Since the start of the pandemic, the University of Idaho’s military program has been finding new ways to train cadets and adapt to COVID-19.
Military and Veteran Services Director Jason M. Nierman said staff have been taking steps to ensure cadets are safe while training.
“Under different service departments, whether it’s army, navy or air force, each one has guidance they push out to their units,” Nierman said. “They would defer to the most cautious guidance.”
The program still needed to meet tasks, conditions and standards, despite the ongoing pandemic. While the standard for training, content, and education stayed the same, according to Nierman, the departments had to get innovative on how they would implement it.
“Tasks are what you’re going to do, the condition is the environment where you complete the task and the standard is the quality of the task,” Nierman said. Observing various safety protocols, the program divided trainees into small groups to allow distance between them during physical training.
Over the last year, Nierman said the department didn’t have any large COVID-19 outbreaks where several students tested positive at once.
“We did have some students that tested positive, but there weren’t any large outbreaks or shut down of departments,” Nierman said.
The ROTC programs at the university have cadets from other colleges and universities in the area. Nierman explained how the program handles each university population of students while maintaining safety precautions to lower the risk of infections.
“The army program here has some cadets that go to Lewis-Clark State College and the Navy ROTC department has students from Washington State University,” Nierman said. “Washington State University was online last semester. UI made an effort to do face to face and that’s how we continued to do instruction.”
The program also holds summer training for those in ROTC. These take place near the end of May and the beginning of August. Other events hosted by ROTC departments were canceled or modified due to the pandemic.
“These large, social events on campus were canceled,” Nierman said. “The plan for the summer is to hold the summer training events for the students scheduled this year or for those who couldn’t go last year to make it up this year.”
Those plans include basic camps for freshman and sophomores and advanced training for juniors and seniors. According to Nierman, these trainings operate as internships for cadets and midshipman.
“These are around the globe,” Nierman said. “They involve specialty training like airborne school or air assault school.”
Daniel Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @DVR-Tweets