PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Colleges and universities across the country are making big decisions what the campus is going to look like after the summer. West Chester University is one of the schools in our area going back to in-person learning in the fall.
It's a return to something close to normal made possible by vaccinations, but the decision to go back was just one of hundreds of hard choices administrators had to make very quickly during the pandemic.
"Universities are not accustomed to having to make those kinds of life or death decisions about whether to hold classes or not," said West Chester President Chris Fiorentino. He told the KYW Newsradio In Depth podcast he made the right choice when he shut down campus after spring break 2020.
"Any university or college that found one case on their campus was going to have to shut down," he said. "That was the level of reality at that point."
Now he says West Chester is thriving because of those steps.
"We're in the process of having our commencement ceremonies, and now we're turning our attention to next year and we have very different circumstances as we look to next year where we were last year at this time," he said.
And while mostly everyone will be back in person, Fiorentino said some changes will stay.
"The bursar's office, the registrar's office, the financial aid office — they function very effectively over the web and these students are very tech-savvy," he said.
"This has been a very effective way to conduct business. It would be silly for us to go back to the old way of doing business where we have long lines at the registrar's office for people to conduct business."
Most important, Fiorentino encouraged everyone returning to roll up their sleeves. "If you're vaccinated," he said, "the risk of hospitalization and death are extremely low."