We at SUNY Brockport are eagerly awaiting the return of our students, faculty, and staff for the fall 2020 semester. Through our Bringing Brockport Back committee, we have been carefully planning their safe return since April. I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of the safety precautions and mitigation strategies we are implementing in an effort to keep our entire community safe.
Our planning efforts have been chaired by our emergency manager, Fred Rion. We are tremendously grateful to have Mr. Rion on our team. He has years of experience in the field of emergency management, including having spent nearly 10 years helping to manage emergencies for Monroe County. That experience, coupled with the relationships he’s built during his career, have been invaluable as we navigate this pandemic. Our plans have been lauded as some of the best in the SUNY system, and several portions of them have become a model for our peer institutions.
Social Distancing and Face Coverings
We thoroughly understand how important non-pharmaceutical interventions are in combatting COVID-19. Therefore, we have enacted a stringent Social Distancing and Face Covering policy. Students, faculty, and staff are required to adhere to social distancing protocols at all times. We are minimizing the number of campus gatherings and have strict limits on the size of those few gatherings that will take place. Indoor gatherings will not exceed 25 people. Outdoor gatherings will not exceed 50. Everyone on the SUNY Brockport campus, including guests, are required to wear face coverings at all times unless they’re alone in an enclosed office, or in their bedroom. We have also taken the hard but necessary decision to restrict access to our indoor campus facilities for the duration of the pandemic, and we are only allowing a few limited exceptions to the visitor rule.
On-Campus Students
Students will begin moving in to campus residence halls on Thursday, August 27, and move-in will continue throughout that weekend. Below are some changes for residential students this fall:
•Guests are not allowed in student housing. In fact, students from one residence hall cannot visit students in another residence hall.
•If it is determined that a residential student needs to isolate and/or quarantine, that student will need to go home. They’ll be responsible for arranging private and not public transportation.
•In the rare instance that a student cannot go home, they will isolate and/or quarantine on campus.
•Residential students will be required to move out of campus housing before Thanksgiving.
Off-Campus Students
We understand that you may have concerns about large student gatherings that could take place off-campus. If they occur, we will take such incidents very seriously. Our Office of Student Conduct will review and investigate all reports of students violating our Social Distancing and Face Covering policy. All reports are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Sanctions may accelerate based on the progression, severity, or frequency of the violation. Accelerated sanctions may include suspension or dismissal. Examples of factors that may indicate increased severity and accelerated sanctions include, but are not limited to, the following:
•Hosting a large gathering that potentially exposes a large group of people to COVID-19.
•Repeated violations.
•Knowingly having symptoms related to COVID-19 and going to a public location without isolating.
Should you have any concerns about safety issues regarding our students in the Village of Brockport, please call 911 immediately. Delayed or informal reports may limit our ability to address concerns. The Brockport Village Police refers incidents involving students to the Office of Student Conduct.
What happens when a student gets sick?
All students will complete a daily symptom checker. Students whose daily symptom checker reports trigger concerns will be contacted by our Hazen Health Center staff and triaged for testing on-site. All students are encouraged to call the health center if they have any health concerns, whether related to COVID-19 symptoms or not.
•We will conduct a testing clinic each afternoon for students with COVID-19 symptoms.
•Students who are scheduled for testing will be informed during triage to make plans to return home following a positive test.
•An on-site antigen test will provide results in 15 minutes
•Negative responses will have a follow-up test sent to a lab to confirm.
•Any student unable to return home or who is awaiting transportation home will be immediately isolated on campus.
•Students who test positive for COVID-19 will only be eligible to return to campus after being cleared by a medical professional.
Much planning and countless hours of work have been put into ensuring our students can return to campus safely — and hopefully stay here until we wrap up face-to-face instruction just prior to Thanksgiving.
I recognize that this is an uncertain time. None of us has lived through a pandemic before, and it is hard not to feel anxious at times. I know that the return of students to our village may increase your sense of concern. I would ask that you welcome our students this year as positively and proactively as you have done in the past. Our students are coming from regions with low incidents of virus transmission. According to the latest data, collated by Upstate Medical, part of our SUNY family, 59% of our students come from the same risk level as Monroe County (low level), and 40% come from an even lower risk area! Our team monitors this data regularly, and each time that I have reviewed the data, I have seen progress made across our state in flattening the curve. I hope that this data sets your mind at ease.
We look forward to a healthy and successful fall for our College and our community. As has been said many times since this pandemic began, we’re all in this together.
Heidi Macpherson , SUNY Brockport President
