Grove City College’s 2021 Florence E. MacKenzie Campus-Community Awards honor key players in the College’s ongoing effort to maintain a safe and healthy campus during the pandemic.
The awards are presented each year to recognize those who work to bring the College and the community around it together in meaningful, beneficial ways and strengthen a town-gown relationship that goes back to the College’s founding as a community endeavor in 1876.
This year, the campus award goes to the College’s COVID Response Team and the community award to Art Campbell ’87, a local bus company operator who was key to implementing the quarantine strategy worked out by the team to manage potential infections on campus.
The awards, now in their 38th year, were presented Tuesday.
The College’s COVID team, represented at the awards by Vice President for Student Life and Learning Larry Hardesty, Operations Director Susan Grimm and Dean of Student Life Joseph Cirelli, was formed in Spring 2020 as the coronavirus began its deadly spread around the world. They developed plans to deal with the earliest days of the pandemic and the successful return of students for both the fall and spring semesters. Members worked tirelessly to keep the campus community safe and largely infection free over the last year.
“Each member of the team served our campus with excellence, diligence, and deep compassion. Along with countless others who served so faithfully in these extraordinary times, the members of the Response Team exemplified the best of who we are as a College community,” Cirelli said. “It is truly my privilege to be their colleague and a very small part of this very special place."
Campbell is part of the family ownership of Campbell Bus Lines in Slippery Rock, Pa., and a graduate of Grove City College with a degree in Accounting. He and his wife Monica, a 1988 graduate, live in Slippery Rock. Their daughter Sedona is a current student.
“Art Campbell is a long serving partner with the College via multiple transportation contracts – for students, events and alumni outreach. None have been as important as the tireless effort given to transporting current students for COVID-related quarantines on and off campus from local hotel blocks, where quarantining overflow was housed. Any hour – day or night – Campbell buses were available and Art was there to drive,” Hardesty said in his nomination of Campbell for the award.
The Campus Award recognizes members of the faculty, staff, administration or student body, including student organizations. The Community Award recognizes an individual, group or organization from the greater Grove City Borough area. Nominees for both awards must have met the criteria through volunteer effort, not through aspects of employment or other requirements that force interaction.
The awards are named for Florence E. MacKenzie, wife of former Grove City College President Dr. Charles S. MacKenzie. Her efforts and involvement included serving as president of Grove City Woman’s Club, the Women’s Bowling League, secretary of the local United Way and president of the Grove City Hospital Board of Trustees, today known as AHN Grove City. The awards have been presented since 1983.