Email from President Joe Keegan

March 11, 2020

Greetings to you all,

As you may have heard, the Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, announced today that as part of the state’s strategy to help protect the health and safety of the citizens of New York, SUNY and CUNY colleges and universities would be implementing distance learning for remainder of the spring semester starting March 19th, 2020. This strategy is being taken as a way to reduce to population density and where possible, limit transmission of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Perhaps as important, the Governor went on to note what that would look like and how it could vary by each campus’ particular conditions and students’ needs.

While we could expect that you would like a definitive answer as to whether we will do the same, we were appreciative of the Governor’s address and his point about how conditions would vary by campus. At this point, we are working with our campus and SUNY partners on what are the next best steps that we can take for the College. We expect that we will have more details for you over the next day on this as it relates to delivering instruction. For now, classes will continue as normal.

As we have shared with you these last few weeks, we have been actively planning our response to the coronavirus. Much of that work has included contingency plans for distance learning options, which the Governor mentioned in his address.

Thank you for your patience and for your support. One of our greatest strengths is our community and we have faith we’ll find our way through this together.

Take care,

Joe Keegan

NCCC President