By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri Western State University is working through a spring semester dominated by coronavirus concerns and looking forward to a fall semester largely back to normal.
Missouri Western President Elizabeth Kennedy says the St. Joseph campus is again seeing the basketball hoops and volleyball nets go back up, and students hitting the tennis courts.
“The campus is starting to come alive and to me that’s one of the most exciting things,” Kennedy tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “Spring is my favorite season anyway, because you see the flowers coming up and you hear the birds coming back. Well, on campus we’re seeing the life come back.”
Kennedy says current plans call for 85% of the classes offered by Missouri Western this fall to have some in-class component to them with a bit more than 70% entirely face-to-face.
Masks and social distancing will remain in force unless the pandemic eases even more.
Kennedy says she’s excited about the possibility of a semester on the St. Joseph campus beginning with COVID-19 mostly in the rear-view mirror.
“I’m just so excited. It’s like we’re opening up again and here comes life back to Missouri Western.”
Much has changed since this academic calendar year began.
Kennedy points out there was a lot at stake when Missouri Western began the fall semester.
“When I look back at the fall, one of the big fears that we had, and I think the community reasonably had, was that we were going to bring all of these students in and be a super spreader for St. Joe. So, the burden was really on us to do everything we could to mitigate and I would say almost that the exact opposite (happened),” Kennedy says. “We were able to keep our numbers down, deal with the cases that came up, mitigate those circumstances.”
Kennedy says the university has learned a lot about coping with the pandemic and Missouri Western students have met a challenge they will remember for the rest of their lives.