A grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) totaling up to $5,847,714 is being awarded to Keene State College as reimbursement for money previously spent on testing purchases and services, according to a Jan. 31 press release by KSC’s Director of Strategic Communications Paul Miller.
President Melinda Treadwell said the grant is an exact reimbursement of the money the college had spent on testing and testing supplies for the past year.
“We put a tremendous amount of money into operating the campus, buying masks, buying tests, doing all the things necessary to make sure our students didn’t experience the cost, our faculty and staff didn’t experience the cost,” Treadwell said.
Treadwell also explained that the FEMA grant was not the first federal or state funding awarded to the college due to COVID-19 related costs, specifically citing previous grants relating to lost revenue from on-campus students who were sent home in 2020, as well as personal protective equipment (PPE) costs and ventilation system improvements.
Treadwell went on to reference the ‘clinical surge flex facilities’ program, in which the college helped convert the Spaulding Gymnasium into a hospital overflow facility in case local hospitals became overburdened with too many COVID-19 patients. According to the Keene Sentinel, the program spanned from early April to late May 2020.
“We bought a whole bunch of equipment to be ready because the city asked us to help, but that was reimbursable,” Treadwell said of the program.
“We were going to invest where we needed with hopes that we would get FEMA recovery,” she stated.
Vice President of Finance and Administration Nathalie Houder said that the money the college had spent on COVID-19 related costs had been taken out of the college’s money reserve account, thus not having an impact on the college’s debt.
Houder explained, “It’s sort of like a savings account, so when we had a positive operating margin we built up those reserves, now that we’ve had a negative operating margin they’ve come down…we’ve also spent money out of those reserves for COVID related expenses, but for those COVID related expenses we’ve been so fortunate that the federal government is reimbursing us so our reserves are going back up,”
“The net impact on us [the college] should be 0 because we spent the money, and then we’re being reimbursed for that spent,” she noted.
Houder also went on to explain that the reserve funds have been supporting the college through budgetary problems in recent years. “In a way the system has been supporting us [the college] and our negative operating deficit,” she said.
“The good thing is we got that money back, because if FEMA had not reimbursed us, that 5.8 million would’ve been our hit,” Houder said.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
