Video Transcript – 2020 State of the University

Video Transcript

(upbeat music) (scenes from around Boise and campus)

[Students] Go Broncos!

[President Tromp speaking at commencement] I learned the byword there, innovation, innovation, innovation. If there were new ways to do the work better, we wanted to find them.

(upbeat music) (upbeat drum music) (applauding)

[Commentator] Boise State, gettin’ it done at tournament time, four-peat, history for Boise State. I’m really, really proud as the guy that gets to be a part of all those things to see them rewarded for the work they’ve done.

[Commentator] And congratulations to the Boise State Broncos champions of the Mountain West for a record time forth time.

(cheering) (upbeat music)

[Welcome back]

[Keith Thiede, Associate Dean for Research and Advanced programs, wearing a suit and tie, sitting outside on a lawn chair] I hope you had a refreshing and relaxing summer.

Welcome back to school.

[Nichole Moos, Clinical Instructor, Early and Special Education] The beginning of school is my favorite time of the year. And this year I’m especially grateful for those of you who worked over the summer to make it a safe reality for all of us here at Boise State. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Go Broncos.

[Rachel Rowe, Director of Educator Success] Thanks to everyone who has kept our community running throughout the summer. We really appreciate all the hard work you’ve done to allow us to be able to welcome our students back this fall.

[Jennifer Snow, Interim Dean, College of Education] Welcome. Welcome back to our Boise State community. People have been working all summer on a safe return. We are here for you to work in community on healthy, safe, innovative ways to strengthen our Bronco community. Go Broncos.

[Randi McDermott, Chief Operating Officer, Vice President for Campus Operation] To that team in campus operations, you know who you are. You’ve spent all summer preparing for everyone’s return. I am beyond words to thank you enough for the way that you’ve stepped up. I can’t wait to see you from here up. [Indicates eyes to forehead] See you soon. Go Broncos.

[Kathy Hurly, Lecturer, Department of Accountancy] Thank you to everyone in administration who has made this semester possible. It’s going to be a great one because we are resilient. I know we’re going to miss seeing each other face to face, but that’s okay. We can do this.

[Darrin Pufall-Purdy, Associate Professor, Theatre Arts] Welcome back Broncos. Even though we’re socially distant, I’ve never felt closer to my community, students and colleagues in Boise State. Have a great year.

[Eric Jankowski, Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering] What is up Broncos? Welcome to campus. There is so much wisdom and potential embedded in our community. And I’m so eager to see how your perspectives and your learning add to it this year. My challenge to you is to grow your support networks, and that will take extra intention this year, but it’s a tangible thing that everyone can do to make this year more awesome for everyone.

[Amy Vecchione, Associate Professor and Head of Emerging Technologies and Experiential Learning] Hello, everyone. And welcome back. I am so grateful to get to work with each and every one of you. I know we’re all trying to transform our work right now, and we’ll keep continuing to guide our students so that all of us can work to be the best that we can be. Thank you so much. I know it has not been an easy year. And I’m just really looking forward to working with all of you.

[Serena Hicks, Clinical Assistant Professor, College of Education] Hi, everyone. I would say welcome back, but some of us never left. And we’ve been here working, getting ready for Boise State students all summer long. Whether you’ve been hanging out on a virtual campus with me all summer, or you’re just coming back from something fantastic, welcome back. Great to see you.

[Johnathan Krutz, Lecturer, Business Communication] Hello, Broncos. Welcome back to a place of kindness, decency and respect.

[Elizabeth Ramsey, Assistant Professor, Librarian] Woohoo, you’re back. We at the library have been working hard all summer to get the library safe, secure, and ready for your return. Come to us for trusted information from people committed to your success. See you at the library.

[Text on screen: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….]

[Kirshna Pakala, Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering] This summer has been really tough for me and my family, but the Bronco family came together and showed their empathy, compassion and care.

[Kirshna puts on a Star Wars facemask, and star wars icons appear on the screen around him with the text, What about 2020?]

Much to learn you still have.

[Text on screen: May the Force Be With You]

(upbeat music)

[Patricia Hampshite, Interim Department Chair, Early and Special Education] Welcome back, everyone. We’re so excited to see you this fall. Go Broncos.

[Katherine Wright, Assistant Professor or Literacy, Language, and Culture] I never thought I’d be so excited to be sitting in my office. Thanks to everyone who worked hard all summer to make this possible.

[Katherine Hoehne, Secondary Educator Success Coordinator] Welcome back to campus. We’re really excited to have you here, even though things look a little bit different now. Thanks to all the hard work so many employees put in over the summer to keep us safe. Have a great semester.

[Tana Monroe] Hi everyone. My name is Tana Monroe, and at Boise State, I’m the director of security police and event operations for the Department of Public Safety. I’d like to welcome everyone to campus and hope that you have a safe, healthy, and fun year ahead of you. Go Broncos.

[Steve Marlatt, Associate Manager, Boise State Sign Shop, prepping a sign] Hey, Broncos, we’ve missed you.

[Kathryn Beesley, Supervisor, Boise State Sign Shop, putting up a COVID informational sign on the wall] We’ve got you covered.

[Sign Shop employees sit outside the sign shop] Welcome back, Broncos.

[Text on screen: And now, a special thainks to our essential workers from the Boise State University String Quartet]

(upbeat music)

[Boise State string quartet playing in front of the Boise State B statue while wearing masks]

(classical music)

[Montage of scenes from around campus with essential workers prepping public spaces and classrooms; researchers working in the labs; all are wearing masks]

(classical music)

[President Tromp] Good morning, everybody. I wanna thank our Graduate String Quartet for that lovely introduction. May I ask you all now, wherever you are to please stand for a round of applause for our essential workers who worked all summer to keep our campus safe and to prepare it for your arrival this fall.

We owe such a debt of gratitude to them, and I’d like to hear that applause all across campus.

I wish we could be in person together today. Your energy, the extraordinary positive energy of this community is a part of what makes this place so amazing. Today I’m going to talk to you about two themes centrally.

Our community’s incredible acts of service and our resiliency and adaptability in the face of challenges. I want to begin with something we might not even think about, unless we pause to reflect.

We are here.

All over the country, people have had to freeze what they were doing and lost the opportunity to be together, but we have the good fortune of being together today. In this moment, the moment of unprecedented challenges, we have managed to come together and figure out ways to be together safely and advance our extraordinary mission.

When others have folded, when others have bent, we have been resilient and we have served.

[Faculty wearing graduation regalia hold signs that say The Class of 2020 is strong and resilient, And we are so proud of you!]

[President Tromp] We know the kinds of challenges that we’ve faced, not just as an institution, but as a country in this difficult time. There’ve been financial challenges and not just for institutions like our university, but for individuals and families.

The pandemic helped create those challenges and then helped expose other challenges that we were facing as a nation. We’ve seen enormous racial unrest and conflict. And we’re poised for a very conflicted political period in the near future.

We’ve had concerns about how we can meet the needs of our students in this incredibly difficult time and how we can as a university, meet the needs of our community.

We’ve lost so much already. People have faced so much hardship, but there is so much for us to be hopeful and thankful for as we move forward. As an institution, we have worked to be nimble and responsive. We have focused on our mission. Our university’s mission is threefold, teaching, research and service.

And I’m going to talk about all of those components. Those components intertwined together to make a university like ours what it is. Not only do we serve students, we do incredible research that threads together with the work our students do. And in combination, we’re doing incredible service to our communities.

We have a history of being able to rise from great challenge.

[slide on screen reads Boise Junior College, 1932. Students and faculty of the Boise Junior College assemble in front of St. Margaret’s Hall on the first day of classes, September 6, 1932]

[President Tromp] Boise State University was founded during the Great Depression. Another period of grave, financial insecurity and turmoil. Through innovation and persistence, Broncos continued to rise about that adversity.

We started out as a small community college, and we have grown to the largest institution of higher learning in the state.

[slide on screen reads Boise College 1965. Governor Bob Smylie signing a bill that chances Boise Junior College to Boise College on February 6, 1956]

[President Tromp] Together we will face today’s uncertainty with the same spirit and scrappy determination and hard work. We will build a new future together.

[slide on screen says Boise State University 1974. Two biology students take water samples of the Boise River under the Capitol Boulevard Bridge]

[President Tromp] Our faculty and staff have gone beyond what anyone could have expected of them, to support our students and continue their world changing research. I just want to give you a couple of examples.

Our Student Union Building has engaged in virtual conferencing instead of having the traditional conferences that they host.

Our ExtraMile Arena and Morrison Center have completely rethought their spaces so that they can accommodate students and provide that social distancing that we need to keep everyone safe.

And OIT did so much work this summer to help us be flexible and responsive in our classrooms so that we can serve people in a variety of ways. But in addition to that, we’ve provided incredible support within our community.

We’ve provided physical and emotional support. Our counselors went online so they could help and care for our community. We provided career counseling. We had seniors who went off campus in the spring, and suddenly didn’t have that support network that they always have with their faculty right there and their peers right there.

But our career counseling went online to assist and support them. In fact, we were a national model. We’ve had online yoga sessions, online mindfulness, town halls. We know we can do more. And we’re gonna keep trying this fall as we come back together again, to learn from you and to understand what you need. I’m gonna be talking to you today a great deal about our mission.

[slide on screen with text that reads Our Mission. Boise State University is a public, metropolitan research university providing leadership in academics, research and civic engagement. The university offes an array of undergraduate degrees and experiences that foster student success, lifelong learning, community engagement, innovation, and creativity. Research, creative activity and graduate programs, including select doctorial degrees, advance new knowledge and benefit the community, the state and the nation. The university is an integral part of its metropolitan environment and is engaged in its economic vitatlity, policy issues, professional and continuing education programing, and cultural enrichment.]

This is really an important time in times of crisis. It is so important for us to reflect upon our mission. What you’re seeing right now is the university’s mission statement that was approved in 2012. This year, you will be evolving that mission statement during our strategic planning process.

Our current challenges in fact, may help you see our mission a new. We’ve already learned so much, and this time is an opportunity for us to grow and evolve as an institution. If we can discover better ways to help our students and to do our incredible research and to serve the state, this is a time when we can do it.

We have so many strengths. When we educate people, we change their lives. We transform their lives, and that ripples into their families and their communities.

This is an extraordinary mission. And I can’t imagine a better time than when the world and the nation are in crisis for us to teach people and serve. We increase the personal success of individuals who connect with the university, but we also make an incredible impact on the state, the region and the world.

And the way we do it has been so incredibly innovative and student focused. Many universities, many research universities leave teaching only to people who never go into a lab or never go into an archive.

At Boise State University, in part, because of our beginnings, our origins, we have a deep and profound commitment to ensuring that students are folded into all the work that we do. So I wanna talk a bit about that incredible research as well. We’ve made incredible strides this year. We had $58 million in research awards this year.

That’s an extraordinary accomplishment for an institution that has a history as a community college. That’s up 45% in just the last five years. And what that tells us is that the work our faculty are doing across the curriculum, in every area, from our artists to our business faculty, to our health faculty, our engineers, our scientists, social scientists, and humanists, education, public service, innovation and design, and all of our graduate programs all across the institution are doing work that is creating new knowledge and changing the way people think.

Our faculty are leading in their areas of study. And that has a tremendous impact on our students. The difference between what a research university does when it teaches and another institution is that we fold students into that process of knowledge creation, and that helps them to become leaders.

Research is also an engine of activity for the state, economic vitality and innovation. I’m gonna give you just a couple of incredible examples. Our faculty are working with nanomaterials right now to create life saving surgical implants and to purify water. They will literally change people’s lives.

We have faculty cataloging New Guinea’s flora. We have faculty searching for new ways to understand the pay gaps in this new high tech economy. We have people studying literature about 17th century Basque nuns that is changing the way we understand our culture today.

We have historians who are studying Boise’s de-industrialization. The work our faculty do isn’t just adding to this incredible body of knowledge. It’s helping to grow students who understand the power of knowledge and the ways in which their engagement with that knowledge can help them make a better world.

We’ve also reached out and linked arms to work synergistically, not just with each other and across units, but with corporations and partners, nonprofit partners from across the state. And those partnerships make an enormous impact.

Let me just take Micron’s partnership as an example. They have funded new scholarships for our students and funded new facilities for our faculty to do their teaching and research, because they recognize the ways in which the world changing work that our students and faculty are doing is contributing to the world. That is profound impact.

And our impact is being felt around the world. This summer, at the peak of the pandemic, we had faculty from engineering and folks from our Maker’s Lab work collaboratively to create face shields, to help protect people. That design was lifted by universities all across the country, who thought it was such a brilliant design. And those face shields were sent all the way across the world to Mozambique in Gorongosa where we have a partnership to help people there stay safe.

We are serving our community every day, even, and especially in times of crisis. I am so proud of all that our faculty have done. We’ve had over 50 business and entrepreneurs work with our Venture College in the “Survive to Thrive” series. We’ve had over 7,000 views of that work since March. We’re helping small businesses in our communities and across the state and region that have been struggling to respond, figure out how to bounce back from this difficult time.

We’ve had our faculty working with teachers in K-12 throughout the state so that they can better serve students across the state in this difficult time, both in the spring and going forward. In fact, we provided thousands of hours of service to K-12, this summer and this fall. That’s impact.

And we need people to understand our impact. We need to showcase and explain that impact so that our legislature and the community at large, in the State of Idaho, understand what we do. We need to help people know that the work the university is doing is advancing their wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of the state.

We have a duty to explain to people why the work in every single area of the university is improving, not just the lives of our students, but the lives of people in the city, in the state and all over our region. We can win back their trust just by showing them what you already do.

We’ve been the special target of some challenging assessments in the last year. Often Boise State has been called out specifically. And we know that there are challenges in our state with people losing faith in higher education. We have the lowest educational attainment in the country.

This is because people do not understand what the benefit is to getting that degree. And they don’t see what the university has to offer. We know that students ask themselves, why do I need college? We know that families think that about their young people. Why should they go to college?

We need to help them see all the ways in which the incredible work that you’re doing every day will impact not only their students, but the future. We will embrace the challenges that face us, all the challenges that are before us right now, and we will use those challenges to become our best self. This is what Boise State has always done.

This summer, career services went online, when our students had need, they were there. We provided telemedicine. We had a revolution in student responsive coursework. I heard from parents all across the country when we went remote this spring. I had parents write me and say, I have students in two or three other universities, and Boise State did the best job of transitioning to remote learning.

In fact, what we did was so profound that people described it as head and shoulders above what their children were experiencing at Ivy League schools. They saw what we did is so transformative and so nimble and responsive. You made that happen. We were flexible in response to our students’ needs.

And in a state like Idaho, we know our students have different needs than they do in other places. When I was teaching at the University of Wyoming, I had a young man who had done brilliantly all semester long, and about three quarters of the way through the semester he disappeared from class. I emailed, I reached out. I just couldn’t get in touch with him.

And at the very end of the semester, when I was grading final papers in my office, I heard the soft tapping on my doorframe. And I turned around and there standing in his hat and boots was this young man. And I said, “I haven’t seen you. “How are you? “I missed you at the end of the semester. “You were doing so well, what happened?”

And he said, “Dr. Tromp, my mother passed away “and I had to go home and help run the ranch. “And I don’t wanna bother you. “I don’t wanna trouble you. “I’m not asking for any special treatment. “I just wanted you to know I was sorry.”

And I said, “Son, you don’t have anything to apologize for. “Let’s figure out how to get you through this semester. “We’ll make everything work.”

We have built a mode of learning and teaching that has been responsive to our students when they are in crisis. The more flexible and responsive we are, the less a student like that has to feel that there is no option for them when there is a family crisis.

And we know that many of our students are experiencing crises in their families right now. The more flexible and responsive we can be to them, the greater our university will be at serving the needs of the people that our mission drives us to serve.

We have worked so hard to build community. Our staff and our faculty have really striven to figure out how to reach their arms around people, even when we can’t be in the same room together, to be innovative leaders in creating those connection points.

I want you to watch for some new efforts at letting us hear from you about the ways in which you imagine that you can innovate, that we can innovate as a university.

Let me say a word about Bronco Day. You all know that Bronco Day is one of the most important recruitment days we have all year. We bring so many students on campus and they get to have a taste of the experience of being a Bronco. It’s such an exciting day. People look forward to it all year. When I interviewed here, Leslie Webb told me about Bronco Day and the impact Bronco Day makes at the university.

This year, we couldn’t host hundreds and thousands of people on our campus. So Bronco Day went virtual. But what we learned when we did that was that we touched students who would otherwise not have been able to join in.

We learned that there are some things we can do face to face and some things that we can do virtually, and that we will discover even better ways to serve our students than we have before. We will discover better ways to help them succeed because we’re facing these challenges.

When I came, I asked our community a question. When 87% of Idaho’s counties are rural, how can we better serve those students? We had a resounding response. We are touching those students in ways that they’ve never been touched before. We will be a national model for how universities can serve rural students.

And when we build these programs and see what’s successful, we’ll share it all across the country because rural students are being underserved all across the nation. If it is difficult for them to come to an urban area, to get their degrees, we will go to them.

We’ve developed a Community Impact Program that will allow faculty to connect with them, where they live, and then give them the flexibility of online learning for the most of the semester. And then come back to them at the end of the term and help them wrap their arms around that material before they complete the semester.

We’ve offered True Blue scholarships for Idaho students. We’ve created Future Forward scholarships for rural Idaho students. And we’ve expanded our First Forward initiative, which is for first generation students to help them be successful.

We’ve also created a program called the Hometown Challenge. I grew up in a small town in Wyoming, and when I went to college, I couldn’t imagine how I would go back home and serve and live in my small town. It just wasn’t conceivable to me.

I saw some few people there who had college degrees. What the Hometown Challenge will do, is bring those kids home to work in government, business, nonprofits in their home communities. So they can imagine how to go home and serve. We are making a difference right now. Our community answered. Those programs will be up and running this fall.

We’ve also responded to challenges in other incredible ways. During this incredibly difficult period, we’ve seen some amazing projects emerge. Our graduate students work together to map the virus across the state in real time, so that we could see the places where the virus was emerging and people could make better choices.

It was a tool for our business leaders, our government leaders. We built ways to sterilize equipment. We developed virtual tutoring. All of these things will impact the world long beyond this COVID moment. And your leadership worked together very hard too.

We put together working groups that had incredible outcomes. You saw that virtual commencement, what an extraordinary event that was. We heard from parents and families and from our faculty and staff, that it meant so much to them to see the kind of investment that was made in that.

We hosted healthcare workers on our campus. So they could be safe and keep their families safe when they were facing hospitals with COVID. We created a new program called the Bronco Gap Year. And I hope you’ll look up this website. It’s an incredible program. We know this year, many students are asking about whether or not they need to go to college in the fall, whether or not this is the best time for them and their families.

But we don’t want them to lose the thread that connects them to Boise State and to that great future that could be ahead of them. So the Gap Year will allow them to work in a mentoring relationship with a faculty member and capture college credits at a low price. So they can be working to help support their families, to help them recover from the challenges that they’ve faced, but also moving forward and advancing in their lives.

They can earn up to nine credit hours this year so that they stay on track for their future and get their feet underneath them. And they have a chance to talk with a mentor who can help them plan their future.

I asked all of our leadership this year, I said, “If you look forward five to 10 years “from right now, what would your unit ideally look like?” Work with your leadership teams and figure out together where you’re going, what the best of yourself can be, and then start charting your course towards that in this difficult time.

And boy, has our community responded. We have put in 16,000 hours of training for our faculty this summer. 16,000 hours that our faculty dedicated for flexible teaching for student success. And we owe a big debt of gratitude for our CTL and eCampus and the provost office for putting that together.

[slide on screen reads, 725 faculty participated in training for online / remote course delivery totalling over 16,000 hours of training. 367 K-12 teachers registered for the Introduction to Online Teaching course offered by Boise State impacting up to 57,000 K-12 studetns]

In this way, our faculty and our staff were able to be incredibly responsive, not just to student needs in the spring, but going forward in the fall. We’ve impacted hundreds of teachers in the state and through them we’ll impact thousands of students.

We have been a catalyst for positive change in an incredibly difficult time. That’s something Boise State should be so proud of. And we can’t go back now to business as usual. These ways of evolving can make us even better at our incredible mission of serving students and the state. We will not wither in the face of challenges or criticism.

As a university, as a place of learning, we will learn. We will face those challenges and learn. We will reach more students even in our rural communities, we will increase the go on rates and we will change the lives of the college completers. We’ve seen more of them coming back to us now, and people up-scaling with graduate degrees.

We know that it will make an incredible impact on people. If folks who took a few college classes here and there, and then faced economic hardship in this period, if they have the opportunity to complete those degrees now, the university is ready to serve.

Last year when I came before you in this address, I described for you our energetic goals for the future. I told you that I wanted us to find new ways to serve rural students. That I wanted us to think about how we could advance our research mission because of the ways in which I saw it so fundamentally integrated into teaching and the service we do for the state and the world. I told you that I wanted us to pursue innovative strategies in our teaching, research and service.

This innovation is in our blood. It’s who we are. It’s why we have come so far. And why we have been named in the top 50 most innovative universities in the nation, two years in a row.

Now let me just pause and say a word about that.

There are thousands of institutions of higher learning in this country. There are hundreds that are in the category national university. We are in the top 50 of all those institutions.

And that measure is voted on by other institutional leaders across the nation. And what that means is people are looking to you. People are looking to Boise State to understand how to move forward in new ways, how to better serve our students, how to better serve our communities. You are a model for the rest of the country.

I also called upon us to enhance and foster our transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking. This is who we were from the beginning. We weren’t created in silos, like a lot of research universities are. We have new programs in CI+D and our College of Arts and Sciences is developing proposals for new schools right now.

New ways of thinking about how we approach challenges, grand challenges that we face. I also called upon us to care for our communities. We know we haven’t always done that. We know we haven’t always done it as well as we’ve wanted to, that we’ve stumbled.

And in times of hardship and conflict, we see that so keenly. I want every student, faculty and staff person to feel safe and to feel they have an opportunity to thrive on this campus. Ideas and innovation flourish, where people feel a sense of belonging.

This doesn’t mean we won’t challenge people. Universities should ask difficult questions. They should challenge people to engage their beliefs and think through them critically. It’s an important service that we do to the world. But we should be a place where we can engage in dialogue, where we can disagree with each other respectfully.

Boise State is a complex and intellectually diverse place. And when we face a period of enormous challenge, we need to think about our responsibility to be leaders in that dialogue.

This summer, in honor of the 56th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Betsy DeVos’s office came out with this message. This anniversary is a timely reminder to mark our society’s progress and to strengthen our resolve to realize the law’s full promise, racial equality for all.

As a university, when we look at all the challenges that are before us, all the ways in which we have heard people from many different perspectives say that they haven’t been seen, that their needs haven’t been attended to, that they haven’t been heard, and we can hear, and we can help create dialogue.

We can learn, we can evolve and we can grow. This is a part of the way that universities serve, not just the communities in which they sit, but the world.

I also said, we must grow the impact of the university. When we do these things, the incredible work that you do and share it, we become our best selves, and we increase the impact on the people that we serve directly and indirectly. We make an incredible impact on the state.

I brought before you those six items last year, based on dialogue I was having with you. You told me, this is what we see as our university’s special challenge and special strength. You told me what those six things were. Now, we will come back to you in the strategic planning process to carry forward that critical work.

Finally, I wanna praise the incredible impact you’ve made already this year. You created care for our community. You did this. You helped our students succeed in an incredibly tumultuous time. You provided one another with mutual support even when we couldn’t be present in the same room.

We look forward to a fall where we will see even more tumult. With a national election in a divided country, we cannot fall into despair at our disagreements. We have to recognize that while we will disagree, while we will challenge one another, it is a time for us to engage in that thought provoking, intellectually challenging and meaningful work of doing what we do as teachers, as learners, as a university. Boise State is not only a national leader in innovation in higher learning, but it is working hard to be a shining example of what it means to have difficult conversations in a tumultuous time.

In a politically, racially, ideologically, diverse community, we can actually talk with one another and make a difference in the world. Boise State students will leave here, ready to invest in others, in their community, and to make their positive impact with their gifts. This is after all the best of what we are. We are resilient. We are innovative. We are Broncos.

[slide on screen reads Thank you to our community for showing your care for one another by wearing masks on campus.]

(upbeat music)

[Participant 1 puts on mask] A lot about our world has changed.

[Participant 2 puts on mask] We’re here to change the world.

[Participant 3 wears a mask] And at Boise State University, everybody wears a face covering.

[Participant 4 wears a mask] And is practicing physical distancing. It’s just what Broncos do.

[Participant 5 wears a mask] Because we are a community.

[Participant 6 wears a mask] We want to be here.

[Participant 7 wears a mask] I wear a face covering ’cause I care about you.

[Participant 8 wears a mask] We wear a face covering because we care about the community.

[Participant 9 wears a mask] It’s not just about me.

[Participant 10 wears a mask] It’s about all of us.

[Participant 11 wears a mask] We all want to stay on campus and stay healthy. And that’ll take all of us to do that.

[Participant 12 wears a mask] We’ve got this covered.

[Participant 13 wears a mask] We are Broncos.