[School theme softly plays]

Hello and welcome to the 2021 Minnesota state university family orientation podcast. I'm your host this season, Dr. David Jones, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, here at Minnesota state university Mankato. We're excited, we did this podcast last summer and got great reviews on it. Clearly, we're continuing to be in the midst of a pandemic so feel like it makes a lot of sense to continue this effort and share with you important resources information introduce you to some of the important people here at the university that will be very influential in the success of your student as they attend our university and answer just a lot of questions you might have so this is our welcoming podcast I want to share with you a couple of different messages first as I mentioned I'm the vice president for student affairs I'm in my 10th year here at the university and couldn't be more thrilled to be sharing all the various resources and the people here and the offices at our university and the dedicated efforts that they've put forward, in all that they've done to help students be successful during their time here. So the purpose of this podcast really is to provide a lot of that information but more importantly provide accurate information based on what we know related to the pandemic our academic planning our student support and service plans for you, as you get ready for the fall of 2021 and we welcome our new class of students.

So let me start with what we know right now today I'm recording this on the 26th of February 2021 and we continue to meet weekly one of the things we're super proud of is our weekly meetings with the Minnesota department of health right from the beginning of the pandemic we've struck a great relationship with the Minnesota department of health and their higher education experts in helping us adjust to the needs of our students our faculty and staff here to make sure that we're following the most recent guidance as well as we've placed people on statewide committees and task forces to help influence and write those guidance's that have been used across all of higher education in the state of Minnesota. It's that expertise that we take a lot of pride in knowing that they're available and right here on our own campus to help our students be successful so what do we know as of right now we stand just about at midterm period here in our spring semester students we find ourselves in what we call our flex sync mode. If you look at the color on our website we are in yellow, which is right above the green. Green is back to fully normal it goes yellow and then orange and then red being the most serious green being open we are at yellow we started this semester at orange as requested by the governor of the state of Minnesota and transition recently to yellow which allows us to begin to do more in-person activities here and provide more in-person services for our students that includes the opportunity for faculty to engage with their students in our classroom settings so I mentioned the term flex sync one of the things we're super proud of and we'll explore in a future episode as well but our students right now have the opportunity if they're not feeling well or they're not feeling safe with their own health to go and attend an in-person class they have the opportunity to go log in and attend that class from afar right on their laptop from their apartment or their home or the residence hall room wherever they may be. As well as flexing then allows some of the students to attend class in person. We have the entire classroom set up across the campus with the current six-foot distancing as well as requiring masks at all locations here on campus and that provides a great opportunity for students to interact with their faculty and their professors and instructors as well as maintain a safe distance from everybody in a way that allows them to maximize their learning. This approach has really allowed us to be super successful this year we poured in a lot of resources last summer to make sure we had the success that we're having right now, and we're super proud of that.
As we look at our cases here at our university and where we stand on the number of cases and everything let me share with you an update on that. 
I shared earlier that as of February 24th two days ago we are still at the yellow.

We have a total number of students with active cases of COVID right now in our campuses is 7. 
Just one of those students has had an active case with a self-reported campus contact, meaning they've (one person) been on campus at some point when they were positive.  We have 0 of our 97 available quarantine beds being used right now. We house about 3 000 students in a normal year. 

Right now we've put aside 97 rooms to address those who need to isolate or quarantine, and we have zero of those 97 spaces being used right now.  We may have students who are living in our residence halls that may quarantine or isolate in their own space. right now we have zero students who are doing that as well. So, we're super proud you can look at our website underneath our covid campus data and you can see since we began tracking this information in early August all the way through today of how we've stayed on top of covid and been super transparent about the resources that we have and where our caseload is at this particular time. In addition to that, we're super proud of our student health team that is put in place and we'll explore more about their services in a future podcast.

But really we have full medical physicians nurse practitioners nurses we have built and put in place a respiration clinic so we can do testing right here on campus as well.

And of course, our students in the city of Mankato have the opportunity to take advantage

of some of the state testing sites, we have set up as well. So that's where we stand, lastly, I want to introduce you to a couple of resources, and we'll talk more about these again in future episodes

But that's where we stand right now, we have an
an incredible resource called the office of

New Student and Family Programs, and that's an
office that's available for our new students before you get here as well. As a new student all throughout your first year, and then family it is the best place to start with any question you may have because if you're uncertain where to start it is truly the best place. I promise you if that office doesn't have the answer right away they'll likely know where to find the answer or who to speak to for answers.

So, it's an incredible resource, you can go to our office in new student family programs you'll find versions of this podcast, where you can link to Spotify, iTunes, youtube to find that posting of this resource and we want to welcome you excited you're considering to be a maverick or that you've made the commitment to be a maverick for this coming fall. We'll be sharing with you more details as we record these I expect to be doing these probably minimally monthly, but likely two times a month as we introduce you to a lot more topics and know that you have questions.

With that thank you look forward to speaking with you more and visiting you in a future episode! 

thanks!