PSU Town Hall; 2020-06-30

As COVID-19 cases increase in the region, Pittsburgh State University has continued to be proactive in its approach to the pandemic, including face mask requirement for all campus staff, faculty, and visitors. PSU President Steve Scott and Provost Howard Smith joined us today for a live town hall to discuss the current status of campus operations and planning in a time of uncertainty. Good morning everybody and welcome to our town hall brought to you by KORPS. And we come to you from a rainy and cloudy Pittsburgh State University campus. And I'm here with Dr. Howard Smith, our Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Good morning Howard. Hey, good morning, Dr. Scott, and welcome to everybody that's listening today. You know, even if it's raining, it's still a great feeling to be able to walk across campus and enjoy the beauty that's here. So rain or shine, pitch state's great place to be? Absolutely, and I saw you walking across the campus and you had your mask on and we'll have plenty of conversation about masks as we go through the morning. You know this, the virus just continues to impact everything we do. And I know you and I are talking a little while ago about your grandkids are going to come for a visit, but now they can't. I mean, it's painful, isn't it?

It is, you know, it's an emotional thing too, and I know for all of us that it has disrupted our lives. I was going to say normalize, but it's just a disruption. And in last, in yesterday, Florida was put on the on Kansas's list of states to watch the quarantine from. And we have some a daughter and some grandchildren in Florida that we're going to come actually tomorrow. And so we had to make a decision. And since they can't quarantine and they're in a location where they've been involved with folks. So unfortunately, it will, it will be delayed till sometime in the future. But like many of you that are out there, your families have been disrupted and some of your routines have been disrupted. And again, we're trying to stay safe and do the precautionary types of strategies that hopefully will continue to keep the numbers down with the virus. Absolutely. And that's the kind of personal responsibility that people really need to take and make those decisions. And look out for themselves, their family, but also those around them. And we can all, we can all make those decisions that can help.

That greater community good is really, you know, what it's about. It's a servant leadership in a way. It is. And you know, I've talked quite a bit about. We're very fortunate that we've had that kind of support throughout the campus. And certainly appreciate the KRPS and Tim Metcalf and his team that allows us to use this medium to communicate with girl and nation and the region. We know that KRPS has some of the most loyal donors across the campus. And they may have been turning into, to listen to some jazz this morning. And they're here and you and me talk about what's going on at the virus, but we certainly welcome them. And we thank them for their continuing support because it's extremely important to this radio station. It is. And thank you because it's programs like this that really reach out. And because of your support, we're able to do these kinds of things. I also want to put my thanks in there to all of our donors and supporters of KRPS and the University as a whole. We've had a number of people, and I'm sure you've had this too. Sure, we've had some criticisms of decisions we've made. We've also had a lot of people this step up and check on us. We've got donors that call me regularly just to check in to see how I'm doing.

And one of those I talked to on a regular basis is Gene Becknell. He knows a little bit about radio stations himself. But guys, he continues to call and check in on me. And he doesn't like me asking how he's doing. He wants to know, how am I doing? How is university doing? And boy, that's important to us. It is. It's the caring community. It's just the, you know, it's the unified support that we have. And again, we've mentioned it before, but it's in our DNA at Pitt State. And that's really to try and do the right thing. And, you know, granted that at times, hindsight's always a good way to judge decisions. But looking ahead is difficult. And right now, it's just pretty cloudy out in front of us. And we don't always know what's going to come forward. So we appreciate people's support. And I certainly do. I know you do. And we are trying to make the best decisions we can at the moment we can. And that's a good way to frame the conversation. We'll have this morning because, you know, every once in a while somebody will say, I don't just announce all these things in one shot. And we'll just figure, you know, we'll have it all figured out and we'll move forward.

Well, the knowns keep changing. And it seems like in you and I've talked about this quite a bit. Every time we make a decision, there's just more decisions to make. And Jamie and I talk about that on a regular basis that we will decide something. We'll think, well, that's good to get that decided. And then pretty soon we're looking at three or four more decisions. And they're more complicated. Well, and there is no recipe. You know, it's just that it's because of the uniqueness of even of our programs and of our staff and of the kinds of services we provide, a decision may not necessarily be the right decision for every one of those. Exactly. And, you know, we should note that summer school is underway right now. So each time that we've gotten together and done the town hall, we've really given shout outs to our faculty and staff who've made things work. But you've got a number of faculty who are teaching online this summer. You bet. And they're doing just an outstanding job. You know, again, we're moving forward. We're going to coexist with this, recognizing that we've got to make modifications and probably will continually have to do that to who knows when actually.

But the staff has stepped up, faculty support staff, certainly even on campus we've had to have some services that have continued in order to be able to deliver what we're doing. It's kind of like being in this radio studio right now. Again, shout out to KRPS folks for being here and getting this set up in a safe way so we can do these. And, you know, we talk about the folks who are teaching. We're going to talk a few minutes about the number of operations you're going on on campus. But really, we need to acknowledge the many people who are working from home. And work from home may sound pretty exciting initially. And I think some people have really struggled with it. Some people have really embraced it and they like it. And I think it's going to change our workforce going forward in terms of how we do that. I think we're going to more embrace that than ever before. But it's not necessarily easy. And in some cases, I think people have said, I'm going to go to the office because I got to go away from these kids because they're just so demanding. Well, it didn't combine that with two working parents or two working folks in a home or multiple working could be could be parents could be guardians could be even older siblings and an officer think of the activity in some in some of these areas.

You know, that might be a little bit stressful on some people. I would say, I would say, I asked my grandkids to be quiet while I do a conference call with you. And it's it can be pretty hair and scarom as we move along or you're talking to somebody and you see a little hand come up in the picture. Yes, that's exactly kind of fun stuff to actually. So I thought what we do today and you know, I've kind of laid this out that we would we talk about kind of the current status of the campus and the decisions we've made where we are right now. We're going to talk about the status of the community. And then then as we look forward, we need to think about what are our working groups doing? What are they deciding what issues are they confronting? We heard from them last last time, but we've got to picked up load bit of information from each of them. And then this time we didn't get to do this last town hall, but this time we're going to answer some questions from campus. And the problem with working with really smart people, they write really hard questions. Yes, they do.

And so they're very insightful. I think they're all concerned about the right kinds of things, you know, the kinds of things they should be concerned about. And their questions really push us to do better. And before we jump into the kind of current status, I would remind people we're interested in your feedback. Abby Fern maintains of social at pitstate.edu where she picks up questions from people. We share those questions across our group. We review them. We think about how we can respond and what does that tell us about decisions that need to be made. So we're really, really interested in your feedback. We're also interested in your feedback on the radio town hall. How is that working? Now today, Howard and I are about, let's say about eight feet apart, maybe nine feet apart. We're not wearing our masks right now, but we both wore them in. We even took a picture to document that. Tam and Dustin, the team here, they're in masks as we came in. So we're doing the kinds of things we need to do in this venue. And we want to make sure you all know that we'd like to have some feedback on, is this helpful? Do you find this informative? Because we hope it'd be informative and also motivational that would help everybody move in the same direction and be motivated to do the right kinds of things for our students, faculty and staff, as well as our visitors.

Howard, I'll start with the current status of campus operations. And as you remember back on June 1st, seems like forever ago now, we announced that we were going to open our outdoor facilities. And that was a step. We thought that was an important step to do. And as we understood more about the virus, we felt like there was less threat, less of a threat in outdoor venues. I think that's proven to be the case. Yesterday, and we announced this last week, but effective yesterday, we said masks will be mandated for students, faculty, staff, and visitors while they're on the campus of Pittsburgh State University. Not in outdoor settings. And we're going to review that a little bit more in depth. But that was an important message. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the governor's announcement as well. And then we have signal. We did signal our intentions to open our facilities on July 7th and bring people back to campus, not staff completely up, but have staff in each office and really begin to work with each other and with the public and with our students. But given the increase in cases, we decided we would delay that nearly two weeks to July 20th. So that's the date that we have on our schedule to make that happen.

And as everything we do, we've got to be pretty flexible because things could change. And what about the academic calendar as we reach that? Well, you know, we still we're still slated to open the fall semester on August 17th with staff returning that that week, that Monday and prior to that. One of the things I think you just mentioned I'd like to underscore and that is these are everything we do right now is a target again going back the flexibility. We certainly are making plans for these kinds of things. Some discussions just so you'll know right now where we were obviously the very first weekend. We always like to have grill a warm up. We like to have staff back and work with students. Those are discussions because just like the July 7th date, there were things beyond our control. Obviously the numbers of cases have gone up. We've just got to continue to keep our eye on the data that's coming in to get a pulse. So that opening weekend is still a discussion point.

Again, it's a target that we've had on there, but we're not where we thought we would be at this point just to be honest. We actually had hoped and prayed that this would be in a we'd be in a better situation. But we are we are going to open on the 17th. Again, we'll talk more about course delivery and in rooms and a little bit when we talk about working group. With that in mind, our closing dates would be November 20th. That Friday would be the the basically the date that we move over to for the for the next week and a half or two to the online or alternate course delivery, which typically would be four classes for those three day of weeks. And we do have November 21st for our dedicated spring 2020 graduation ceremony on the calendar. I think that's important. It's in that morning of the 21st. It's still on the calendar with the final date being December 11th. So those dates are still on the calendar. Really the other dates that we have during the semester still stay in place as far as our our grades and drops and ads and those kinds of things.

But the fall semester we're looking forward to it and really just getting more active. I can you know, I get a sense when I'm talking to groups on on in one of our conferences whether it happens to be teams or another venue. You know, people want to get back. They really want to get a little more active. So we're excited. And you know, I talked earlier just before we came on the air and talked about how do you how do you create a mindset that says we want to be back. We got to figure out how to be back and how to be back safely. And then Abby always throws in. I think this is really good point. Not only do we start the year face to face. How do we finish it? And what are the decisions we need to make along the way? What are the policies we need to have in place? And what are the individual behaviors need to be like in order to make that happen? And I think that's what we would ask everyone to think about is not think about or frame this in a way that says what are the 10 reasons why I can't do this. It's what are the things I've got to put in place to make this happen and to have a successful semester for our students and for our faculty and staff. I think it's important to frame that in that way.

It is and really and help prepare people for these adjustments. You know, we've got some back back to school plans for students back to school plans for staff, like you say. So really it's helping people anticipate some of the things they may or may not be thinking about as well. You know, one of the questions, let's talk about masks for a little while. Mask has just become quite an interesting topic. And I think you and I've been on the same page all along and early on and as we talked about mask. I think we both recognize the importance of mask, but we thought, you know, how would the campus adjust to requirement or mandate to wear mask. And I think in our both of our heads, we were thinking, well, we're probably going to need to strongly encourage the use of mask. I think that that's where I was. I think you were there for a while and then. And then we had a conversation with Dr. Sandness and and the science moves along and the information that we see across the country, the number of cases. And then all of a sudden, it just seems like you and I and this seems like the same day looked at each other and thought, we don't have a choice. There is no choice. We've got to mandate the use of mask because it is the one thing we can all do that will make a difference in slowing and stopping this virus.

It is. And when you listen to the experts and the folks that are knowledgeable in this field, there are a couple of things that always continue to emerge as things that we can do that will help mitigate the situation. And certainly mask or one, not only does it protect you, but it protects others, you know, washing your hands. You know, a lot of these things are common sensical. But at the same time, we need to build a culture of utilizing and really taking advantage of doing these kinds of things. And you think that these efforts would have some impact on the flu. So for all washing your hands, maintaining social distance, wearing masks. For a guy six people need to get a flu shot. Yep. If that's the perfect for them and their doctor would recommend it, I would hope that we have a very high percentage of our faculty and staff and the community that we get a flu shot.

I certainly plan to get one. You know, when I had grandkids, I really started getting the flu shot on a regular basis because I kept thinking, I don't want to get the flu and transmit that to the grandchild. And in order to, you know, it's kind of, and again, building these new cultural expectations, you know, the other evening, we did a retirement picnic is what I want to call it for, Dr. Cahal, Dr. Frieden. And it was interesting because no one had been together in a long time. So we had tables spread out. We had masks when we walked in. We were social distance. We had meals spatially prepared that were in individual containers. But it was, it was amazing. How many people said, I just want to reach out and hug you or I want to shake your hand and, and people resisted as a means of, of at least trying to, to hopefully again, you know, not spreading something. And it's not that we didn't care. I know more, some people are more comfortable with that than others. And probably what we, one of the things I would ask everybody as we begin to get into this is just, just think about how you want to be treated. If, you know, do you want that proximity?

If somebody's uncomfortable, let's, let's give them the respect, maybe not to do that. And, and maybe you're, maybe you're comfortable being closer to people and things. And certainly we can, and I can understand some different opinions. But as we go through this, I would like for us all to consider the other person's stance on this stuff. Absolutely. You know, I was with someone recently and he started shaking my hand. And I said, and I kind of put my hands up and I end like I was being arrested. I put my hands up and I said, I said, I better not do that. I've been around, you know, some other folks and I might make you sick. You know, I think his thought was, well, I'm okay. So I can shake your hand. But my view was, well, I could make you sick. And that's not a good thing. And so he said, okay, I got to understand that. But, but we also need to just practice some language. You know, if somebody is in your space, how do you deal with that? You know, the other day we're placing. Kathy was talking to somebody and every time Kathy took a step back, the person took us out for is like, well, what is, what do we not understand about social distancing? It's just, it's just a fascinating thing. But like you said, it's new cultural behaviors that are so opposite of what we've done.

Now, the part I want to talk about about masks, and I'm not going to do this a lot because it gets very controversial, but masks become partisan. And that's, that's just the darn just thing when you think about it. But I think there's hope there over the weekend, vice president Mike Pence really encouraged people to wear a mask. Steve Ducey of all people on Fox and Friends, I have read that he encouraged people to wear a mask. And last night, I just read this morning, Sean Hannity has now encouraged people to wear a mask. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, Senator from Tennessee. There are people now that are speaking out on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, and they're saying, this is important. This is how we can stem the flow of this virus. And of course, Governor Kelly just came out and made an announcement about it. And I believe it's effective Friday that throughout the state of Kansas and public spaces, people are required to wear a facial covering.

I think that's a good step. It is a good step. And again, I think it's again, I'm going to go back to using common sense on some of this. There's going to be certain situations where obviously when you're eating, when you're drinking, and it may be that you're operating certain types of machinery where there's a additional safety issue that needs to be considered, where that may not be the case. But certainly if we put this in effect for the majority of cases and the majority of situations that we're in, we are going to make a difference here. And I would tell you that I've gotten quite a few pieces of feedback from faculty and staff indicating that they're more than willing to do this because they believe it will help. And at the same time, I want to make sure that people understand, again, we need to use common sense on how we do that and as far as implementation, because I know that at times people are real concerned about basically, how do you, how do you get people to do these things? Yeah. And I think that's a real important point that there will be some exceptions. We talked about students in their dorm rooms. We talked about individuals in their offices working on their own, Tim's working in the control room right now.

Doesn't need to have a mask on. There's nobody around. Well, and we also have a preschool. Yes. And getting a, you know, basically, the KDHE and the Department of Animal talked about, you know, preschoolers aren't required to wear a mask. And in certain preschool settings. So we need to again look to experts for their guidance on some of this. And anybody out there that's ever raised a preschooler can think about proximity. They can think about trying to get this done. And you brought, you brought two great points, one's common sense and the other's science. And I think you can bring the two together and we can really make a difference. And so we've got some questions later will approach will respond to about mass and additional questions. But certainly our expectation would be that people will use them. And from what I've seen on the social media sites, people are really encouraging. That's been very encouraging to me, the affirmation that's out there in social media. Now, there's others. It's a smaller percent after today's conversation might be bigger. They may feel like they need to be louder. But generally people have said this is a good idea. And the timing was right. And it seems to me others are following us.

So let's go on and let's talk a little bit about the offices that are underway right now. And Howard, you've got some of your folks that are working on campus right now. Certainly do. And again, they are taking the safety precautions for one. I'll just point out right away as a mission. I think we talked about this before. What was interesting was that once we got through the spring semester, because we had shut down operations to basically we weren't having visitors. We weren't having some site visits. But then all of a sudden the semester is over. And then we still have students that want to come school here. And they want to come down and visit. And so we do have students with their parents visiting again, social distancing. And we even have masks to provide if they don't have masks. So we're getting those tours on campus. We're still responding. I know we've implemented live chat in several of our offices, which is we didn't have prior to the pandemic. And we're finding success in that. In a number of offices, student financial assistance has is open sound. And you know, we've got to process applications for students. They don't just show up day one and get their financial aid.

There's a lot of work behind a lot of these offices. And again, when you have offices open, then somebody's supporting that somebody's cleaning that. So obviously we got a lot of assistance from certainly our administration division where they're maintenance and custodial supplies are out there serving our needs so that people can get in. We've got, you know, we've got our housing people working. I know that. And I know Dr. Irwin would would weigh in on this. But again, it doesn't happen day one. You've got folks out there that are having to get rooms ready. We've got to again process a number of things. Our International Office is active as some of you know, some of those some of our international students don't have the opportunity to go home. And right now if they went home, they may not be getting back. So again, we're providing services in those areas are our registrar's offices down. You know, people are requesting transcripts of some of that work we can do from from emotes some we can't just to be. I don't think I have to remind you what I'm going to and that is to some of you will. I know will certainly agree with this.

Our existing technology system Gus is a little bit antiquated. So some of those things that we others might be doing at other locations and universities. We don't have that we don't have that luxury for that opportunity because we still got we've still got some work ahead of us on that. We've got student athletes that have returned to campus. We're going to be have as a matter of fact when July hits, we begin to see more and more people show up at campus and in different for different events, different groups getting ready for things. So we are becoming more active or we what we would have been a year ago. We're certainly not. But we still got to provide those kinds of support and have the kinds of staff on hand. So we can have the best experience we can with what we're doing right now. So we're very appreciative of those folks who are on the campus and doing the work and. And I think that's almost organically grown each day. You just seem like there's a few more there and they're kind of learning to live with the virus and you see more and more masks. We've had a couple of people out at the crossing house to do some work and boy they're in their mask.

The grounds crew was by the day and they were in mass and we had a couple of Tom Emmerichek's group out this morning on a little issue, very minor issue, but boy, both of those employees were masked up. And so that means that work is continuing, but they're also being very safe with it. And I'd like to mention here acts library because it's actually got a, I'm called in a double whammy. We've got the pandemic and they've done a wonderful job with curbside service. That staff has just stepped up to the challenge. I mean, obviously we've got some school classes going on. So they're providing services remotely. On top of that, they have remodeling. They're on the phase five of the acts remodel. And so they're going to have, they're going to have limited actually no access for a little while still to acts as far as walk in, walk out. They are providing services until we get some of the construction pieces done. So it's, it's just another layer of complexity to providing service and in Randy and his, in his staff have just done a fantastic job.

And obviously students success is housed in that building. And what we have this summer cares, they're running it out of a building where they, they can't get in and out. And so they're on campus too in Heather and her folks have done a wonderful job as well. It's everybody that's helped them. So, you know, it'd be nice if we could predict what the next thing will be that we get the opportunity to deal with. But it might even be nice not to have an opportunity one of these days. Yeah. Yeah. And reach the plateau. You know, and the neat thing about a construction project, typically, it's got a start date and end date. Now over to actually we've had a few that are gone way beyond the end date. But a pandemic doesn't seem to have that start date and end date. That's, that's indefiniteness of it has been a challenge. Hey, would you talk, would you talk just a minute, we're running just a little bit behind, would you talk just a minute about where you think enrollment is for the summer and the fall. And then I'm going to talk about testing. And we'll talk about Crawford County. You bet. And I'd like to, basically, I'll just give it to you straight. Our numbers are down.

And our summer numbers are down some, but our fall numbers are down a little bit more now. And I think it's understandable when you, when you begin to look at. Basically, the everybody out there is wondering what's going to happen. And I know that as cares went along, we looked real good in the spring. But honestly, I think some folks are have that weight and see piece right now as far as looking at what's going to happen. Can I, can I get to this, this point, I look at zero hour freshmen and we were looking very good on that. But, but now we're down probably 30% more than we were last year in that now 30% is like 30 some students. So I'm going to use 30 students instead of 30%. But, but as you look over all, we're probably down another, another half as many students as we would have been last year, which is about 160. And any student that any student reduction, this is an undergraduate is, is, is just less revenue that we're bringing in. And certainly our good news still is our graduate numbers are up.

But that doesn't, that doesn't, that doesn't cover our, our reductions in undergrad. So we're anticipating some continued decline there. And as I talk more later about course delivery, we certainly know that some students are in a weight and see to see how their schedules impacted by what kinds of adjustments we make to our classes. So one things we can do is every single person on the campus needs to think of themselves as an admissions officer. And they represent Pittsburgh State University. They're an ambassador for Pittsburgh State University. So we need their help representing us. And if we have students with inquiries about the campus with about programs, guys, we need to be responsive. You know, just this morning I heard a story about a young man that is over at Parlington Lake. That's over the, that the State Park over there. He's a Pittsburgh State grad. He walked into our Registrar's office one afternoon to reenroll to come back to school. And the Registrar's office said, you need to talk to Cindy Ford.

He went and talked to Cindy Ford, got a degree in biology is now managing a beautiful area over in Parlington. One conversation, one redirection by that Registrar's office turned that, turned that person into, turned that life into a career of something he loves to do. So everybody on the campus can make that kind of difference. And I want to talk about one other thing hard before we take a break. And that is testing. So you think about what we've done and what your group is doing, and you'll talk about that more in a minute about the classroom configuration, about mask requirements. And, you know, we're ordering and buying supplies and plexiglass and all those things. Well, one other piece of this is testing. And we're going to have a testing strategy. Folks over in the Bryant Student Health Center, they're going to lead the way in helping us develop that. We've had some input from University of Kansas Health System. They're willing to help us with some of this. We think there's some spark money out there that will help. But we will have a testing strategy.

And some would say you need to test every student, every employee as they come to campus. Some would say that's wasteful. That's not helpful. And others would have a different kind of strategy. And I think we'll land in a different place, but we're getting great advice. And I'm looking forward to kind of continuing that discussion and getting us in a position where we have a really solid testing strategy. Yeah, it's important again that we take the right approach for us and certainly needs to be within the realm of where it provides information that's going to be useful. You know, I know that there's different sides to some of this as far as the testing goes. And we've heard from a numerous medical people and I consider them all to be very knowledgeable and very good people. But there may be a difference of opinion because all of us know that sometimes some of these things we do are just a moment in time. You can take my temperature at 8, but that might be different at 10. Yeah, exactly. So what we want to do is not do something for show. We want to do something that's going to make a difference and make this place safer.

So with that, Howard, we're going to take a break and then we'll come back and we'll talk about Crawford County and the working groups and then we'll go to Q&A. So Tim, turn it back to you. All right. Thank you, Tim. We're back with Dr. Hart Smith, the vice president of academic affairs, provost at Pittsburgh State University. And I'm Steve Scott, the president of Pittsburgh State University. And Sean Nakarata just sent me a picture of Howard too bad. We're on a radio because it's a picture of him and a pit state facial covering. I like that. It's a good looking mask. It is. I'm going to, I'm really going to get one of those. Sean looks pretty good in that picture right there too. Yeah, he does. So it looks like it works well with glasses. I got to tell you the ones that for those of you that wear glasses, I don't know about you, but I have foggy instances if I don't have that mask on right. It's a serious issue. I know Jamie's talked about that as well. And I think we just need to keep looking until we get the right style. And we're going to order some more mask and Joe Delsegan, his team, they've been really helpful to us and we'll have another group of masks before too long. And we think they'll be a little more comfortable. So I thought I'd give you just a brief update from kind of the Crawford County perspective.

You've hired to talk a little bit about that. First of all, do want to give a shout out to Rebecca Adamson, who was a County health officer and she really did a nice job as we worked our way into the beginning of this pandemic. So thanks to Rebecca for her leadership, the County Commission working with Rebecca, then decided to add some additional expertise and staff to the effort and Rebecca still with the health department certainly. But Nevada, Dr. Linda Bean from the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas and also Dr. Tim Stebbins from Ascension, the V. Christie, Pittsburgh. And we're very fortunate those two have stepped up and really leaned into this. And they're working of course with the group that Sean docker auto is working with. And that's a community task force that I think is just such a great idea to think about. To think about how do we lead the County, both from the public health side, but also the economic side and what can pit state, the city, the chamber, all the various partners do to help this, this county recover and move forward and stay safe. They do a lot of information sharing their coordinating messages, Sarah Runyon, she's the PIO at the city and have a firm courses are marketing communications person they're working together to help craft the message.

Because the messaging is important and the sharing of information is very, very important. But I feel good that Sean is a co-chair of that group along with Jay Byerson, the city. And they've been very, very active. I think they're meeting every week and they're providing some great input and a great opportunity for sharing information. And as you've seen, how are the cases in the region are up? You know, you and I talked at one point where I think we had a four week period. We didn't have a single policy test in the county. And now it's really taken off. I haven't looked at that number today, but I think it's north of 250 is the count. And so Abby says it's good to remind everybody that hospital capacity continues to be good testing capacity is good. And on the death side, we have had very unfortunately we've had one death. And I think after that death, it was discovered the woman was positive for COVID-19. And contact tracing, I would think is a little bit of a concern, but they're working to build capacity in that area as well. And that's going to be critical for us for this fall.

So that's a little bit of information from the county. I appreciate the work that all these various entities are doing to try to position ourselves as best we can for reopening of the campus, but also reopening of the county. And this is a very difficult task to take on right now. So our county officials, our city officials and all our cities and communities here and the working together, this particular task force is so critical to us moving forward. So it's just it's really a wonderful thing that we have a group of people that can sit down and literally maybe not always agree on something, but do the again have the discussion in a civil way to move us forward in a positive way. And coordinate our efforts, coordinate our resources. And really the messaging is so important that we coordinate our messaging. So let's talk a little bit about and that's a very, very important group that's working their way through this pandemic. We have three groups on campus. I know you chair one of those groups as the academic affairs working group. Steve Irwin chairs a group on student life and Doug ball course chairs the group on budget and finance.

So what's the latest from the academic affairs group the most the really right now the most critical thing that that's coming forward is actually looking at our courses for this fall. Doing a course inventory and basically it's an analysis of of the classroom space to the enrollment and then then with additionally considering what's taking place in that classroom. And really this is again it takes more than just the working group. We're reaching out. I want to say thank you to Lindel Haverstad our architect on staff in that particular group because he's in dialogue and blogs regularly about what other institutions are doing. Again, it's not it's not a simple thing. There is there is no recipe necessarily for classroom capacity because classrooms are different dimensionally. The sixth square foot is certainly a rule of thumb. But in as you all know, if you go into a classroom, some classrooms have angles, some have pillars, some have polls, some have.

And certainly when you're thinking about how many students can go in a room, are there armchair, are there arm chairs, are there tables and chairs, is it an auditorium seating lots of different things. And basically what we were finding is that about 30% of what we would have thought a normal classroom is probably the covid capacity. So we handed the deans with all those dimensions. And again, it's not a recipe. It's not an absolute. You have to look at classroom by classroom. But they're looking at the enrollment of the courses right now versus the social distancing capacity to see if that particular class can function in the assigned room. We have a meeting this afternoon again to see what we're at and what we're what we're hoping is one we want to get a good hard number on how many fit right now. Then we want to talk about are there courses that could be moved, for instance, may have a low enrollment, but in it being in a room that has additional capacity, maybe there's a class in a room that's over capacity that could go into that room.

Look at that. We have some larger spaces on campus that are available and we'll talk about then how that might fit. You know, this is like a big puzzle, though, keep in mind that it's not as simple as just finding the room. It has to do with the time of the class. Again, what's in it and one of the couple of key pieces when you look at social distancing classroom capacities, one is certainly the social distancing piece, which would be this, let's say the six square foot piece. The other thing is you need presentation area. So you can't just take say an 800 square foot room and then divide it by the 36 square feet you need and say that's capacity. Well, what's the presentation space needed? Also, what's the circulation space needed and coming in and out of the room has an impact on that circulation space. We're looking at those things at this point in time. So that's a piece. The other piece that came out of this particular group in Susan Dallas again, her team, you know, right now and CTLT or working on a training schedule so that folks that need to come back and get some additional training.

We're going to make that available in July and up to the obviously going forward and there's already a lot of training modules out there that they can access, but we need that in place. With the course inventory, we're also finding out right now there are some faculty have already moved forward and said, I'd really like to do my class as an online or a high flex. High flex is actually a combination. I've heard that term lately. What does high flex mean? High flex is actually a combination of hybrid and online. And so basically what it amounts to is a modification to a course where I might split my class. Some come one day, some come another while others are online or it can be secret synchronous synchronous as it comes around. We're going to get this figured out so that we know where we stand. And once we have that, then we need to make sure that students are given notice.

So for instance, again, I signed up for this class in March or April and now the delivery has changed. So we're working and IT is working hard on getting us a method so that they can check that here in July. And then we'll just actually, once we know that and students check their classes, we're going to have to see where the enrollment lands. And again, people are choosing for a variety of reasons. Let's keep in mind that it could be anybody. It could be faculty. It could be students that have a real health concern for some reason. And so they need to know what their options are. So you have a variety of areas that are under you. You mentioned the library. You mentioned financial assistance and student success programs. So really, those programs, you're figuring that out. In fact, already have figured out how they're going to be staffed, how they're going to support our students. You're really going to come down to that classroom. Is it really the biggest challenge in front of you right now?

Yeah. And the other piece that comes in with this is equipment. You know, in the spring, I'm just going to say it, we were lucky. I mean, as far as being able to move quickly and do what we have, but we're also needing to purchase some additional equipment. I want to thank Brad Stephanoni over in purchasing, doing a great job trying to run down equipment for us. You talked about safety. We've got some shields in face shields already, but there's other things on back order. So and that's one of those things we can't, I can't tell you that for sure it'll be here July 18th. You know, I would like to get, there's target dates for that. So getting these, these equipped is another piece. And most of the rooms will, you know, again, for those presentation areas, we'll have plastic shields for those that need it. We're trying to get them as set up as best as possible. And we'll, you know, there's some questions on here that we'll talk. I'll address a little bit about that when we get to that. You know, one of the things that, as you and I watch and we do, we read this every single day, we check to see what's going on at the national level and even within the state. And you do hear faculty expressing concerns about the fall, and really concerns we see expressed aren't any different than we would feel, and we know.

They make sense. We understand them. But some of the concerns that are expressed is that faculty aren't involved in the decision making. They're not involved in the processes that are being utilized. Now, you've got faculty on your group. Yes. And on this particular group, there's six or seven faculty on that group there. You know, we try at Pitt State, and I think we do, we really do do a good job, I believe, getting involvement. And not only that, and, you know, I talk with the faculty center president and Kay any president on a regular basis. And I know you do as well. We talk with student leadership on a regular basis too. In order to get an idea of what they're thinking, what their feelings are. And that is a key ingredient to this. So, one other piece that will be coming out that I just want to mention to everyone that hasn't necessarily come out of the group at this point. But we will be adding a couple of statements to the course syllabus supplement.

Obviously, we can't guarantee that a course that starts out face to face on August 17th will end that way in November. We learned that this spring. So, people need to know that when they enroll. We also need to make sure that people understand what kinds of technology they need to have access to in the event something might have to be changed. Because we don't have checkout technology for 5,000 students. That's just not something we have. So, there will be some things in that syllabus supplement as a means of giving people, hopefully enough notice and upfront information that they can continue to make the decisions they need to make. It would be nice if we could, if everything was absolute, but as I told a student the other day that was talking to me, I said, I understand what you want. I understand how you feel. But a couple of these things we can't guarantee. Absolutely. Flexibility.

So, you mentioned that you've got six or seven faculty members on your working group. There are also faculty members on the other working groups as well. Steve Irwin's group and student life and also Duck Ball's group. So, I thought I'd give you a little bit of an update on theirs and it will get to some Q&A. On the student life side, first of all, of course, the Bryant Student Health Center has continued to function throughout the summer. And again, so appreciative of Dr. Kathleen Sandness and Rita Gurth, what tremendous leadership they provide for that facility and the great customer service and just the expertise. Everything about it is the first class. I appreciate them. Dr. Irwin's group really has a lot of facilities to deal with. If you think about the Bicknell Center, the Bryant Student Health Center, the Campus Activity Center, the Dining Hall, Grill and Bookstore, over in the Student Center, I mean just one of the facilities after another that's got to be addressed in terms of signage and spacing and how are you going to operate, how are you going to staff it. So, they're working on plans for each of those. And probably the most complicated, just like your greatest challenge, our greatest challenge would be in the classroom. How do we manage the classroom? His is the residence halls. How do you have students living in close proximity and make sure they do remain safe and they're really working their way through that.

Not only how do they live there, but how do they check in. And so a lot of work is underway right now with Dr. Irwin's group and appreciate his leadership. Doug Ball, of course, is working on the money side of this. And if the pandemic wasn't bad enough and the threat that we all feel to our own health and well-being, there's economic fallout as we all know. And so, Doug's leading a group to really look at what are the different approaches where we can save money. Like, you know, not spend as much as an important part of this and within OOE or Labor or Travel or whatever it might be. He's also then looking at what are other institutions doing as they manage their way through the financial aspect of this. And then they're also doing something that's negative that they need to do. And that is what would the impact be of a furlough salary reductions and some of those options that we would have to manage our costs as we go forward. This awful thing to think about, and you and I talked about this before, we're just so much in agreement with the whole council is.

We're trying to do everything we can to protect the jobs and pay people what we've been paying them. That is so important to us. At the end of the day, if the state allocation gets really reduced or, as you mentioned, enrollment is really slides back, we will not have the revenue to make that all happen. So we've got to have people understand that there are possibilities, there are paths through this that would include some pretty negative impacts on salary or furlough. And furlough is a reduction in salary. It's just, it comes along with the reduction and expectation of you. And how did I know you saw the news out of KU last week, maybe two weeks ago, where they announced they were cutting salaries beginning in August. I think it's going to run for six months and it's going to go from, if you make less than 50,000 a year, you don't get touched, which I like that piece of that model. But then for every increment of $10,000 as you go up, it goes from 1% cut to 2% cut to 3%. And so I think it caps out at 11% cut for those, a lot of folks, KU make over $200,000 a year, I guess. It caps out at 11%.

They're going to save $79 million by doing that, and they need to save $120 million. So we think it's important, and Abby included this in the last daily update, or maybe a couple of before. We think it's important people see that and understand that these are the kind of decisions that are being made around the country. Yeah, I agree. You know, people, I always think one of the things I always believe in is there's hope, and we are going to come through this. We're going to, we will survive. But at the same time, I think it's very important that we're very realistic with people. And that we're very pragmatic in the sense that obviously if our expenses are greater than our revenues, we have to do something. And we want to make sure that right now we're trying very, very hard to keep everybody employed. And again, to minimize any kind of salaries issues that could occur out of that. But we have some tipping points coming down the line. One will be the 20th day enrollment.

That'll be a tipping point for us, because it'll tell us where we're at on tuition. And tuition, as we all know, is a substantial part of our revenue right now, at least approximately 50%. Let's say another tipping point will be the election in November, and then what falls out after that election as far as the state allocation to us. And whether or not it's kept intact, or if in fact something would occur to it. We can only handle so much of a loss of revenue. And then we have to do something. And everybody on campus, I think every employee on campus is concerned. And so we want to keep people apprised of those decisions that will be coming down the line. But at the same time, people need to know that these discussions would probably be better to take place now, rather than at the moment that we would have to make that decision. And it really helps if people stay tuned to what we're talking about, listening and talking to the supervisor about their own area. And then also have a greater sense of across the United States what is going on.

I think I mentioned yesterday in the council meeting that over 250 institutions across the country have announced pretty significant cutbacks in salary or furloughs. Because higher education is a business, it's human capital. It's 80-some percent of our costs are related to people. And there are benefits in their salary. So it doesn't give us a lot of flexibility. But I would argue that we've been well managed financially. We enter this in a pretty good position. But it could be, as you mentioned, there's a couple of tipping points that could really tip things in our direction that would cause us to take other kinds of actions that nobody wants to take. But we may not have any choice. So that's a look at that. I think that's important that we're aware of that. And with that, I guess we go on to questions. We don't have as much time as we plan. But I think that's okay because we also provide answers online too with our FAQ. But let's get to some of the questions. And let's look at some of them.

I know that we're kind of already handled. What do you see there? What's one that Kim's going to do? We've already talked about a lot of these, have we? Well, I'm going to go to the third question. Again, this is one of those. Let me read the question. It seems that the general public mood in the four states area is to seek Corona virus prevention as unimportant. I understand people's desire to just get past this and get back to normal. But I don't think that's how pandemics work. And I'm increasingly concerned that if a downward trend in new cases continues through the summer, it will be difficult to get students to understand the continued need for social distancing and wearing masks when we come back for fall semester. And again, this underscores the importance of our student guide for students to come back to campus. And one of the comments in here is the downward trend. Well, that's no longer there. It's an upward trend. And for some of these students and some of the areas they come from, we probably will need to do some more education, particularly if they're coming from a less impacted area.

Certainly those that are coming from areas where there's a higher incidence level and more frequency of the testing positive, they may come in with a better understanding. But as you all know, and if you'll think back to, and I'm going to use it kind of more of a generic here, to when you were 17 to 22 years old, sometimes we didn't have the history that older people do to understand the urgency of something. So we will have to work with students. You see in the numbers right now, the 18 to 34 year old group is getting hit by the virus more than ever. I mean, that really has changed. And hopefully that will sink into our students and our younger staff members. One of the questions of course is, I'll just pick one of these, but I thought this was interesting how we plan to enforce the mass policy given that the tobacco policy is not enforced. Well, I'll tell you what, the tobacco policy in my mind was very successful because we have a very, very high level of compliance. Now you can go around and you can find a place or two where smoking might have occurred, but there's not very many.

And we decided early on we were not going to, you know, cuff them and book them over violating our tobacco policy. We were going to use a really more of the kind of like you mentioned how our culture behavioral approach to, how do we get people to buy into this. Now on the mask, it's more, it's more significant. It's, it's more important, even. And so I think we're going to have conversations at the President's Council level over the next few weeks of what is the enforcement approach. We still wish in a perfect world. And you may say, I'm naive. In a perfect world, we would roll this out and people would see it. They would see the level of infections that see the death count. And they would see the mayhem that's being caused. And they would think, I have an opportunity to help. I have an opportunity to make this better. And my gosh, it's not much of an inconvenience to put a mask on. And when you get in your car and take it off, you get your dorm room, you take it off. But it's not that hard to do. And I'm going to tell you, I don't like wearing them. I was with a doctor recently during a day long meeting. He just fished with it the whole time.

And I looked at him, I thought, well, if he's not comfortable with it, no wonder I'm not comfortable with it. So it's not about comfort. It's about safety. It is. It is. And speaking of safety and there's a question, will classrooms get clean between classes? Well, there certainly will be a cleaning schedule. And again, this is not a question I can give you a recipe to because labs are different than maybe a lecture classroom. And you know, wipe on the table down versus cleaning a whole set of equipment up and those kinds of things. But certainly guidelines or procedures will need to be in place. And again, the uniqueness of some of these classes needs to be taken into account and then uniqueness of the spaces. So each of the colleges will be working on plans. The colleges have their own back transition back to campus. So those will be things that will be taken up with particular classrooms that are specific to certain colleges and programs. And I'd like to answer this one just something. I know you're already out in front of it. It says, a question is, can face shields be supplied to those with recognized disabilities that make wearing a mask unsafe as an alternative? And I know you've already ordered I think 100.

We've got an office already had them and hired modeled one the other day on a video call that we had just to show us what that looked like and that those would be available. And that's an important message. You know, I was at a dermatologist recently and I had some skin cancer type things burned off my nose right after the appointment. I put my mask on and walked out. Oh my gosh, it hurt. I couldn't do it. You know, it probably wasn't even good for me to have that on that on that skin that burned. So there are people that have serious health conditions that are going to be in the way of or cause someone to say, I can't do a mask. I need something else. And I think we've got to be responsive to that. I know and I know you are thinking that already. And again, that that also illustrates and unfortunately we can't be everything to everybody. And so in some cases it may be that there's a service that we can't deliver or somebody may have to make a decision about whether or not they can participate in something.

Yeah, I think there's just so much to this that is that's our responsibility to create the very best environment we can. And we've got to have people, faculty, staff, students, visitors coming to the table with a sense of responsibility of what they can do. You know, we've got leadership Kansas coming to campus this fall in August. And the folks running it locally, Brandy Johnson and Blake Benson, very active in the leadership Kansas program. They said, what do you think? They said, well, we've got to follow our policies and we would expect those visitors to wear a mask. And we will we're going to have a dinner or some kind of eating opportunity, but we're going to spread everybody out. I mean, we're going to do what we need to do. So one of the questions that comes up and it's on this list is you have to wear a mask to a football game. I hope we have football games. You know, that's a real concern. I mean, right now I'm just pretty concerned about that and that even happened.

But I'll tell you what, it'd be the least of my worries if I had to wear a mask to watch girl football. I mean, I'd be pretty excited about that. I'd wear a hazmat suit if I thought if I thought I could go to a football game to watch the grillers. Well, certainly, though, hopefully the wearing of a mask will cut down on the number of cases and hopefully sooner than later we can begin to maybe back off of some of these things. Absolutely. So we got just a couple minutes left. Your thoughts here and maybe that was your thought, the kind of final thought, but anything else to share before we sign off and turn it back over to Tim Metcass. I just want to say thank you again to everybody out there, all of our staff, all of our faculty, all everybody that works at the Pitt State, the community itself, all our political leaders. These are difficult times and we need to work together and recognize that these are not easy decisions. And in some cases, they're just going to be decisions that are made at that moment based on the date you have because it's just unpredictable.

But really appreciate everybody's patience and willing us to work together. So thank you. And you know, this is the 4th of July week and we kind of started the session today with talking about the grandkids. But it is 4th of July on Saturday. It's a federal holiday on Friday. And so we get the day off, but we only work half a day. So Doug Ball, to his credit, brought to the group, an idea that why don't we just kick people out of here, that is very nice of it, on Thursday at noon. And they'd get a really nice, lengthy 4th of July holiday weekend. And we all thought that is a great idea. And our system can handle that. And so that's what everybody gets to do. Isn't that cool? That is cool. Thank you, Doug. I appreciate Doug Ball and his team and the work that they do to manage all of our benefits and salaries and all those kinds of things. We don't think about, oh, I got a paycheck today. If you don't get a paycheck, you're really going to think about it. Or if your benefits don't work out, you're really going to think about it. So Doug, great job to you.

We do hope everybody has a very safe 4th of July. I hope you end up with all everything intact after the weekend of shooting fireworks. Be very, very careful out there. Be safe. I guess we'd say let's be careful where you travel to because we're all going to be back working. And hope to see everybody on campus on July 20th or at least what staff we will bring back on campus on July 20th. And we'll resume our buildings open. And as Howard said, there is going to be an end to this. We are going to reach a new normal and what an exciting moment that will be for all of us. So Howard, thank you. Appreciate the tremendous work you're doing to lead the academic affairs. Thank you, Dr. Scott, for leading us through this. This is certainly something that I don't think they do in presidential training. No, I haven't had a course on pandemics. I think they'll probably add that. So everybody, have a safe holiday, care about you, appreciate what you're doing, and we will see you along the way. Thanks, everybody.