BLUEFIELD, WV (WOAY) – Bluefield State College recently announced new measures the school is taking to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Robin Capehart, president of Bluefield state college, has been leading the charge to make changes at the college.
“Yesterday Governor Justice announced that we had the first case of Covid 19 in West Virginia and I think we knew eventually it was just a matter of time before that was going to happen in the mountain state, so it’s important for Bluefield state to intensify its efforts to reduce the spread,” Capehart said.
Capehart went on to mention that the measures are designed to limit person-to-person contact and keep students and faculty safe.
“The primary focus of these measures today is to reduce the density of personnel on both our Bluefield and Beckley campuses and minimize the amount of transactions and interactions that we have which we think could possibly facilitate the transmission of the virus.”
The most ambitious of these plans is to move the majority of their classes online. Bluefield State already has 40% of their classes available online, but the transition to take even more classes online is taking extra effort.
“We had a couple incidence of faculty members who weren’t adept to teaching online classes and of course we’ve spent the last few days actually putting them through the process of being able to offer to deliver their classes online.”
Bluefield State’s spring break ends this week, and the majority of students will find themselves not returning to campus. Some classes such as nursing clinicals will still be in-person however.
