Page 30 - Campus Technology, October/November 2020

FEATURE > Emergency Response
“Typically in higher education we have a challenge where we set up a blue-ribbon committee of 25 people, or 20 people, or 15 people, based on position, and we produce reports. That doesn’t work. This has to be a living, breathing incident response system that can move and make decisions within hours, rather than days or weeks.”
pus. It’s been very reinforcing and reassuring to me. What we’ll do is the same thing I said to my team and the class that I teach: I said, “This is a require- ment of the university.” There was language the uni- versity senate encouraged us to put in our syllabi, and I put that in my syllabus — it’s in there and we had a conversation around it. I said, “The first con- versation is going to be between the two of us if we have a challenge. The second conversation is I’m going to report that to the dean of students.” We changed our code of student conduct to be more COVID-focused for this fall, and there are remedies
in that code if those have to be taken.
So far, we’ve had very good success with the mask
wearing. We’re still working on some social events and some compliance with isolation and quarantine orders, and then we’ll use the full power of the code of student conduct to interim suspend students who do not com- ply, and all the way to have hearings that could lead to additional actions as well. The numbers have been modest as it relates to those, but there have been stu- dents that we’re engaging in positive conversations around expectations.
CT: Are you setting up the campus for more outdoor activities or learning spaces?
Monday: We’ve set up 15 areas on the campus — we have about 800 acres in Lexington, KY, probably about 650 to 700 are available to use. Within the core component of campus we’ve set up 15 areas that are covered with seating, that are available for our stu- dents to socialize, to have events, to study, to take a Zoom call, if you will, if a student has an online class as well as a traditional delivery class as he or she moves and traverses the campus. They’re well utilized.
For programming space as well, we’re utilizing the
outdoors a lot more. We’ve had a couple outdoor movies where we set up the blankets that are 6 feet apart, provide [students] a canned Coke as well as a thing of popcorn as they come in, and have some pos- itive peers walking around to make sure we’re doing what we need to do and we’re physically distanced. And we’re going to do more and more of that.
But these 15 zones that we’ve set up throughout the campus, some make sense, [such as] right there by the student center, and some are spread out throughout the campus environment as well. It’s really cool to see how well utilized they are.
CT: You must still be engaged in contingency plan- ning. Can you share your approach to that?
Monday: We have to stay on top of those indicators that you referenced in the beginning. With the start- up of the semester, we now have a 7:30 call every morning where we’re checking in specifically with our Emergency Operations Center and our Health Corps, really focused in on our testing strategy, look- ing our testing rates. You may have seen recently that we finished phase one of testing and now we’re already moving into phase two. Phase two began yesterday, where we looked at the positivity rates of certain components of our community. We looked at our Living Learning Programs, we looked at some of our residents who lived with us outside of the LLPs, we looked at our fraternity and sorority life mem- bers, and a number of other categories. We saw a higher positivity rate in our fraternity and sorority life members, so starting yesterday we started test- ing all of our students who are fraternity and sorority life members again. About 500 of our 31,000 stu- dents are being tested as we speak over the next couple days, to take a more focused look at that
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | Oct/Nov 2020