TEXAS -- School campuses across Texas are preparing for a very different fall semester. While public school districts and centers of higher education have received guidelines from the CDC, the TEA, and the state of Texas itself, none of these campuses may look the same in the future.

“As Virginia Woolf said, ‘the future is dark.' It’s unknowable,” said Southwestern University’s Laura Skandera-Trombley. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a negative.”

Skandera-Trombley just took the reins at Southwestern University, when COVID-19 first took hold.

“We have to be comfortable living with that fluidity,” she said.

She, along with fellow university leadership, scrambled to come up with a plan to reopen this fall after parents, students and faculty expressed concern over health and safety on campus.

“Social distancing in the residence halls, as well as the classroom, plexiglass shields in the cafeterias,” Skandera-Trombley recounted.

Ultimately, Southwestern decided to reopen with in-person classes, but that could change.

“We’re moving forward on this one path at the moment and then we will wait and see if there’s anything else that would make us, by necessity, come up with an alternative—which is online instruction—which obviously is not our preference,” she explained.

Just a few miles south, Concordia University chose the middle ground.

“We will run in-person classes but we are giving students the opportunity to choose whether they want to participate in these classes virtually or in person,” provost Kristi Kirk said. “We really believe that the current situation affects all of us differently. We all have unique situations and we want our students to be able to choose the solution that is right for them.”

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Concordia already made adjustments.

“First of all, move classes to bigger spaces as much as we can. That allows you to keep the same size in a more spread apart space,” she said. “In some classes, we will limit how many people can participate face to face at a time.”

While it looked ideal between sessions, it could change when students come back. Kirk asked for a little grace on behalf of fellow school leaders.

“We see this as a short blip in a college student’s path even if it lasts a semester or even a whole year, if that were the case,” she said. “It’s not their whole college experience, just part of their experience.”

Because in these unprecedented times, even leaders in academia could be caught in a learning curve.

“This is not a forever. This is for right now,” Trombley stressed.