Opinion | PCC Superintendent/President Dr. Erika Endrijonas: Surveying the COVID-19 Landscape

Next month marks the two-year anniversary of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I think through the steps we’ve taken at Pasadena City College over the past 20-plus months to deal with this disease and its effects, I feel a little like a gardener who takes a pause from tending one corner of her flowerbed and steps back, takes a deep breath, and sees the entirety of the landscape in front of her eyes.

It is quite a sight to behold.

In fact, it was just yesterday that members of my executive team had their latest check-in with the Pasadena Public Health Department. Throughout this process, we have been grateful for our partnership with Dr. Ying-Ying Goh and her team of stellar professionals. They have been outstanding resources, sounding boards, consultants, and compatriots for the COVID-19 team at PCC. We were pleased to hear Dr. Goh’s support for the steps we are taking. We have gone above and beyond what has been required of us, and it is very rewarding to be recognized for our efforts by the professionals.

So how did we get to this point of going beyond the expectations of our public health colleagues in this midst of this pandemic? At PCC, our COVID-19 response has become the full-time job of a few people, and a part-time responsibility for everyone. Our efforts began with our custodians, groundskeepers, maintenance staff, and campus police officers, many of whom never stopped coming to campus and instead poured themselves into the task of keeping our facilities and our personnel healthy and safe. For their service throughout this pandemic, we will long be in their debt.

Our first priority was to improve our physical plant to support a return to on-campus operations. Over the first year of COVID-19, we cleaned our campus from top to bottom, upgraded every ventilation system in every building, installed air filtration systems in all classrooms and offices, and established enhanced cleaning protocols that we have only made stronger. We also installed thousands of square feet of plexiglass in offices throughout the campus as an extra measure of protection.

These physical improvements gave us a strong foundation to bring our students, faculty, and employees to a clean, healthy working and learning environment.

Next, we focused on our people. As public health requirements were developed, we integrated and built upon them wherever we could. We scanned temperatures and distributed wristbands in order to ensure that everyone on campus was fever-free. We implemented a daily symptom survey to help people remember to stay home if they were sick. We were one of the first higher education institutions in Southern California to require vaccinations, with limited exemptions, of our faculty, students, and staff. And if members of our community got sick, we provided them with the time they needed to care for themselves and their families.

This spring, we have added weekly COVID-19 testing to the mix, expanding a monthly program we started in August 2020. After a brief pause in on-campus instruction to shelter from the worst of the omicron variant, our students, faculty, and staff returned to PCC on Jan. 24. Every person who came to campus was required to have a recent negative test result before coming to class or starting work.

This week, with that baseline test behind us, we have moved to a period of surveillance testing, in which every student and employee will take a weekly test. These community tests give us valuable information about any spread of the disease and the tools to contain the effects. At the same time, we are providing an incredibly valuable service to our students and employees, making free, regular COVID-19 testing available at a time when it is exceedingly difficult to get tested.

Our results speak for themselves. From Jan. 17 through Jan. 30, the latest date that results are available, we tested 8,341 students and employees and found positive results in 149 tests. That positivity rate of 1.8 percent, when compared to LA County’s rate of 12.5 percent, is very encouraging.

Another figure worth sharing: PCC has verified the vaccination status of 21,332 of our students and employees. These data are available for the public to view on our COVID-19 information website, pasadena.edu/lancerstogether.

The future is impossible to predict, and we know that our landscape will continue to shift. But at PCC, we are tending our garden carefully, doing everything we can to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment for our students, faculty, and staff.

Erika Endrijonas, Ph.D., was named the 16th president of Pasadena City College in January 2019.