ALBANY COUNTY — Nursing students at Maria College are “battle hardened” as they help during the pandemic, said the college’s president. Similarly, the president of Russell Sage College says his students are learning life lessons about serving the common good.

The presidents of the two colleges with Albany campuses, both specializing in nursing and health sciences, spoke at Friday’s county press conference about how they are coping with the pandemic.

Because hand-washing and mask-wearing are part of the curriculum, even in normal times, for Russell Sage students, the college has had “a high degree of compliance,” said its president, Christopher Ames.

“We had a successful fall where every student who wanted to study in classes on campus, who wanted to reside on campus was able to do that,” said Ames.

The private college, between campuses in Troy and Albany, has about 2,300 students and 500 faculty and staff, and had no lay-offs or furloughs because of the pandemic, Ames said.

During the fall semester, Russell Sage had 38 cases of COVID-19, he said, affecting 36 students and two staff members. He added that there were no hospitalizations and no sign of transmission in classrooms or offices.

Like other area schools, Russell Sage stresses social distancing, mask-wearing, hand-washing, and sanitation, he said.

This year, all residential students are in single rooms so if any get infected, he said, “We don’t have to move them. We just deliver food to their rooms. They switch to remote education.”

The college trained its own contact tracers to assist the county so tracing could be completed within two to three hours of first learning of a positive test, Ames said.

He praised a collaborative effort with other nearby Albany colleges including Maria, Albany Law School and Albany Pharmacy School, which early on had access to COVID-19 tests.

The college’s repurposed armory was turned over to the National Guard, which used the space to assemble test kits made at Wadsworth Laboratory.

Currently, Ames said, “There’s just more COVID around.” So the college is doing surveillance testing of 900 to 1,000 per week.

Russell Sage has been accepted as a vaccination site but does not know if or when it will get doses.

“We all have the same goal: We want to get those vaccines out,” said Ames.

He concluded, “There’s so much suffering with the pandemic … But it’s also a profoundly teachable moment. I’ve never known a part in my life when it was so clear that what individuals did makes a difference to the common good … for our students, that’s a lifetime lesson.”

Maria College

Thomas Gamble, president of Maria College, noted it does not have residence halls, dining halls, or athletic teams. Eighty-five percent of its students are women, most of them part-time students.

“They have jobs. They have children,” he said. “Our job is to get them educated in a career where they can take care of themselves and their families and get on with their lives.”

Skill labs and science labs have to be in person, he said, and everybody on campus was tested when classes started for spring semester.

“We have very low transmission rates,” Gamble said, noting that, since last March, there were just 21 positive tests.

Because of the pandemic, he said, the college has pivoted.

“We come from a heritage of nursing with the Sisters of Mercy,” he said. “Nurses were in Crimea with Florence Nightingale and she has elegant letters about how wonderful the Mercy nurses were at that time.”

Right now, Maria College has 90 students who are working to help with the pandemic at Albany Medical Center, with Whitney Young, and at the recent pop-up vaccination site held at the Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church.

“They are battle-hardened as a result,” Gamble said.

Gamble concluded, “We made our pivots. Our enrollment’s holding. Our nurses are helping the community. We are trying to live our mission to the extent we possibly can.”