Excitement grows over upcoming first day of school at WKU

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - Students are back on the hill, some returning and others getting ready to experience college.

Currently, Master Plan is in full swing, that’s the transition program for all new undergraduate students.

WBKO News spoke with WKU President Timothy Caboni about getting ready for the first day of school.

“I’m really proud of the work that our faculty and staff did to create the opportunity for us to come back fully in person,” says Dr. Caboni.

The official start of the semester is Monday, August 23rd.

“We’ve had a complete transformation of the freshmen experience with the first-year village, a third of our young people are in living-learning communities, instead of entering with 3000 freshmen, they’re entering with 23 other first-year students in a living-learning community,” adds Caboni.

Dr. Caboni also says he knows the incoming freshmen have had one of the toughest senior years, and that at WKU they’re trying to make the college transition as easy as possible.

“These young people have had a senior year unlike any other senior year in our history, and all they want is the opportunity to be back and be in person here on campus, and we worked really hard to create an in-person experience that is completely normal, except that we have to wear masks a little bit.” -- Dr. Caboni

He also says, “the reality is, folks just want to have a chance to return to some kind of normalcy, we’re gonna have to learn to live beside this virus, it likely will become endemic at some point, and so what we need to do as an institution, is make sure that we can continue to meet our mission, no matter what the external challenges are, and I think we’ve done a great job this year with that.”

COVID-19 vaccines are not required to go back to classes, but students can go to the Graves Gilbert clinic on campus and get the vaccine.

“We’ve modified the healthy on the hill guidelines, based upon what CDC and our local health authorities have suggested. We’ll have masking in all of our indoor facilities,” says Dr. Caboni.

They are also strongly encouraging students to get vaccinated.

Copyright 2021 WBKO. All rights reserved.