We have not had a significant outbreak. I know LSU has. I communicated with Loyola’s president just yesterday, and she says that they are doing well. And, I know Xavier has done well, too. So, it just depends. There are so many vari- ables involved in having in-person classes in this pandemic. It’s hard to really make generalizations from one university to the next, because the conditions are so differ- ent. At Tulane, we were able to put a lot of resources into setting up the campus to facilitate in-person learning. We have built outdoor classrooms. Before students could half of the deans said that their enrollment was down, and about half said their enroll- ment was up. The best I could determine is the schools that have had media attention tended to be the schools that have experi- enced an increase in enrollment. We’ve been able to get a good amount of media cover- age for the work that we’ve been doing with COVID-19, so I think it has certainly helped our enrollment. The curriculum is another story. It’s not so much the COVID pandemic that’s impacted our curriculum as it is the racial reckon- ing that’s happening within the country. I came to Tulane with the intent of having the school have a serious and sustained focus on racial equity. When the racial reckoning occurred after George Floyd’s killing and Breonna Taylor’s killing, it just created even more impetus to take a fresh look at the cur- riculum, and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re looking at the entire curriculum to make sure that we are adequately address- ing the issue of health equity. move on to the campus, they had to move into a hotel where everyone stayed until they had a negative test before they were allowed to even come on campus. We were able to do things that larger universities [and universities with fewer resources] just can’t do. So, I think it’s hard to say from one place to the next, because the universities are so different. We’re also testing our students twice per week. If you’re a university with 50,000 stu- dents, testing twice per week, you’re talking about 100,000 tests per week. At our scale, testing twice per week was something that was feasible, but it wouldn’t necessarily be feasible, or it would be very expensive, for a much bigger university to do. We also have the in-house capacity to test at our medi- cal school. So, there’s just a number of fac- tors that makes it really difficult in my mind to say: well this university, they seem to be doing OK, but this other one isn’t. What’s wrong with them? Because situations are so different from one place to the next, not everyone would have the resources to do Dean Thomas A. LaVeist with Provost Robin Forman, Tulane President Mike Fitts, and Board of Tulane member Kim Boyle.