Another large storm moved up the east coast threatening to bury every town in its wake with snow this past week. This after a storm that crippled the mid-Atlantic states with feet of snow the weekend before. The first storm missed Connecticut when it turned out to sea but the forecasts predicted that on Wednesday we would not be so lucky. In preparation colleges, schools, and businesses announced their closures as early as a day before. Parking bans were put into effect. Those businesses that did open Wednesday morning closed early. The governor worked with major employers to stagger employee releases so that the highways were not clogged and that everyone had the opportunity to get home safely. However, the storm on Wednesday was seen by many as a bust as most of our towns received only a few inches of snow, which prompted many of us to wonder if all of efforts were warranted.
It reminds me of the issue we faced with preparing our colleges for the H1N1 flu. Last summer in our institutions there was a great deal of discussion about contingency plans in the event that many of our students suddenly were not able to come to classes. Although there are other good reasons that should provide impetus to have solid contingency planning, primarily, we were attempting to prepare for a potential H1N1 outbreak. We did not want to have our students severely set back in their educational goals by losing a semester. We dealt with the pieces of the problem we thought needed to be addressed in our prep work. We discussed probable numbers of classes that could be affected. We looked at the numbers of faculty and staff members that could be affected. We developed updated our contingency plans for moving course content online in a short period. We developed training workshops to prepare our faculty to conduct at least part of their classes in Blackboard. We attempted to work affectively to convince our staffs and faculty that the planning was worth the extra energy.
Although the year is not complete it appears to be far enough along that much like the storm that missed, H1N1 appears to have missed us this academic year too. Some are saying that their extra effort was in vain or that their lack of effort to prepare was justified. Some suggest that the man-hours of all the intelligent, educated professionals could have been better invested resolving some of the numerous issues facing our colleges.
In general I feel that prep-time is never wasted. In this case, we should like at the larger picture. Preparing for H1N1 has improved the technical knowledge of our faculty. Preparing for H1N1 has forced us to make sure that we are contractually and technologically ready to handle larger numbers of students online. Preparing for H1N1 has given us a better contingency plan that we can use regardless the cause that students are not able to come to the physical campus. Over the last couple of years schools and colleges in Connecticut have closed due to regional electrical power failures, water main breaks, grieving of tragic happenings, investigations into health of conditions, and violent events. For the most part we have been able to cope reasonably well when bad things happen but the work that we have done has prepared us for the worst.
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