Message from the President

Information regarding H1N1 Flu
Updated October 12, 2009

Dear OCCC Faculty and Staff:

OCCC continues to monitor the impact that the flu is having on faculty, staff, and students. From daily reports provided by supervisors, the Vice President for Human Resources is monitoring faculty and staff absence due to illness. Also, a sample of volunteer faculty has regularly been reporting student absences in 150 sections to the Vice President for Academic Affairs.

While we do have reports of employees out ill with the flu, the overall number has not been significantly higher than usual. You may be interested to know that with 1,371 current employees (full and part-time), the percentage of employees reporting being absent due to illness has ranged from 1.0% to a high of 2.4% per day.

In terms of student absences, the numbers increased from around 15% to a high of 26%, and in the last few days have been consistently around 23%. Since we do not have good comparison data, we cannot conclude that this number is significantly higher than usual. However, some faculty have indicated that the rate of absences does seem higher. Faculty are asked to continue to be flexible with students who are following the recommendation to not come to class if they are ill. MORE...

Sincerely,
Paul Sechrist
President

Once again, for your information, the Center for Disease Control lists the following as flu-like symptoms:

• Fever (100 degrees or higher)
• Headache
• Extreme tiredness
• Dry cough
• Runny or stuffy nose
• Muscle aches
• Sore throat
• Vomiting
• Sometimes diarrhea

Keep checking our Pandemic web site for updates.

Walktober Competition

The Walktober competition was a huge success! We had 66 employees competing. All together that walked 6, 748,719 steps or 3,374 miles which is approximately how far it is to walk from Miami, FL to Seattle, WA. The grand prize drawing was held on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009 at Noon in the Main Dining Area. More details

2nd Quarter Health and Safety Training

For the second quarter each employee of OCCC is required to update her/his Sexual Harassment Prevention Training.The instructions on how to enroll in the online class are attached. This training is required for all employees and must be completed by the end of this quarter, December 31, 2009.

Online Instructions for Sexual Harassment Prevention Training

Weekly WOW Sessions