Hartnell moves the deadline for a vaccine requirement after as many as 4,000 students don’t comply.

There were cupcakes and cheerful thank you’s at an in-person meeting of the Hartnell Community College District Governing Board on Tuesday, Dec. 14. The cupcakes were to celebrate the college’s winning soccer and track & field teams. The thank you’s were from trustees to staff and each other, ending with Chair Erica Padilla-Chavez thanking each trustee individually for their contributions.

Absent from the agenda was any discussion of the college’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate deadline that same day. Rumors were circulating among employees that more than 4,000 of approximately 10,200 total students currently enrolled failed to comply since the portal opened in October. In fact, the only indication that night that something might be amiss was an urgent plea by an administrative staff member to accept a union request to allow an extension of hybrid working conditions into the spring semester. Currently, some Hartnell staff are required to be back in person in January, despite the rising threat of the omicron variant.

The next day at a College Planning Council meeting attended by administrators, faculty, staff and students, administrators were pressed to confirm if the rumors were true that 4,000 students had missed the vaccine deadline. “You’re not wrong,” was the answer from an administrator, remembers Christine Svendsen, president of the Hartnell College Faculty Association. “So we know we’re in the ballpark,” Svendsen says.

Interim Superintendent/President Raúl Rodríguez, who was at that meeting, attributes the lag not to a low vaccination rate, but distraction: “Once the semester started winding down, we saw a big increase in student activity in terms of uploading,” he says by email.

The college isn’t saying publicly how many students did not upload photos of their vaccination cards by the Dec. 14 deadline. Hartnell spokesperson Scott Faust says no tally is necessary because the day after the original deadline, administrators extended the deadline to Jan. 13. The mandate applies to all students, including those who are enrolled in virtual learning.

Rodríguez expects compliance to rise by then. “We expect it to be a small number [by the Jan. 13 deadline] just as other colleges and universities have experienced,” he says.

In order to be eligible to register for spring classes that begin Jan. 24, students must upload to a third-party contractor, Med+Protector. The contractor is also accepting applications for, and ruling on, medical and religious exemptions. Faust says no breakdown of how many have applied for exemptions is available.

Monterey Peninsula College also has a vaccine mandate for all students with a deadline of Jan. 7. Its portal opened Dec. 15 and within five days, more than 1,000 students uploaded their cards, a spokesperson says.

Despite an in-house survey at Hartnell showing students have adjusted well to distance learning, the pressure from the board is to bring them back, Svendsen says, especially in light of Hartnell’s opening of two new satellite campuses in Soledad and Castroville this year. Svendsen thinks they may lose students to other institutions. “Why would students enroll online at Hartnell if they can go to another college that doesn’t require [vaccination for online classes]?” she says.