Hello Faculty, Staff, and Students,
Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Public Health announced Tuesday that our region will start a mitigation plan on Saturday, October 3. When our region or state changes guidance around the pandemic, our emergency management team evaluates our current campus practice, makes adjustments as needed, and communicates any guidance to you.
The Stephenson County Health Department confirmed that Highland’s current guidance already complies with the mitigation plan that starts on Saturday.
Since the semester started in August, we have continued to review our campus foot traffic. This includes monitoring how many in-person courses and employees are coming to campus. Although our staff departments are back on campus at 100%, we have been operating around 30% for our daily average classroom capacity.
The only area of our campus that will be impacted is the public conference center and any in-person meeting that is more than 25 people. The rest of our campus will remain operating as we have been since August.
As a reminder, you can reference all of our guidance at highland.edu/hcc-advisory We have also recently added a COVID-19 Dashboard to our website which tracks current and cumulative lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases on campus https://highland.edu/covid19dashboard/
Thank you for practicing social distancing, wearing a mask, self-monitoring for symptoms, and not coming to campus if you are sick. It’s because of you that we are able to continue operating on campus.
Cougars, continue to mask-up, work hard, and have a successful semester
– President Chris Kuberski