Jamestown Community College P-J file photo

Both the State University at Fredonia and Jamestown Community College are reporting very high compliance rates with the state’s requirement that all students get COVID-19 vaccinations by this past Monday.

SUNY Fredonia’s president, Stephen Kolison, reported in his weekly COVID-19 campus update Thursday afternoon that 97% of the student body had provided evidence of vaccinations. The other 3% received medical or religious exemptions from getting the vaccine.

Kolison wrote, “This is tremendous! It indicates how seriously SUNY Fredonia students take this pandemic, and how much they desire to be in class and succeed academically. Students, thank you for your diligence in responding to this mandate.”

In addition, he stated that 73% of all campus employees have notified the administration they are vaccinated. He noted that, due to labor rules, faculty and staff cannot be mandated to get vaccinated.

“If we combine SUNY Fredonia’s students, faculty, and staff together, then 93% of our campus population is vaccinated. To put this in a regional context, this rate of 93% is much higher than the rate for the rest of Chautauqua County (our county), and higher than the rate for New York State,” he wrote. “Remarkable!”

Kolison went on to say that the vaccination rate, combined with mask-wearing, testing and individual efforts to combat the virus, “make me cautiously confident that we can continue an academic year that includes in-person instruction and extracurricular activities. Thank you all for these endeavors to keep SUNY Fredonia safe from COVID-19 and its variants.”

Over in Jamestown, Daniel DeMarte, SUNY JCC president, also talked up his school’s vaccination effort.

“Following Monday’s deadline, we can proudly report that more than 95% of the SUNY JCC student body has received the COVID-19 vaccination, pursuant to the requirement by the State University of New York,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “We appreciate our students’ efforts in doing their part to keep our campus community safe.”

DeMarte continued, “Students who chose not to receive the vaccination were provided other options, such as transferring any available coursework to an online setting.”

Some 92% of the JCC workforce has received at least one dose of the vaccine, he said. “This is a wonderful sign of their commitment to keeping our students and the campus communities safe,” DeMarte added.