By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
As the debate continues across the U.S. about the legality and need for federal vaccine mandates, Fort Hays State University is not planning on implementing a mandate for students or staff at this time.
Unlike larger universities in Kansas, FHSU President Tisa Mason said the university does not have federal government contracts that would cause a mandate to be put in place.
"What happened recently is the federal government said that they were going to put language in federal contracts," Mason said. "So research institutions are particularly going to have to make decisions about a vaccine mandate whether they wanted to do one or not, and turning down contracts from the federal government."
She said a thorough review of FHSU contracts did not include the stipulation.
"At this point, we reviewed all of them. Not one of them includes the language," Mason said. "So we are watching, we are studying. If we get a contract that hasn't, we'll have a conversation about whether we turn it down or move forward."
Overall, she said the hope is FHSU will remain mandate-free.
"It's really unfortunate, quite frankly, that we've been put in this position, but so far we're holding strong we do not have to mandate," Mason said.
Even before any mandates were put in place, she said FHSU has seen only a minor impact from COVID.
"We are going to continue with our excellent success on mitigating the spread of the virus on our campus," Mason said.
Along with the efforts of faculty and staff, including the student health center, she said an incentive program that gave direct payments to students and staff have helped mitigate COVID on campus.
"I think we are a little above approximately 80 percent of our faculty and staff (vaccinated,)" Mason said. "I don't recall the percentage off the top of my head for the students, but I know that it's over 50 percent of our students as well."
While the impact has been low so far, she said care is being taken to ensure impacts remain low.
"Most importantly, we have to be careful of our residential students, and isolation and our high has been well, it was three students till the other day, we're up to four students," Mason said. "But it's been very minimal. We've really done really well with people making local decisions."