LSMSA Fall Re-Opening

Good afternoon Eagles and Eagle Parents:

 

We are so ready to bring our students and our faculty/staff back to campus. The on-campus community of faculty and staff, as well as the School’s Governing Board of Directors, desire a return to normalcy. But the world around us has not returned to normal yet. 

 

The past weeks and months have been spent planning for our return to campus. Believing that Louisiana would be well into Phase 4 by mid-August, we worked to develop a plan for a safe return to campus after Labor Day. While we re-envisioned our traditional campus experience and outlined ways to increase safety, circumstances in our state continued to worsen. In considering the worsening conditions (over the past 72 hours the number of reported new cases in Louisiana has increased by over 7,000), the unavoidable risks that would exist in our residential setting, and the likelihood that on-campus instruction would be constantly compromised by the disruption of closing campus with any onset of cases, we determined that the most responsible decision to make is to maintain the LSMSA experience virtually for the fall, in terms of academic coursework, academic support services, and student support services.  

 

While we realize that moving to a fully online program represents a tremendous departure from the upcoming semester you have been anticipating,  we feel that this path best meets LSMSA’s priorities, including protecting the health of our students and their families, as well as our faculty and staff, and continuing to deliver the academic experience that defines the Louisiana School while minimizing what would certainly result in disruption to students’ education if we had to react to a COVID-19 case while on campus.

 

As we continue to plan for fully virtual education in the fall, careful consideration will be given to the following areas:

 

 

Dr. Key will be in touch soon with information about your courses and a process for at-distance advising for the fall semester.  We will also work to provide all necessary technical and equipment support for students and faculty.  We will communicate all relevant information as it becomes available.  

 

For the spring semester the hope is for students to return to campus. Throughout the fall we will continue to work with public health officials, our external partners, and our Board of Directors in order to plan for a reopening that will allow for alignment with the CDC, Louisiana Department of Health, and state guidelines at that time.  We will do our best to bring students back if we feel confident that we can do so safely.

 

Similar to the decisions we made last spring semester, these decisions are difficult ones.   We miss our students.  We miss their energy, their curiosity, and their spirit.  We miss our extended community of faculty and staff.  All of us would like nothing more than a return to normalcy for the semester ahead.  But know, in the absence of our previous ‘normal’, that we are committed to bringing our students the top educational experiences possible in the state of Louisiana.  We are also committed to supporting and building community throughout this process.  We will remain a living-learning community, even amidst the virtual landscape of the fall semester.

 

Years from now, we’ll all look back on this time as strange, certainly, but also as an opportunity to react to the circumstances we were thrown into. We are all trying our best to do the right thing, both logically and morally. Parents, we appreciate your trust in our institution.  We know these are difficult days for families to determine best paths for their children.  We hope you will continue to trust in our school to offer your child an excellent education and important social opportunities with their peers, even though the situation represents a new ‘normal.’

 

Parents, your children and their safety and security remain our top priority.  Thank you for allowing us to be a part of these pivotal years of their development.

 

Steve Horton