College community,

As we continue planning for the Fall, it is my optimistic hope that our reopening plan could be certified by SUNY as early as this week, allowing us to publicly share our Fall semester format more broadly with our College and external communities.

Last week, with guidance from SUNY, we took our high-level Fall Reopening draft and applied the content to a series of categories and subsections announced by Governor Cuomo on June 18. We accomplished that task in time to meet the June 23 submission date, as set by SUNY Chancellor Johnson.

While we await feedback from SUNY, we continue working on the finer details of our plan and are preparing or refining implementation strategies. Please know that once we receive clearance from SUNY, my intention is to host a Zoom session open to all SUNY Orange employees so you can learn more about the College's plans for Fall 2020 and ask questions of me or members of the EMT/COVID-19 Response Team. The call will be held from Noon to 1 p.m. the day after we receive certification. I will share a College-wide invitation once we have set the date.

Upon certification, we will also be preparing a public announcement that we’ll share broadly with current and prospective students, the general public, and our community partners.

I want to thank the members of our College community who have offered comment and feedback on our draft thus far. Replies filtered in from all sectors of our College community, providing the types of diverse perspectives necessary when creating an expansive plan of this nature. Because of the unexpectedly quick turnaround demanded by SUNY, we stuck with our original content for our draft submission. However, your input will absolutely shape our implementation strategies.

Your input was timely and thoughtful, and ranged from suggestions about high-level strategies to very detailed questions/comments related to academic delivery, physical space allocation and configuration, social distancing, contract tracing, and compliance.

Very soon, likely just after the Fourth of July, we will be sharing a SUNY-wide employee survey link. Many of our sister institutions will be utilizing that survey as well. We will have access to the full data set from across the 64-campuses (in case there is information that will be beneficial to us) but we will also be able to distill replies from SUNY Orange employees. I encourage you to complete that survey when it becomes available. The survey examines multiple aspects of how our employees have experienced COVID-19 and working remotely throughout New York on Pause.  The data will certainly influence our thoughts and actions as we implement our Fall 2020 plans.

Again, I continue to appreciate the work of our EMT/COVID-19 Response Team and thank those of you who have participated in supporting that team.

I remain hopeful we will receive positive news from SUNY very shortly.

Regards,

Kris