Page 8 - Delaware Lawyer - Winter 2021

FEATURE
Cleon L. Cauley, Sr., Esq.
Culture, Vision and Teamwork
What HBCU Delaware State University is learning from COVID-19’s challenges
Delaware State University, ranked as the third public Historically Black College or University (HBCU) in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, has a 130-year tradition of providing a high-quality, low-cost education to those who had been traditionally either excluded or under-served by public education for reasons of skin color, gender, national origin, religion or sexual orientation.
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In 1891, that primarily meant young African American men and women. Today, that mission has expanded
to include Deferred Action for Child- hood Arrivals (DACA) students and low-resources families of all colors. But HBCUs share another characteristic: chronic underfunding both in opera- tional and capital terms. As a sector, these institutions have older and more fragile infrastructure, smaller endow- ments, lower operating budgets, and a much greater vulnerability to sig- nificant unforeseen challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic that has spread so rapidly across America.
Amid the flurry of news stories through fall 2020 about universities forced to send students home due to massive COVID-19 outbreaks, Dela- ware State University managed to com- pile a record of pandemic risk manage- ment that allowed it to return 80% of students to campus and keep the en- tire community safe throughout the semester. Over 35,000 COVID tests returned only 121 positive student results in four months — an unparal- leled record of keeping infection below 0.5% even as the virus spiked across the country. What lessons can be learned from this success?