By Josh Margolis
HAVRE, Mont. (NMB) – With just one month left in the spring semester at MSU-Northern, Chancellor Greg Kegel says they have been grateful to experience minimal COVID-related issues.
“We put some pretty stiff protocol together, and one of the things that I will tell you is the students helped it. They didn’t resist it, they helped it. To this day, we have not had one transmittal of that disease from student to student. So any student that ended up with COVID on our campus got it from somewhere else. Downtown or at home or wherever they were. But they haven’t passed it from student to student. That’s a huge accomplishment and we couldn’t have done that without the faculty and staff coming together and doing whatever they needed to do to keep Northern open.”
According to DPHHS, as of March 26th, MSU-Northern had not reported a COVID-19 case in at least two weeks.
As members of the community continue to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Kegel says they will be able to further reopen.
“Allow people on our campus, have games, have crowds, fans, all of those things that we’ve been missing out on. When I had to close the campus last spring, we had a fairly robust college calendar of events. We just canceled every single one of them. For over a year now, we haven’t had an event on campus. We’re desperately needing to have activities and things to do. My plea right now is to stay safe, keep doing what we’ve been doing, and get vaccinated and let’s get this virus behind us.”
Spring commencement is scheduled for May 1st and will take place in two separate sessions.
“We’ll do a session in the morning and a session in the afternoon…We broke the students into two sessions based on the colleges. I think that’s a good way of doing it. It’ll be a little harder, but it’ll certainly be better than trying to do four or five different types of things across the last week of the semester. They’ll be duplicated sessions, so everything that I do in the first graduation session will be the same as the second one. And that allows us to distance better and set ourselves up in pods of people and still remain as safe as we can possibly be, but still be able to have family attend those ceremonies.”
