Emphasizing that the risk of COVID-19 can be minimized but not entirely eliminated, higher education leaders in Oklahoma joined others nationwide Thursday in calling for Congress to protect schools from possible lawsuits.
Colleges should not be held liable if students catch the disease while attending classes or other school functions, educators said.
Campuses will take extraordinary precautions this summer and fall, with social distancing, masks and temperature screenings among the most likely measures, said Tulsa Community College President Leigh Goodson.
“But the only way to reduce the risk to zero,” Goodson said, “is for you to stay home, everyone you live with to stay home and never have contact with anyone.”
A U.S. Senate committee held a hearing Thursday to consider protecting schools from COVID lawsuits as well as providing additional funds to help campuses with virus-related expenses.
Lawsuits could take resources away from financial aid and other student benefits, the president of Brown University in Rhode Island told senators. But a leading Democrat suggested that colleges won’t need legal protection if they take appropriate steps to prevent the spread of the disease.
“What message does it send to our families and our students?” asked Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts.
Congress could craft the legislation “very carefully” to protect only campuses that follow health guidelines, Brown President Christina Paxson told the senator.
“I do not want protection from being careless,” Paxson said. “That is not what we’re about,” she said, adding that careless schools “should not be protected in any way, shape or form.”
Like other institutions, Oklahoma State University is working on plans to keep students “as safe as possible” this fall, school officials said.
“We know we cannot remove all of the risk of exposure to the virus,” OSU President Burns Hargis told the World by email. “At a time when higher education funding is constrained, federal funds to help build out our safety plan and limiting liability to avoid using scarce resources defending lawsuits would be helpful.”
This article originally appeared on Tulsa World.
