Page 27 - Campus Technology, October/November 2020

through our Health Corps, a group of approximately 15 people who are focused every day, seven days a week on serving our students who test positive or are con- tact traced. And a couple other factors. But those are the key indicators that we’re looking at on a daily basis.
CT: What are the origins of UK’s Pandemic Response Team and how does it work?
Monday: When we think about incidents — and some of us who have been involved at the university have been in various other incident responses, whether it was a weather event, whether it was an emergency event, whether it was some type of criminal event that happened in and around campuses — normally you start with a core group: We call that the Emer- gency Operations Center. That EOC scales, but let’s call it 10 to 15 members who have been meeting full- time, five days a week, weekends when necessary, almost since March. That group was the core, and then everything expanded — you expand your response based on the challenge. As the challenge became more acute and became more serious, we stood up more and more teams. We started with a couple work streams talking about housing and dining and course delivery, and then that has expanded to look at everything from legal, to child care issues, to human resource issues, to how we can serve our stu- dents from a student services standpoint, how we recruited the class for this fall from an enrollment management standpoint. You expand based on the challenge: Well, this is an unprecedented challenge I think for most of us, maybe all of us. We continue to lean in to “more equals better”: Diversification of ideas is going to produce a better outcome, so how do we continue to have a big table, lean in to our faculty, our staff and our students, and add representatives from the representative groups. Much appreciation to our university senate, our staff senate, our student government association for their involvement.
One of the things that’s one of our key principles as we think about response is that finances come second. We’re not making decisions based on a dollar, we’re making decisions based on can we do these things and make it easier to be safe. Can we focus and how do we show by our actions and words that we care. That’s the frame, and we’re going to do that while we over-com- municate and focus in on the health and safety of all of our community members.
“A lot of us say every day, another day we get is another day of information. It’s another day of data, it’s another day we can be most informed about how to respond and how to best position us to not only overcome the pandemic, but to figure out ways to accelerate out of it as well.” — Dr. Eric Monday
campustechnology.com
27