Colleagues,
We continue to evaluate public health conditions in our region and assess the impacts of evolving data on the well-being of our students and employees as well as the operational impacts to our colleges. In the last two weeks, we have prepared to expand our districtwide testing capacity as needed and we are seeing case rates in our communities begin to flatten or even decrease. That said, case numbers are still amongst the highest they have been during the entire pandemic, underscoring health and staffing concerns for our colleges.
With that as a backdrop, beginning on January 31, our “difficult to convert” courses that were originally scheduled in-person this semester (science labs, arts classes, and other lab/activity classes) will resume on ground instruction. A full list of those “difficult to convert” courses and programs can be found on our reopening website. This shift will roughly triple the amount of in-person offerings on our campuses and mitigate negative academic impacts to students in these disciplines.
Other lecture classes and courses that do not fall into the “impossible to convert” or “difficult to convert” categories (about 2,500 sections districtwide) will remain online through Presidents’ Day weekend, with the goal of resuming in-person instruction in those classes on Tuesday, February 22. We expect that cases in our region will continue to decline as our testing capacity expands over the next several weeks, reducing the risk to public health and staffing shortages by then.
Most student services will remain online until Tuesday, February 22 as well.
For more specific information about the status of your particular class or service area, please contact your area dean or supervisor.
