UK planning to open campus back up in August

Over the last few weeks, colleges across the country have been announcing plans to reopen campuses for the fall semester.

The University of Kentucky is the latest to do so, as the school has announced it will reopen campus beginning in August.

“We plan to open in August for our Fall semester,” UK president Eli Capilouto said in a statement. “The distinctive residential educational experience we provide at UK has attracted thousands of students from across Kentucky, the country and the globe. That experience is critical for the future. This differentiated education will be more necessary than ever to help us and our students meet the ongoing and daunting new challenges our world must now confront.”

Here’s an excerpt of how UK is planning to make its campus safe enough to open by the fall:

To reach our goal, we must act quickly over the next month-and-half to reinvent or reimagine what is normal in the wake of this public health crisis. To that end, we want to share with you the process we will undertake and the guiding principles to be followed:

• Three broad-based planning teams will work quickly to think about the most important questions that must be addressed to re-start campus.

• At the same time, an additional team is being created to develop strategies for screening, testing, tracing and treating on our campus to help ensure health and safety as part of our reinvented normal operations. Such strategies may also, potentially, assist the broader community and state we serve.

• The best ideas from that process will be handed off to our existing COVID-19 workstreams – 19 teams that have, for months, been addressing implementation issues related to the coronavirus. • That collective work will form the basis of a campus operational plan that will be prepared and communicated by mid-June.

Be sure to read the entire plan here.