Page 8 - BusinessWest March 3, 2021

people safe, but we’re also looking to the future England since last
“I think about the new employees who came on board just before the pandemic, and not having them in the office and having them shadowing someone every single day for a week or two to learn what needs to be done. I
think that has impacted them.”
and how we can more provide enhanced services to the community. We’re trying to balance the present and the future.
Cooper: This is our third semester in the pan- demic, and we’re adapting. We are back on cam- pus, we’re fully residential, and we had our first athletic contest recently — the men’s gymnastics team played Cal. So, yes, we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. When we thought about the pandemic and what we needed to do, we had to pivot, just like healthcare; we didn’t imagine going online as quickly as we did, but we made it happen. The biggest takeaway for me thus far, and moving forward, has been the resil- iency our faculty and students, in particular, have demonstrated.
Johnson: We’re in good shape for the shape we’re in, and like others, we do see a light at the end of the tunnel. As for what’s changed for our organization, we’re future-focused; we’re looking at how we want to come out of this. We’ve been planning for the next five years at Western New
September. We
have not taken the
bunker mental-
ity of waiting for
the storm to pass
and then figure
out what we want
to do. We’ve cre-
ated a vision; we
want to be a ‘new
traditional uni-
versity,’ a phrase
we’ve coined here
and that we’ll define in the upcoming weeks and months to come, and imagine the possibilities.
MARY-BETH COOPER
“The synergy of having people together, the opportunity to come up with ideas and piggyback on them together, and just the joy of being in the workplace, it’s difficult to get all
of that on a call or on Zoom .”
have adjusted — a lot
of litigation is driven
by the court schedule, and having the courts shut down for a period of time has had an impact. Also, we’ve got- ten a lot of calls on the employment aspects of this pandemic — small businesses, and all busi- nesses, for that matter,
That’s because higher education, like health- care, has been turned upside-down; we’re reimag- ining ourselves, and we think the best is yet to come. It’s tough, though ... we’re in a very tough environment.
Rymarski: We all have our own struggles, and the law is not immune to it. The biggest impact has been access to the courts and how the courts
are struggling to deal with smaller staffs, how a PPP loan impacts them, what they’re going to do under the Family First or CARES Act, how they’re going to get employees back, and how they imple- ment policies and procedures across the board that are going to be fair but also abide by all of the regulations.
Senecal: When this whole thing started right around March 9 — I remember that date vividly — I think I stopped breathing sometime in the middle of March, and I was resuscitated some- time in June, because it looked really bad from my perspective. June came around, summer came along, and things started to look a lot better. Then fall came around, and as cases picked up, that started to have an economic impact on a lot of our customers.
To put things in perspective, we had probably $300 million in loan balances involving customers in that first month asking, ‘can we not pay you?’ And we responded like most community banks and said, ‘yes, no problem; let’s revisit in 90 days.’
JENNIFER RYMARSKI
estd
1944
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MARCH 3, 2021
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