KEENE, NH – Keene State College is receiving a grant worth more than $5.8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recoup money spent on providing COVID-19 tests for students, faculty, and staff during the pandemic.

According to a news release, the $5,847,714 FEMA Publica Assistance grant will reimburse the college for purchasing 165,000 COVID-19 antigen tests between January 2021 and March 2022. The college also paid for 1,328 polymerase chain reaction, or PCR tests, as well as courier services for those tests to be transported to a lab for analysis.

“With the health and safety of our community always being top of mind, the college made significant and ongoing investments to be proactive and to mitigate risks during the pandemic,” Melinda Treadwell, president of Keene State, said. “The financial costs of all those actions were not insignificant, so this grant is critical to offsetting the expense of the protracted response and campus-wide testing.”

Keene State did recently close its testing center for the remainder of the spring semester, however rapid COVID testing kits are still available for symptomatic testing.