A message from the president

Posted: July 30, 2021

Welcome back to the full Gannon Experience!

Beginning Monday, we will be transitioning the majority of us back to campus as we prepare for face-to-face instruction, in-person support of our offices and colleagues, and an exciting new academic year.

Many have been regularly on campus throughout and others already returned to daily work on campus these past several weeks. All of your work, from wherever you have been serving, has helped prepare us for our return and the return of our students in August.

Monday starts the next phase of that preparation and the next phase of our ongoing effort to return to normal amid the pandemic.

One of the most important and most pressing needs is our encouragement of our staff and faculty colleagues to get vaccinated. Many of you have taken this step to protect yourself from the significant health risks and to be a part of creating the most safe and healthy environment for us all. I want to thank the more than 70 percent of full-time faculty and staff members who have reported being vaccinated to our health center. (If you haven’t taken this step of reporting your vaccination status, you can do it here.) We still have a ways to go in the coming weeks.

If you are not yet vaccinated, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible for your health and that of all the many members of the extended Gannon family. Until you are fully vaccinated, your surveillance testing will begin promptly and continue every two weeks to maintain close tabs on the status of the virus within our Gannon community. We have outlined these requirements in prior emails and in the acknowledgement and consent notifications we will all sign off on to continue our shared work. You can find more about this here should you need an update.

We recognize that COVID-19 and the nation’s – and our – response will continue to evolve. Our response will be informed by many factors, including the level of disease in our region, the health and vaccination status of the members of our Gannon community, and the guidance of our external governing bodies among others. We will continue to update our protocols as needed. For now, here is our guidance as we start back:

• Masks are not currently required on either campus, but we strongly suggest that those who are unvaccinated to wear them indoors. The CDC has recently updated its guidance on masks for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Erie County does not yet fall under these guidelines but we are watching closely. We are actively assessing how Hillsborough County is doing to determine if a mask requirement needs to be reinstated on the Ruskin campus.
• If you are ill, please do not come to campus.
• Report symptoms or exposure to COVID-19 – whether vaccinated or unvaccinated – through our LiveSafe app. Though we are not requiring students to use LiveSafe to access classes in Erie, we will continue to use the app as a daily reminder to monitor our health and as our main gateway to the health center to handle COVID-19 cases and exposures.
• If you want help getting vaccinated, let us know. We have worked with our health partners to have them available. You can get the process started by contacting the Health Center at hlthcoun@gannon.edu.
• Remember that all of our current COVID-19 guidance is posted at update.gannon.edu. Our updated protocols for travel, social distancing, gatherings and other details are there.

We are happy to all be back together once again. We are planning for a safe and successful year, and we appreciate your help in making this possible.

Go, Knights.

Keith Taylor
President