With the approval of limited face-to-face classes in areas under alert levels 1 to 3 by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF), Ateneo de Zamboanga University (AdZU) has continued its preparation for the resumption of in-person classes.
Vice President for Higher Education, Fr. Rene Tacastacas SJ said in an interview with the BEACON, “We have already spent so much for the retrofitting of our facilities in the past months. Right now, we are preparing other laboratories to accommodate all other lab classes of various programs in time for the January 2022 reopening,”
AdZU has initially planned to conduct face-to-face classes for nursing and biomedical engineering programs as soon as the city is placed under alert level 2.
Fr. Tacastacas noted that “Almost all nursing students have been vaccinated already as well as all biomedical engineering students. We have been inspected by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and we are approved, but the COVID situation in the city prevented us from pursuing the limited face-to-face classes this first semester.”
He added that AdZU has been preparing for the back-to-normal operations since the beginning of the school year in August 2021. But, additional funds will be spent for retrofitting renovations and refurbishing of the classrooms.
The university’s VPHE further explained that it will be difficult to have complete face-to-face classes as all students need to be vaccinated and with the slow progress of vaccinations, he estimated that the earliest this could happen is on March 2022.
“We cannot force some of our students to be vaccinated. Other students are also afraid to come back to school with the still looming threat of the virus infection…. We need to receive yet the guidelines from CHED regarding the conduct and the accommodations allowed for those not yet vaccinated. I am afraid that we cannot unilaterally decide on our own regarding matters on accommodations of those unvaccinated but we will have to comply with CHED directives and IATF initiatives,” Fr. Tacastacas claimed.
