BY KATIE HIRV ’22

She’s a familiar face, that’s for certain. Whether you’re stopping by to pick up your package from Amazon or the letter your family sent, Kory Figura is usually around the Wartburg Mail Center, ready to help with any mailing or shipping needs.

“We do all the incoming mail for faculty, staff, and students. That includes equipment, animals, chemicals, perishable things they need for lab work, and student packages. Last year, we also started to do textbooks through Akademos,” said Figura, the college’s Mail Center coordinator. “Because we do all the receiving, we also do all of the outgoing, including some of the marketing for the college. We’ll also facilitate any posters or postcards.”

When COVID-19 first began to spread last spring, the Mail Center had to make quick changes as students headed home all across the country.

“We saw a lot of people shipping things as they left. It took me about six weeks to track everyone down to see if they were still living on campus, if they left early, or had gone home or elsewhere. I ended up with a large spreadsheet of all the students, trying to find out when students were leaving. Even if you live off campus, you have a mailbox. With those people, we didn’t always know where they were,” Figura said.

Along with trying to figure out where all the students were living through the spring and into the summer, Figura also had other projects in progress, including rearranging the Mail Center to accommodate the influx of packages during textbook time. This also allowed her to move things around so employees could have work spaces that were as far as part as possible.

“We still have to work in close quarters, but I structured the schedule in such a way that we don’t have much overlap in between shifts. This way, if someone who works in here has to go into quarantine or tests positive, we don’t have to wipe out the entire staff,” Figura said. “This is a very hard area to maintain distance in, but we’re working with a smaller group of people. We take temperatures when people come in for their shift. Initially we did a lot of wiping down of surfaces, and now we ensure people are washing their hands after working with lockers or incoming things.”

A larger change made within the Mail Center to help protect everyone was elimination of signing for packages. Students now receive emails with a scannable barcode once a package for them has arrived in the Mail Center. The barcode is scanned, which allows the Mail Center to keep track of who is picking up their packages and when.

In addition to the pandemic, Figura has been watching closely the headlines involving potential changes to the United States Postal Service.

“International shipping has become more of a challenge than it already was. It’s difficult for our international students to send something home. There were countries that were not accepting mail from the United States,” Figura said. “Back in January, there was a huge concern that the United States was going to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union, which allows us to ship small packages in and out. While we don’t do a lot of shipping of small things, if the college had wanted to send a T-shirt to an alum overseas, that wasn’t going to happen. They managed to work out an agreement.”

As Figura and the Mail Center staff look ahead to the rest of the school year, their concerns with keeping one another safe and healthy is the top priority. Just in case, though, Figura has trained some of her colleagues in the Advancement Division on how to do the most critical Mail Center tasks.

“We’re very concerned with staying healthy, because we know that the Mail Center has to keep working. There are a number of people on campus who rely on us for medication, equipment, or materials they need for experiments. There are checks that come in and leave campus. All of that still needs to happen. We can’t shut down. We are trying to be really, really safe,” Figura said. “We thank everyone and ask for their continued patience when we get busy. One of the huge impacts we saw with COVID-19 and the textbook ordering is that we can only handle things so quickly. We’re trying to keep our workers safe so we can keep our service going.”