University of Kentucky’s final plan for fall restart changes schedule, adds testing
University of Kentucky students will begin and end the fall semester earlier than normal while attending classes and eating with smaller groups, according to the final reopening plan released Tuesday.
COVID-19 testing will be available for all students within about a week of when they return to campus in the fall, said Eric Monday, the executive vice president for finance and administration. Testing will also be encouraged for faculty and staff, especially those with underlying conditions or those over 65.
The first day of classes is Aug. 17 — a week earlier than previously planned. Students and employees will get daily symptom assessments via an app. Masks will be required unless someone is alone, eating, exercising or whenever the masks may interfere with “required curricular activities.”
Students won’t get Labor Day off and the in-person portion of the semester will end at Thanksgiving. Finals week will begin after the holiday, but will be online. The university’s enrollment is more than 30,000 students.
According to Monday, the university employs about 20,000 full- and part-time employees. About half of those employees — those mainly in health care, facilities or safety operations — have already returned to the campus, Monday said. The rest of will be able to return in phases beginning in mid-to-late July. Employees who are potentially more susceptible to the respiratory virus will have to work with their supervisors to develop potential alternatives.
According to spokesman Jay Blanton, the university spent more than $4 million on personal protective equipment, testing, cleaning supplies and the screening app.
The university has ordered about 80,000 reusable masks and 200,000 disposable masks, Monday said.
Upon arriving, every student — those who live on and off campus — will receive a package with masks, a thermometer, hand sanitizer and information about the socially distanced campus. Additional personal protective equipment will be available in other campus buildings, and according to Monday, the university will install nearly 1,000 hand sanitizer stations.
The overall testing strategy is still in the works. For the initial round of testing, the university will look to partner with other providers to perform several thousand tests.
Classrooms will have limited capacity. Dining halls and on-campus restaurants will reopen with limited capacity. Buffet-style service will not be available in the dining halls and meals will be served to diners in to-go containers.
The university has also developed a fully online contingency plan should a spike in local cases force an early end to the in-person classes. The final reopening report was the work of more than 500 UK employees who met in a variety of specialized committees charged with analyzing how different aspects of the in-person college experience would be altered in the midst of a pandemic. More than 6,000 faculty, staff and students provided feedback on the university’s plans over the past few months, Monday said.
“There’s still a great deal of work to be done. We still have implementation in front of us,” Monday said. “But we’re really, really pleased with where we’re at today.”
Dorm move-in days will be expanded so that students can move in while social distancing.
Capacity in dorm rooms with more than one person sharing a sleeping area — such as the university’s two- and four-person suites — will be halved, Monday said.
“We are responding with a collective commitment to reinvent ourselves,” UK President Eli Capilouto said in a statement. “We will emerge stronger, nimbler and even more dedicated to serving our state and our world. Guided by science and decades of practice in clinical care and public health, we can take comprehensive, common-sense steps to protect community health.”
University officials predicted earlier this month that the university would see a drop in freshmen and transfer student enrollment — costing the university millions in expected revenue. Before the pandemic, the university aimed to enroll 5,700 freshmen and 1,100 new transfer students this fall. Provost David Blackwell said at a board of trustees briefing in early June that enrollment prediction models and the best available data suggest that the freshmen class will be closer to 4,500 and incoming transfer students will be closer to 500.
On Tuesday, Kirsten Turner, the associate provost for academic and student affairs, said the university currently has north of 5,000 confirmed freshmen for the fall. That number could still change before the first day of classes.
“We’ll see what the number settles at when we open the doors,” Turner said. “But we feel really confident and good where we’re at right now.”
Turner said the university retention rate among other classes of students remains stable and similar to previous years.
Many of the university work groups have made suggestions about the details of the socially distant campus. According to the report, those recommendations have not been approved but provide insight into what the campus may look like.
Employees are installing cameras in 90 percent of the campus’ highly used classrooms. About 120 other classrooms with projectors are being equipped with technology that would enable lectures to be streamed so students can attend without being physically present.
According to recommendations made by a university team tasked with analyzing on-campus facilities, some buildings would have reduced capacity. The Gatton Student Center — a high-traffic building that houses a dining hall, multiple restaurants, a bookstore, gym and movie theater — averaged 7,000 to 8,000 visitors daily in 2019. This fall, the building’s capacity could be reduced to 1,800.
A different work group assigned to analyze on-campus housing recommended that two student housing locations be reserved for students who need to self-quarantine. The group recommended that the University Inn be reserved for COVID-19 positive students and Ingels Hall house students who need to self-quarantine after a potential exposure or after traveling.
Monday said dorms for quarantine have yet to be decided.
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 12:29 PM.