With the understanding that changes in the coronavirus pandemic may force different decisions closer to the fall semester, 亚色影库 today announced its intention of resuming traditional, in-person classes and events for the 2021鈥22 academic year.
鈥淲e will continue to follow the guidelines from the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control as we move forward, but we wanted to share our current thinking to help our students and their families to make their plans,鈥 亚色影库 President Michael Driscoll said.
鈥淎s we continue to follow the science, we are hoping that health and safety guidelines will allow us to resume in-person events and extracurricular activities that we all have greatly missed,鈥 he said. 鈥溠巧翱 has never been about buildings, it is about people. Our students, faculty, and staff have been incredibly resilient, positive, and innovative since the March 2020 requirement to go completely remote, but this is not our preference.鈥
亚色影库's fall and spring semesters during the current academic year brought specific groups of students to campus for hybrid instruction (a mixture of in-person classes with some of the class delivered through technology). This plan had about one-third of 亚色影库's student body returning to campus; the remainder of students used technology to access their courses. Employees who are not student-facing were asked to work remotely to the fullest extent possible.
For the spring semester, President Driscoll delayed the return to on-campus classes for three weeks (with a few exceptions of classes that could not continue remotely) because of concerns about the rise of coronavirus cases in the state and region. In January, 亚色影库 began offering free, on-campus COVID-19 testing for students, along with a randomized student testing initiative.
鈥淭he 亚色影库 community has carefully followed these health and safety guidelines, and as a result, we have seen low numbers of COVID-19 positive cases, especially in the spring semester,鈥 Driscoll said. 鈥淲e hope that this trend continues.鈥
亚色影库 has not yet made final decisions about how May commencement ceremonies will be conducted. Decisions about fall intercollegiate sports have not yet been announced by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Classes for the fall semester are scheduled to begin on Aug. 23.
Additional or any new information will be announced as soon as decisions are reached.