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VOLUME LXXXI, ISSUE 3
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T HE T UFTS DAILY tuftsdaily.com
Friday, February 5, 2021
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Students profit off of GameStop short squeeze, share opinions by Alex Viveros News Editor
Several Tufts students reported profiting off of investments made in multiple short squeeze stocks last week, including GameStop and AMC, during what was an especially unusual week on Wall Street. One month ago, GameStop’s stock was at a modest price of $17.25 a share. Last week, however, the stock price skyrocketed to an all-time high of $483 on Jan. 28, before plunging back to under $100 earlier this week. The lead-up to this monumental surge in share prices began several weeks ago, when the popular subreddit r/ WallStreetBets — a forum consisting of a community of largely retail investors that exchange in both financial chatter and their fair share of memes — found out that a handful of large hedge funds were in the process of shorting the stocks of several struggling retail companies, including GameStop and AMC. see GAMESTOP, page 2
COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Wall Street sign is pictured in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
FEATURES
Kognito prepares Tufts community to support peers in distress by Juanita Asapokhai
Assistant Features Editor
In March 2020, Tufts Health and Wellness sent an email inviting students to participate in Kognito: a 30-40-minute online mental health education program that teaches students, staff and faculty how to engage a student who approaches them with mental health-related distress. In the program, the user interacts with a simulated student, and has the opportunity to observe the impact of different responses on the student’s body language, verbal communication and the overall progress of the conversations. Nearly a year later, a mental health task force composed of students and members of departments within Health and Wellness — including Counseling and Mental Health Services — is revitalizing the program at Tufts. It comes at a time when increased isolation, loss of employment and loved ones and illness-related anxiety pose major threats to the mental well-being of the Tufts community. Michelle Bowdler, executive director of Health and Wellness, used a phrase that has become a catch-all term to describe the
events of the past twelve months: “How many times can we say this is ‘an unprecedented time?'” But while Kognito is especially well-suited to the current socially distanced conditions of the world, the implementation of the program at Tufts has been on the docket since early 2020, and is the culmination of a recent movement towards improving mental health services on campus that began almost four years ago. “It was a combination of [interest] from faculty, staff, and students who over time had said to us that they were interested in developing more skills in terms of if somebody was struggling … [they wanted] to feel like they knew who and how to refer [them to],” Bowdler said. “We had done some work particularly with faculty on how to help a student in distress, but they were still looking for a little bit more practical information on top of what the counseling center already does with training.” The opportunity to offer this information came in 2017, when a private donor approached Health and Wellness with funds to be allocated toward mental health projects. For the first three years these funds support-
ed mindfulness and meditation programs, aimed at stress and anxiety reduction. In the last year, the donor expressed interest in a project that would destigmatize mental health and make people more comfortable if their peers approached them with concerns. The mental health task force proposed Kognito to the donor, singling it out as one of few evidence-based mental health training programs that was, at the time, listed on the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices — a federal database of mental health and substance abuse treatment programs backed by scientific research. The registry has since been suspended by federal health officials. In addition to higher education programming, Kognito offers mental health education and training for educators working with preschoolers through twelfth graders, healthcare workers and government or nonprofit organization employees. The program also features specific training modules for mental health-related issues like bullying, management of chronic disease and substance abuse. According to see KOGNITO , page 4
Still no date on Somerville schools’ return to inperson learning by Alexander Thompson Assistant News Editor
More than 10 months after schools closed due to the pandemic, Somerville’s public school students still do not know when they will set foot in their classrooms again. In a town hall on Jan. 26, Somerville Public Schools and city of Somerville officials discussed plans for the eventual return to in-person learning but declined to give set start dates for any of the phases. City officials cited major hurdles to in-person learning, one of which is that they are aiming to install upgraded air filters, as well as a number of other modifications to increase air circulation, in school buildings, but they are not done yet. Rich Raiche, the city’s director of infrastructure and asset management, showed attendees projections that renovations at Somerville High School will be completed between this week and the middle of March. The work at a number of the city’s elementary and middle schools will be finished
SPORTS / back
ARTS / page 5
OPINION / 8
Chiefs or Bucs? See our predictions for the Super Bowl inside
Tufts students self-publish books, discuss journeys
Viewpoints: Awaiting COVID-19 vaccines at Tufts
sometime between mid-February and the end of March, with others potentially not being finished until the end of August. Somerville Public Schools will not reopen before the completion of the filtration projects, and because the city does not have set dates for when that will occur, it cannot offer parents and students a fixed return schedule. “We acknowledge that it can be frustrating for the families because we’re not standing here and saying this is the date your student is going to this building,” Raiche said. “While we beg everyone’s forgiveness for that level of complexity … it’s the best and fastest way to get students back into the buildings with the least disruptions to the families.” In November, the city announced a tentative in-person reopening plan that would have begun in December and under which most younger students would have been in hybrid instruction by now. However, delays in the filtration upgrades scuttled those plans. see SCHOOLS, page 3 NEWS
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