Today: Mar 29, 2024

Campus dinning closures

Donovan WilsonReporter

A couple of cases of COVID-19 within Adanti Student Center’s food court staff left Dunkin’ and Tres Habaneros temporarily closed down.

With much less students on campus than last semester and COVID-19 guidelines still in place, the student center food court already has much less staff. Then, on top of that, there were two confirmed cases within food court’s staff. There was one confirmed case in Dunkin’ and one confirmed case in Tres Habaneros, the Mexican food station next to the Grill in the food court.

“School figured that the best solution was to shut down Tres Habaneros entirely but shut down Dunkin’ only partially, with some of the options moving to where Bowlful was,” said Sodexo marketing director, Elizabeth Floyd.

The Dunkin’ was the most major issue, as the contact tracing led to only about four people being in the Dunkin’ staff and not quarantining. There are usually four people on at a time and this left no man power to run Dunkin’. So, Sodexo worked with the school and figured that the best solution was to shut Dunkin’s current location and capacity down completely. However, some of the options of Dunkin’ such as iced coffee and bagels were moved over to where Bowlful used to be for the time being.

A similar situation happened with the staffing of the normal food court which lead to not having as many people available as would be needed. As a result, Tres Habaneros was also closed down for the same duration of time as Dunkin’. The main difference between Dunkin’ and Tres Habaneros in this situation is that Tres Habaneros did not have offerings move over they completely out of commission.

“With the student population being really low already, a lot of the venues on campus are already closed or not operating at full capacity,” said Brad Crerar, director of Adanti Student Center.

The on-campus population is the lowest it’s been in years and on top of that, there is a global pandemic going on so the food services on campus have been directly affected less students paying for the services equals less money. As a result of this, not all food venues on campus are even open and the ones that are have cut back more hours compared to last semester. As a result of this, before the temporary shutdown, Dunkin’, The Grill and Tres Habaneros were the only options in the student center food court with sandwich options moving to the grill.

The goal is for this shutdown to be temporary, but the situation will develop further as time goes on. The original plan was for this temporary situation to end and reopen as normally as possible on March 1st. However, as with everything in the world of COVID-19, the situation is ever fluctuating but at this time the reopening date for Dunkin’ and Tres Habaneros is March 8th, one week later than expected but that is subject to change.

“I think it’s great that the school is trying to keep the Dunkin’ options available because that’s really a hot spot on campus used by a lot of students regardless of how little are on campus,” said exercise science major Cassidy Girolamo, a junior.

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