Within the past two years, students have been off-campus, doing online classes, and working hard while the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging on. Now that students have begun returning to campus, many new questions and problems arise. 

Since on-campus classes are back, students and teachers must be vaccinated and wear masks indoors. Some schools even offer free COVID testing.

Some students are worried or unaware of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District’s process on testing and the district’s COVID precaution requirements.

According to the district’s website, testings are open Monday and Wednesday or Monday and Tuesday at the Grossmont and Cuyamaca campuses, respectively.

When students test positive for COVID, they must stay home for at least five days and return to campus when they have tested negative with no symptoms. The COVID tests also have to be completed by a monitored testing site and cannot be done by students themselves. 

To ensure all relevant COVID-19 information is public to everyone, there is an additional section on the website with exact COVID cases between students and employees, as well as the testing positivity rate.

With all this information, some students are still concerned other students will be dishonest if they test positive or show up when they feel sick. 

“I really don’t like the idea that people can just show up whenever they want without having confirmed with anybody that they actually tested positive,” said Diego Mendoza, a student at Cuyamaca College. “I’ve been taking online classes the whole time because I’d rather not risk being exposed; honestly, I just don’t trust people when it comes to this stuff.”

Mendoza explained more of his concerns about how people who test positive for COVID can still come on campus, knowing they’re sick, and spread it to others.

When asked why he is worried when everyone is vaccinated and masked, he said: “I’m just used to being really careful, I guess, nowadays. Especially because of when I’ve been sick. It’s really hit me hard.”

On the other hand, many students seem not to be worried or unaware it was an issue. 

Ben Zieske, a student at Grossmont, agreed with this sentiment: “I don’t see the reasoning for being so worried if people test or not, because we have all of these mandates anyways on us. Why bother worrying about testing if we’ll all be overly protected anyways?”

Zieske said he felt very strongly about quitting the testing on people, as he said it would be “one less thing that we all have to keep up with.” 

While masking and testing will still be a prominent topic for a long time to come, strong opinions from both sides will always arise. 

Fortunately, with the surge of cases waning down, there is a chance for tests to go away for good and a sense of normalcy to come to the campuses once again.

This article originally appeared in the March 2022 print issue of The Summit.