5 coronavirus things: Most dining locations at UT-Dallas to close until further notice

In this special edition of 5 Things, Food Management highlights five things you may have missed recently about developments regarding coronavirus and its impact on onsite dining.

Here’s your list for today:

About two-thirds of on-campus dining locations at the University of Texas-Dallas will close until further notice. The university announced these closures on Aug. 27 and said that Starship and Boost mobile ordering will still be available at participating locations.

In an email interview with The Mercury, director of food and retail services Pam Stanley said that the current population on campus is such that the locations needed to be closed for the fall semester.

“We had to make the very difficult decision to reduce the number of retail dining venues open on campus. This was due to the reduced population of students, staff and faculty on campus. It was not sustainable to keep all our dining venues open without the volume,” Stanley said. “However, we are happy to look at reopening locations as the need increases.”.

Read more: University closes select fall 2020 dining venues

School districts in urban areas and those that serve the most children in poverty are the most likely to be offering full-time remote instruction this fall, according to a report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a Seattle-based research organization. While 65% of rural districts plan to start fully in-person this fall, only 24% of suburban districts and 9% of urban districts plan to do so. In fact, few urban districts will be offering any in-person instruction at the start of the year. Nearly 4 of every 5 urban districts were planning to start fully remote this fall.

Related:5 coronavirus things: School cafeteria workers laid off; reassigned to assist with students’ learning programs

Read more: Urban, High-Poverty Schools Prefer Remote Instruction Under COVID-19, Report Finds

Many students at New York University (NYU) in quarantine weren’t provided food for an entire day, and those that did found themselves with inadequate meals that often went against their dietary restrictions. NYU provided quarantining students with $30 per day on Grubhub so they could order adequate meals after the issues with meal delivery went public. This new program certainly helped, but it does very little to prevent incidents like this from taking place in the future.

Read more: NYU, Cut Ties With Chartwells

Related:10 ways for food service chefs to fire up the flavors of Spain

A cafeteria worker sick with COVID-19 forced the entire kitchen staff at tiny Mountain Pine School District in Arkansas into quarantine, but administrators shuffled staff to keep serving meals and keep students in class. "There's a lot of poverty here so sometimes the two meals that they eat here are the two meals that they get," said Denise Smith, the Garland County District's curriculum director, but on Tuesday, was cooking food for those students.

Read more: Teachers volunteer as cafeteria workers after kitchen staff quarantined

Bustling skyscrapers and office parks packed with workers could be a relic of the pre-pandemic world. The health crisis has forced millions of Americans to abandon their offices in favor of working from home, for better or worse. Now there are signs this may not be a short-term phenomenon, but more of a permanent shift in favor of remote work even after a COVID-19 vaccine is in place.

More than two-thirds (68%) of large company CEOs plan to downsize their office space, according to a survey released Tuesday by KPMG.

The pandemic is proving employees don't need to work in cubicles to be successful. And that in turn raises questions about the value of expensive office space, especially in high-priced cities like New York and San Francisco.

Read more: The office, as you know it, is dead

Bonus: How Cleveland schools are handling a remote learning scenario

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]