Fraternity Houses Trying To Fight COVID

Tennessee Tech’s Greek organizations are implementing COVID precautions for its fraternity houses.

Since the houses are located off campus, each fraternity is in charge of guidelines. Tau Kappa Epsilon President Jonah Stout said his fraternity is trying to be a part of the solution, not the problem.

“We have limited our foot traffic pretty substantially,” Stout said. “We have upped our cleanings as well to daily cleanings to all surfaces in the common area.”

Tau Kappa Epsilon met at the beginning of the semester to tell its members to avoid events without social distancing. Stout said the fraternity designated a COVID chairman to enforce the house mask mandate and make sure cleaning supplies are available.

“The Dean of Students, Katie Williams, and the new Greek Life Coordinator, Alyssa Robinson, they have been very helpful,” Stout said. “I have had close to a dozen emails from the both of them with suggestions and how we can implement the guidelines effectively and properly.”

Stout said the house has hand sanitizing stations throughout the house. Fraternity recruitment was set to begin in-person August 31st but was postponed to a date to be decided. Stout said as of now, the event is still set to be in-person.

“I had already registered those events, so the registration process that they have in place, which I basically go online to the Greek Life email, and I gave where the event was going to be and a description of the event,” Stout said. “And the the COVID guidelines. It was basically a document.”

Each Greek organization is required to submit a plan for any event held off campus.