Lane College closes after 18 students test positive for COVID-19

JACKSON, Tenn. — It’s officially an almost-empty campus at Lane College.

Friday, the Jackson school announced they are sending students home for two weeks.

“We began the semester with this concept that we were going to create a bubble, and inside the bubble, we would have pods,” said Lane President Dr. Logan Hampton. “That thing was working along well, and then there was a party.”

Hampton says they planned for about 2% of the 1,100 students to be in isolation at one time, however, the issue came from the additional students who had to be in quarantine. That’s what actually prompted Lane to make the decision to send the other students home.

“One student might have three students they were in close contact with in the last 48 hours. One student had like 10 people. We started doing that math, and we thought, that number could be 80, 90 students that needed to quarantine by themselves for 14 days,” Hampton said.

All classes at the college have been moved online for now. Hampton says the real challenge is going to be when the students come back to campus.

“Our board is having some real intense discussions about that right now,” Hampton said. “We’ll be looking to them for some guidance, as well as our administrative team.”

But for now, all students left on campus are by themselves, receiving three meals and a snack a day.

“From the conversations that I’ve had with them over the weekend, they were just about as bored as they could possibly could be, asking in some instances if they could come out of quarantine. The obvious answer is absolutely no,” Hampton said.

The quarantine is currently set to end September 21.

Hampton added that some students had already gone home for the long weekend when the announcement was made. Other students completely moved out once it was made.