Collection Tree makes public sub collections private?

I'm having students build collections in a self-hosted installation of Omeka. What I would like to do is use Collection Tree to have students make a top-level collection titled with their name, to keep track of who's managing what collection, and then have sub-collections within that for public display. I'd like the collection with the students' names to be private, and the sub-collections to be public.

But it looks like that if the top level collection is private, all the subcollections are also private even if they're individually set to be public. Is there a way to set subcollections to be publicly visibile within a private top-level collection? I'm comfortable with messing around in the files, I'd just like an idea of where to start.

Or is there some other workaround I'm not seeing? For the purpose of the class, I'd like to have some way to mark on the admin side which student is managing what collections/items, but I don't want student names visible from the public side, so the contributor field and Contribution plugin don't seem like good options.

Hi,

Keep public the users collections and change the theme to not display these root collections?

Sincerely,

Daniel Berthereau
Infodoc & Knowledge management

Thank you! That does what I need. In case anyone else runs into this, in the theme's stylesheet I went in and added

#collection-tree{
visibility: hidden;
}

#collection-tree ul > li > ul {
visibility: visible;
}