In an email sent to students late Tuesday night, the University announced that classes will be moved online from after spring break until April 5. The email encouraged students to stay home until that date but to apply by next Wednesday if they wish to stay on campus. That suggestion leaves students pining to get home with another concern: how to fund travel home.

The move was made in the interest of students’ health and safety, but it leaves students who did not plan to go home for spring break with more questions than answers. Low-income students who are planning to stay on campus over the break now need to finance travel plans, and those who live out of the country need to make the trek back home. We need financial resources and pointers to help us pack up our bags and afford a trip home. We need more than a notice saying we should leave campus by next week.

Those worries are amplified by the increase in presumptive cases of COVID-19 in the District. Students want to leave campus and avoid the growing health concerns, but what happens to those who need to stay? Finding the money for flights, buses or trains within a week can be difficult for students who did not originally intend to leave. Students who cannot go home will be isolated from presumably thousands of peers who can evacuate.

The University should have been more transparent about the expected push to move classes online and given students an earlier warning that they would not be welcome back on campus for a few weeks. Professors had a warning. They were told to prepare online courses as early as last week. They were given resources to prepare those courses, too. Students also needed that logistical information so they could talk with their families about plans to go home.

The expected date to return to campus gives students and faculty a general idea of how long this hiatus will last. But the virus is continuing to spread, so it would not be a surprise if we waited longer before moving back into our residence halls. For all we know, we could end up like Harvard University and finish up the rest of the semester from a computer screen. That would be even more isolating for students who never had the chance to get home.

This uncertainty is not entirely the University’s fault – they cannot control the nature of a possible pandemic. But GW can control how they keep their student body, faculty and staff informed. Moving forward, officials must fill the GW community in on their plans to respond to COVID-19 and provide students with the financial resources they need to get home.

Hannah Thacker, a sophomore majoring in political communication, is the contributing opinions editor.