Two weeks until the start of the fall semester at Howard Payne University, Dr. Cory Hines – president of the university – dropped by the KOXE studios Monday morning to provide on update and what will and won’t take place on campus.

On June 17, Howard Payne issued a press release stating in-person learning will resume during the fall semester, and on Aug. 3 the university revealed a 42-page document regarding guidelines.

“We sent that to all our new students and our returning students, our board and all of our employees,” Hines said. “We did that because we want to make sure we do all we can to provide a healthy and safe environment for our students to experience at Howard Payne this fall. You can’t be too thorough with stuff like that. When you talk about a school of our size, we have professors coming from all over, students coming from all over the state, even throughout the nation.

“The question is how can we clearly explain to them the expectation and not leave anything to chance or wonder about. We were very thorough in crafting that document. It took a lot of hard work by a lot of individuals.”

Topics in the document include everything from social distancing while taking part in intramurals to providing a quality classroom experience while keeping students and faculty safe.

“Our academic leadership team went and looked at every classroom that will be taught this fall just to make sure it aligned with our guidelines in respect to spacing,” Hines said. “Our deans did a phenomenal job with what works best for each school. What works for a psychology class or a Bible class may not work for band or choir. Some classes are real easy to pull off face-to-face, and some are really difficult to transition online so they really wanted to give them flexibility but also with the expectation that we have to spread kids out these days and minimize them spending so much time close to each other.”

Hines also stated Howard Payne University has purchased masks for every student, faculty and staff member for the fall semester.

Another change this semester – the traditional move-in day for students has been scrapped in favor or a staggered system.

“Typically we’re already mapped out what everything for the upcoming year looks like,” Hines said. “You don’t have that luxury in today’s world. For us, having to make decisions on the spur of the moment is very difficult because you also have to send out the communication as well.

“For example, typically we move students in one day prior to the semester, let’s just say it would be Wednesday, Aug. 19. In today’s world you can’t do that, so we have a group moving in Wednesday. Aug. 19 in the afternoon, a separate group moving in Thursday morning, a third group moving in Thursday afternoon and a fourth group moving in Friday morning. You have to maximize spacing and minimize people in the building.”

Wings in student residential halls will also be limited to 50 percent capacity, Hines said.

With the postponement of fall sports to the spring by the American Southwest Conference in July, Howard Payne is also working to modify homecoming this year – originally slated for Saturday, Oct. 9 with the football team hosting McMurry.

“We were going to have three different events at the same time, we were going to have family weekend, have a prospective student day, and have homecoming and call it the Stinger Spectacular,” Hines said. “We’re trying to figure that out, what does that look like in the sense of do we potentially do a hybrid approach? We want to get people on campus, we want people to experience Howard Payne, but in today’s world you can’t have 1,000 people on campus in addition to all our athletes, students, faculty and staff.

“Maybe we’ll split it up and do half of homecoming this fall, do another half of it in the spring. We have some (Sports Hall of Fame) honorees we want to honor, so maybe we bring them to campus and do a banquet in a scaled down version. Rather than having 300 in the room we have 150 in the room and rather than honoring all six we honor three, then do the other three in the spring. But we’re still having those conversations and as soon as it gets finalized we’ll let everybody know.”

Concerts, plays, and other activities normally held at the Mims Auditorium will not take place during the fall semester either.

“We’re not going to be able to pull those off,” Hines said. “We don’t feel right inviting people and packing them in side by side. When you think about roping off every other section in Mims and spreading them out, the amount of people you can get in is just so minimal the question is where is the value to doing something like that. You’d have to do the same performance 10 times to get the amount of people that want to be there.”

For more information regarding Howard Payne University’s fall semester plans and news in general, visit its official website at hputx.edu.

“We want to make sure we’ve over-communicated so the parents know, the students knows, the faculty knows, and the staff knows,” Hines said.