Walked into the television studio for the first time today. Some things will be different this semester, but a lot of it feels the same. There’s a goodness to it, being in a room of potential, a space where people start to see their dreams come true, under lights where their skills begin to sharpen. It’s nice to be in a space like that, even if it’s just to study some of the new safety considerations.
But, in a few weeks, we’ll have students back in front of the camera. A different kind of recording today, though.
It isn’t every day you get to talk to a professor of pediatrics, who is also a medical school dean and the vice chair for health policy and outcomes research. Dr. Aaron Carroll wears a lot of titles. He’s also the director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research and is leading Indiana University’s arrival and surveillance testing for the 2020 return to classes.
He took time out of his busy schedule to talk about sending children back to school, and all of the work the IU campuses across the state are doing to help keep their communities safe.
It’s a good listen. Dr. Carroll is a great presenter. He’s built an ambitious program here, which is probably starting as one of the most ambitious programs on a college campus in the country. And, when it matures to his committee’s full plans will most definitely be at the top of the list.
Consider, when they implemented the re-entry tests for students IU returning to campus it became the biggest testing center in the state, virtually overnight. Some 100,000 students were tested in the last few days, and that was just to re-enroll. And it won’t stop with that one test that allows students to return. Pretty soon they’ll be running thousands of tests a week as a matter of course.
The university sent out two masks to each person on campus. Masks are required. That was a $600,000 expenditure. As Dr. Carroll says in the interview, this is entire exercise on the university’s part is about money and will. The university has had the will to build out, at some considerable expense, a robust system designed to help try to keep us safe.
It won’t be perfect, no. Nothing will be, and I think we acknowledge that here, but there’s something to the effort, and Dr. Carroll is a capable person, surrounded by similarly talented folks. That just has to filter down to the rest of us. A lot of this will come down to individual choices. Mine, yours, and everyone else’s.
