Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a lot of interesting challenges for Oklahoma City University to overcome. From sending the campus community home to quarantine for the semester to where we are now, the university’s policies have ebbed and flowed with a close eye on the state of the pandemic in Oklahoma and the United States.
The decision to send the campus community home for the semester was a tough one. Initially, OCU told students, faculty and staff they would extend spring break for two weeks around the time everyone left campus. Then, toward the end of spring break, the university informed the community that we would be continuing our education online via Zoom.
Once the fall semester of 2020 came around, OCU decided we would resume in-person classes and implemented the alert level system that most of us have become accustomed to. The alert level has changed twice over the academic year, once at the end of the fall 2020 semester to high alert, then returning to moderate alert at the beginning of the spring 2021 semester.
Looking at the numbers, OCU has done a good job of keeping students safe while in person. OCU has had a relatively small number of cases, at least compared to other colleges in the area. We have only had one outbreak toward the end of the fall semester, and the number of positive cases related to campus have dwindled during the spring semester.
However, the way OCU handled communication with the campus community has not been so great. Students, staff and faculty during the fall semester repeatedly asked the university to switch to a higher alert level as COVID-19 cases were rising on campus and in the surrounding community. OCU did not respond to the requests until finally changing the alert level during the last week of classes. The Emergency Operation Center does release weekly COVID-19 campus updates to people on campus, which is good to keep us updated, but the weekly emails never respond to campus concerns. Thus, students feel as though they are left in the dark and start to fear the worst.
OCU’s communication about current policies is not too great either. Many students reported their concerns about social distancing outside the Caf in Tom and Brenda McDaniel University Center. Moreover, several classes during the spring semester were scheduled to have over 25 students, despite the alert level at the time stating classes could not exceed 25 students. The COVID-19 policies and what was being allowed on campus depicted contradictory rule sets to many people on the campus.
Overall, OCU has done an exceptional job at keeping students safe, but a bad job at making students feel safe. OCU needs to establish better communication with the campus community to improve the feeling of security for students. The EOC’s weekly updates can be improved to make the guidelines clear and respond to questions and concerns the campus community may have. While we should be glad the university has kept us safe, letting us know what is going on will keep us even safer.
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