Today marks the one year anniversary of George Brown College (GBC) closing all of its facilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back on one of the most challenging years in education through those who experienced it firsthand: educators, students, and faculty members around shared their recollections of March 16, 2020, the day that everything changed. 

“I remember being on campus and it feeling like a bit of a ghost town. I remember feeling that way because there weren’t as many people there as we had seen before. And I think many people had chosen to stay home that day, because things felt very uncertain about what was happening,” says Chris McGrath, vice-president of Student Success. 

With COVID-19 cases increasing within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) along with public health warnings, many students decided to stop attending classes on campus the previous week. The announcement was made shortly later that all campus facilities would be closed by the end of the day, and faculties and departments around the college quickly began to strategize methods to deal with the challenging obstacles ahead. 

While there were no cases of COVID-19 at GBC at the time, college leadership decided it was best to take this step to safeguard the community. 

“For us, at the residence, I remember working on our pandemic response plan in January when news about COVID started to circle, and thinking, “Okay, this won’t be – this is just in case but there’s no way this is going to be for real. And it seems silly to think that now, but at the time, I was thinking, ‘this is just in case’”, says Erica Fearnall, general manager of Campus Living Centres. 

Twelve months later, Fearnall now realizes that she thought wrong. She says that the most important thing for the residence community was ensuring that students felt safe amid all the changes. Some students choose to stay and others packed their bags to go home for the remainder of the semester. As the residence team was forced to say goodbye to all the events planned for the end of the year, Fearnall says it felt like “missing something you never even had the chance to experience.” 

These emotions felt similar to those of the Huskies Men’s Basketball team, whose tournament was abruptly cancelled in the middle of their championship season, after winning the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association (OCAA) championships for the first time in 44 years. 

“From a varsity sports standpoint, that couldn’t have been any worse for our competitive athletes, who were right in the middle of a championship season for basketball,” says Melanie Gerin-Lajoie, manager of Athletics and Recreation. 

“That was difficult, I know that was heartbreaking for the athletes, for the coaches, our administration, everyone who works so hard to put all the effort into the year to get themselves in a position to go and represent your college at the nationals.”

Similarly, the department of Work-Integrated Learning, Experiential Education & Global Mobility also had to quickly restructure their plans amid cancellations due to COVID-19 as students were no longer able to attend their placements due to provincial stay-at-home orders. 

Rebecca Tapiero, project coordinator, says that it felt like “we were all entering into a space shuttle and being shuttled off into the future ten years ahead of where we should have been.” 

Tapiero said that GBC had always been planning to eventually progress to a more virtual environment within experiential learning opportunities around the college, but when COVID-19 happened, this turbo-charged them into the future, where they were forced to implement strategies they had been planning to do ten years ahead in real-time.

“It was very dramatic. Taking a large organization like GBC where students are used to the hands-on applied in-person learning, and then all of a sudden switching it to virtual overnight was a bit of a shellshock I think for everyone,” says Tapiero. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic endures, school looks different for every college, every faculty, every student. Looking back on this year, in what has been a time of constant, unprecedented change and restructure, this has also brought an opportunity to power through with resiliency in times of adversity. The changes brought to GBC have transformed the way students write exams, attend classes, and interact amongst peers – but one thing has remained consistent: student life at GBC has never been so innovative. 

“The good news is that we’re finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel, as vaccine production and distribution ramps up. There are good reasons to be hopeful, not to mention proud of what we’ve achieved together,” says President Anne Sado. 

To read the Dialog‘s story on the COVID-19 closure from the students’ perspective, click here.