Andy Hakin; photo courtesy StFX
The president of StFX says the 2020-21 academic year went very well despite the ongoing pandemic.
Andy Hakin says they kept 75 per cent of classes in-person, which was tops in the country.
Hakin tells The Hawk they couldn’t have done it without incredible support from members of the community.
“I have to be very realistic here- there’s no way we could have gone through this year without the support of the community, and for that I’m really, really grateful,” he says. “We built up trust with our community, we said that we’d be careful, we’d be vigilant, we’d let them know what was going on, and we obtained that trust- working together, we proved that we can do great things.”
Hakin says community members really stepped up to help the students.
He says more than 200 volunteers came forward to help.
“(They were) getting groceries, they were doing wellness check-in phone calls to our students when they were in isolation, we set up tables here,” he says. “The help tables had volunteer shifts just helping our students through that isolation experience- it was magnificent.”
Hakin says the result of that was only four confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the entire academic year.
He says that success makes him hopeful they’ll be able to run things even closer to normal in 2021-22.
