The President of Thompson Rivers University says students and teachers on campus will not know if someone in their classroom has been vaccinated against COVID-19 or not.

“We really aim to observe all of the privacy regulations that are involved in that so we’ll be looking at a confidential process,” Brett Fairbairn told NL News. “We’ll have an app that will remind them of that, but we won’t be storing that information and we won’t be looking at it.”

Fairbairn was speaking on the NL Morning News, where he was asked how the university plans to require all students, faculty, and staff to self-disclose their vaccination status. A video released by TRU this week says people do not require to prove their vaccination status when they declare it.

Students living in campus housing as well as those looking to take part in some aspects of on-campus life will need to be vaccinated. Vaccines will not be required for students if they are only attending classes, unless they’re in the health sciences field.

TRU’s policy also indicates that anyone not yet fully vaccinated will have to undergo regular rapid COVID-19 testing, which will be available on campus.

“One of the excellent things about our post secondary education community is the high rates of vaccination we’ve already got among our faculty and staff and increasing among our students, so we want to drive those rates up,” Fairbairn added.

“We’ll have vaccination clinics on campus. We’ll have testing clinics on campus. Our nursing students will be helping out with some of those, so it is really part of a drive to get everyone vaccinated, who can be.”

He also says TRU expects to release data which shows the vaccination levels of its staff and students some time this month.

“We have the general information for the area and for the different age groups, but we’ll be looking to track it for the campus population specifically,” Fairbairn said, when asked by NL News.

Following large campus parties at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, TRU is also reminding students to “be responsible” as classes resume.

“We are expecting students to be responsible and making sure we remind all the members of our community of what is responsible behaviour to participate,” Fairbairn said.

– With files from Howie Reimer

The fall semester at #myTRU has officially begun and with our collective efforts, we look forward to it being a safe one.

The vaccine declaration system will be announced in the coming days.

MORE INFO ➡️ https://t.co/lj8ERpAr1R#Kamloops #WilliamsLake #Campus #CampusSafety pic.twitter.com/R9vARMKiWl

— Thompson Rivers University (@thompsonriversu) September 8, 2021