Student employees at the Lerner Health and Wellness Center spent the month waiting for their cash flows to return at the sole campus facility that remained closed in Foggy Bottom throughout the month.
Lerner will reopen Monday, capping off a three-week-long stretch when student employees were unable to complete their usual shifts at the gym and questioned the future of their in-person work. Student employees could participate in virtual customer service-related training and in-person cleaning sessions to earn money during the closure, but availability was limited.
Before students returned to campus for the spring semester, officials originally announced that Lerner would reopen Feb. 1 as part of their plan to slow the spread of the Omicron variant.
“We are able to take this action thanks to the collective efforts of our community members to keep one another healthy and safe,” an email announcing Lerner’s reopening last week states. “These important efforts include compliance with our booster dose mandate, the use of upgraded masks on our campuses and temporarily pausing in-person social gatherings and events.”
GW’s symptomatic COVID-19 testing also moved from the Colonial Health Center to Lerner earlier this month.
Andre Julien, a senior associate athletics director at Lerner, said Lerner is working to relocate some in-person group fitness classes to another location on campus as symptomatic COVID-19 testing will continue at Lerner for the “foreseeable future.” He said more information will come out this month on Lerner’s hours of operations and locations for the spring semester.
“We are grateful for our student employees who help keep Lerner Health and Wellness operating during the year,” Julien said.
Sophomore Claudia Blázquez, who works at Lerner as part of her Federal Work Study award, said she has felt concerned about not being able to work as she uses some of the money she earns to pay her tuition. She said GW should have communicated the announcement that Lerner would open on Jan. 31 instead of Feb. 1 earlier than just a few days before the change.
“I think the University could do a bit of a better job communicating with student employees,” she said. “But I think the staff at Lerner have done a really good job with talking to us, so it’s nice to have at least somebody communicate with us.”
Blázquez said her supervisors said in a recent meeting with employees that they expect the HVAC renovations that will close Lerner for “a portion” of 2022 to take place this summer.
“With HVAC, the way it works is they need to start and finish,” Blázquez said. “They can’t just start and then stop and then start and stop. I think that’s why they chose the summertime because there’s less people on campus and less students will be using the gym.”
Sophomore Jordyn Bailer, who is employed at Lerner as part of their Federal Work Study award, questioned why the closure lasted until Jan. 31 while in-person classes returned Jan. 18. They said their supervisors at Lerner have communicated updates on the building’s reopening through GroupMe messages and emails, but they wish GW emailed student employees more frequently about their plans to reopen Lerner.
“There’s a little bit of transparency, but not a lot and that’s just a little frustrating because obviously I haven’t really been able to work since December of last semester,” Bailer said.
Freshman Nick Isphording, who holds a non-Federal Work Study job at Lerner, said he was unable to take advantage of most of the paid, virtual training sessions that Lerner offered over the past few weeks because he was still adjusting to being back on campus and taking his new class schedule.
He said that he did attend a required, paid training session where Lerner staff went over a new procedure manual and reviewed old procedures. He said he felt that closing Lerner was the right decision to slow the spread of COVID-19 on campus and prevent classes from moving completely online.
“I think that it was the right cautionary measure to be taking so that way we didn’t all of a sudden have an upsurge and we have to go back online,” he said.
