CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A group of students and a faculty member at Davidson College are on a mission to make sure school reopening plans are safe. 

When COVID-19 hit in March they started the College Crisis Initiative or C2I​.

It's a database that tracks not only university and college reopening plans around the country but also what is and isn't working.

Now they are gaining national attention especially as schools figure out what to do this spring.

“Even though we're students in some ways, we're very much emerging experts in this because we've done this the past seven months, really put together a scrappy team. It's the young and scrappy 20 something year old who will sort of get it done in that mindset,” Davidson junior Madeline Buitendorp says.​

One of the big findings they learned has to do with testing.

They found the schools that did well not only followed the Three W's but also tested students a lot and tested both symptomatic and asymptomatic students.

“A lot of institutions that aren't doing as well with testing or testing as frequently are struggling to find those undetectable viral hotspots on their campuses,” Davidson College student Samuel Owusu says.

That advice comes from a trusted source. Davidson College tests all of its students once a week, which C2I says costs around $200,000 a week, and the school says that has resulted in zero active student cases of COVID-19.

“It takes a lot of money to do. So as policy makers are thinking about the future of what our lives look like...it would be exceptionally wise to appropriate funding to those institutions to be able to purchase those tests,” says Chris Marsicano, who is the founding director of the College Crisis Initiative.