Delaware State University students leave for the Thanksgiving holiday this week and will conclude the fall semester entirely online, but university officials say they hope to bring more students on campus in the spring.
DSU has been conducting about 85 percent of its classes virtually, but will switch to entirely remote learning after the holiday break.
University President Tony Allen says DSU hopes to open up a bit more come spring, but is waiting to see how widely available vaccines are at that time. He says the university is hoping for 75 percent online and 25 percent in-person curriculum.
“We do intend to see if we can bring more of our students back on campus as well, because of our testing protocols and the capacity we created, we’re going to be really thoughtful on how to do that,” said Allen.
DSU made testing regularly available this fall semester through a partnership with Testing for America, one of the university’s resident halls has been used to isolate COVID-positive students and it has required mandatory face coverings on campus.
All things considered, Allan says he feels DSU has been largely successful in keeping the spread of the virus to a minimum during the fall.
“I think we’ve tried to take the protocols that we knew to be successful very, very seriously, build a testing protocol to prevent community spread and then dial up or dial down based on the data we see,” he said.
Allen says DSU has a 0.4 percent positive test rate with a little over a hundred positive tests out of more than 30,000.
University of Delaware students will return to their campus after break, but anyone living on campus or using facilities must get tested both Nov. 30 and Dec. 2.
