ALLENDALE, Mich. — Despite the ongoing pandemic, a college tradition is still set to take place on Sunday morning.
Faculty are saying that more than 5,000 new and returning Grand Valley State University students will be making their way into the residential halls, a process that is going to last through Thursday.
The move-in schedule has been expanded, giving students specific days and times to encourage social distancing.
"In the past, our move in had been compressed into about a three day period, what we're doing is we're expanding move-in to a seven-day period," said Greg Sanial, Vice President for Finance and Admin at GVSU. "What we're doing is we're expanding move into a seven day period. Again, it gets back to our whole philosophy to densify the campus, and so instead of having a lot of people doing a lot of stuff all at once, we're really spacing it out. Also this year, people had to register for a particular block of time, so that we can manage how many people are on campus at any one time."
In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on campus, students, faculty and staff will go through thorough testing, so that GVSU can isolate the virus if it is detected.
"One of the things is we're going to have a pretty aggressive testing plan that we're going to establish here on the campus," Sanial said. "We'll be looking to test a large number of different groups. Athletes will be tested very regularly , and our resident advisors will be tested weekly. People in food service will be tested almost weekly. At the same time, we're also going to be doing a lot of random testing, with the idea being that hopefully we can identify a statistically significant sample of those asymptomatic potential spreaders, and hopefully catch them much more quickly."
The week will end with a virtual convocation on Friday, when President Philomena Mantella will address the first-year students.