College Context S1:E4 Coronavirus Response

Published: December 04, 2020

Author: Dana DeFreezer

Victoria Clark: All right everybody welcome to the College Context Podcast. My name is Victoria Clark and I am the director of admissions. I also have two good friends with me here today who I’ll let introduce themselves. 

Geet Vanaik: Yeah, Hi I’m Dr. Geet Vanaik. I’m the dean of academic, international and student services and I'm pretty much responsible for all the issues that come up related to COVID or international. 

Pedro Valentin: Good morning, I'm Pedro Valentin. I’m a ‘96 grad of Greenville um been working in a couple different roles over the last 19 years. First as the dean of campus life and then dean of diversity for about seven years and then most recently a director of diversity initiatives and also the proud parent of a current GU student so yeah long relationship with Greenville. 

VC: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Just so everybody listening can know one of the favorite things that we like to do on the College Context Podcast is ask you all to share the weirdest thing that you have ever eaten.

GV: Wow so I’ve traveled quite a bit internationally and I think the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten is just a little tiny little bite of snake

VC: Um live or fried?

GV: Dry with lots of sauce so I don’t even know if I was able to taste it. And traditionally I'm a vegetarian, a pure vegetarian so it was very odd to do it. But in the international culture when you’re offered such a delicacy you kind of have to go with that, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

VC: Pedro try any snake?

PV: I can’t, I don’t know that I can top that. I think mine I’d have to go with snail. Yeah escargot was not my thing. Yeah I’d put that up as the weirdest thing I think I’ve eaten yeah.

VC: Did you eat it in France?

PV: No, I should have gone with that story. Yeah no it was in St. Louis on Chateau which I think is French

VC: Yeah I think that counts

GV: I think that counts

PV: Yeah that doesn’t happen but it’s close. Okay that’s cool I feel good about my answer. 

VC: Yeah so snails and snakes so that’s how we’re starting today. One of the things as I talk with parents, I talk with students, and I talk with families on a regular basis. They always ask me, how is Greenville staying open right now? How are you guys doing in person courses? Is it safe? So would you just talk us through kind of Greenville’s COVID response plan and how it’s going. 

GV: Yeah so I will say that our response is like one of the best in the world probably not just regionally or locally or nationally. We have been very aggressive with our saliva testing. We’re testing everyone on campus twice a week students, staff, faculty, and contractors and I will say that our response is not just testing so it’s all of the mitigation strategies. So we have testing. We have distance. We have hand washing. We have masks. And we’re encouraging students to lean into their character and service and think about their faculty, thinking about others around them and I think that has been the most effective thing for us is really looking at COVID and trying to crush it with not only testing but our character in service.

VC: Yeah can you talk through how we got to be a part of the saliva program

GV: Yeah so we’ve been very blessed. We have a partnership with U of I SHIELD and through that partnership we were able to, it’s a research partnership, and we were able to join that program in early August. We’d planned to join it earlier on. In August we got the confirmation to be able to be part of that. So we are working very closely with U of I SHIELD as a research partner. 

VC: That’s awesome. What would you say to a prospective parent who’s thinking about sending their student here to Greenville and what how our COVID response plan makes Greenville a safer place to be?

GV: Yeah I mean so I go around campuses and I see different things and I see the life on our campus to be very normal, as normal as things can be during COVID and it’s just so rewarding to come to campus and see students interacting face to face with their faculty with each other and staff having on-campus jobs being in the library. So I think I would say like we are like a little piece of heaven here during these crazy unchallenging times. 

PV: I’m just kind of curious because I having raised college age students and raising them, um love them to death maybe not necessarily consistently, the most responsible so in terms of the testing two days a week and making sure and tracking that everybody’s kind of participating. Have you felt like that’s gone smoothly? Has participation level for 18 to 21 year olds been consistent? Is it a lot of chasing down or have they really kind of been 

GV: Yeah I mean, our compliance on the student side is around 80 percent. Which is, you know again, a small miracle because I think there’s a purpose behind what we’re doing. Students understand that it’s not about them it’s about the community at large. We are in Greenville where there is an aging population outside of campus and so we have a real responsibility to protect everyone around us and so we have done some chasing. I won’t say that we haven’t. So again our compliance rate on the staff side is 97 percent or employee side I would say is 97 percent. So people are really appreciative. There is no cost to students and employees which I think is also a small miracle during these challenging times for everyone. The other thing I didn’t mention is we’re doing a lot of contact tracing. So what we’re seeing is that if we do have a case of campus. We contact trace and we remove people that have been in contact with the people that are infected potentially earlier than any other campus in the U.S. 

VC: That’s pretty cool. How do you feel like that leans into the, like our response to COVID-19, how does that lean into the greater mission and vision of Greenville University? 

GV: Yeah so and I think this is the perfect time to live our mission and value. So I am seeing that happen with returning students really trying to mentor the freshmen coming in and really showing them an example of what true character and service looks like and why they believe that this is the right thing to do. I mean testing twice a week, you have to find time on your schedule. You have to move around your classes. The test is non-invasive. It’s super simple. It’s just you salivate into a tube. So our seniors are leading the way for our freshmen so they’re getting mentors not only in the classroom, but outside the classroom with their peers.

VC: That’s cool. 

PV: So we’ve been doing the testing for about

GV: This is our eighth week testing yeah and our positivity is 0.19 percent, which is actually unheard of on a campus.

PV: So just kind of curious, what we’re currently learning and then how is that going to shape like how long will we do testing. Will it be two weeks? Twice a week?

GV: Yeah so I think we’re looking at new protocols. So just this week we decided you know with our low positivity rate that we’ve only testing employees once a week. With the students are still a little bit high risk and numbers are going up, so we’re still testing them twice a week. But we hope to eventually go down to once a week but our decisions will be based on data and on science and making sure that everyone is safe. The good thing about regular testing is people do get to have the freedom. So you can go home and you can come back to campus as long as you test. You’re not confined to spaces on campus, off campus and that’s the greatest benefit of testing.

VC: Yeah it’s cool. Yesterday I saw a bunch of kids playing kickball and they were socially distanced and they had masks on. I just thought, man how cool is that. Like how many college campuses right now are just having a kickball game out on their main square?

GV: Yeah I mean I see that across campus everyday. Students are hanging out with each other with masks. And when they’re outside if they’re socially distanced they can be without masks. So we’re not doing this huge enforcement of masks and all of these things. We want students to do that on their own because they care about each other and their faculty and their staff. 

PV: Yeah so some of the feedback that I’ve gotten not only just from my daughter but from other students is there is this kind of drive this I mean. They want to have an on campus experience and so um it doesn’t feel as much of an inconvenience because you know the result of doing that and doing that well is that they get the kind of continue with the on-campus learning. Which is I think that’s kind of they’ve demonstrated that that’s a high value for them. So to her and to others it hasn’t felt as if it’s been an inconvenience or that they’re not going to do it because they know essentially what’s at stake if we don’t do this well. So credit to you guys, credit to our staff and our students for valuing our community enough to do this well 

GV: Yeah I will just say this is a historic time to see people coming together and in this collective vision of again taking care of each other it’s really you know I get chills and goosebumps sometimes. I’m like how great is this place to come to work and to be able to impact young people to do the right thing.

VC: Oh yeah absolutely. Even just traveling and connecting with fellow colleagues at other institutions it's amazing that I don’t know of another campus that quite has a plan as just remarkable as the one that we have here. I really feel like it’s like something like God’s really blessed our institution with. To have been a part of this program and then to just have you know your team and your staff you guys made that thing work it’s really awesome 

GV: I agree with you 100 percent. The Lord is watching over us and making this happen because you know it’s not possible without him. 

VC: Yeah that’s awesome. Well cool. Pedro any last minute questions or thoughts? I think our parents are going to be super excited to hear this and just for anyone listening we are open for face-to-face campus visits so we’d love for you to come and to be a part of our campus and see our COVID-19 response plan in action. Pedro, Geet thank you so much for joining us and for any prospective students or parents of prospective students listening we just encourage you to go onto our website. You can see our COVID-19 response dashboard. You can also find a link there to apply right now for fall 2021 as well as spring 2021 and because of our awesome COVID-19 response plan we are open for in-person campus visits and would love to have you join us. Thanks so much.