Message to Students, July 8, 2020
To Our Student Community:
Although summer is still in full swing, we are already thinking about fall on campus and how we can be prepared to both welcome you back and protect you and our faculty and staff from the transmission of COVID-19.
Last week, we finalized our official procedures for notification when a student, employee or visitor to campus tests positive for the virus. The process for students can be found at the Return to Learn website here. I encourage you to read through that information and be familiar with it before you come to campus.
The main thing I want to point out is that individual privacy is a priority; no one is required or compelled to notify the University about a positive test. However, we hope that individuals will choose to notify us so that we can take the appropriate steps. Because COVID-19 is a public health issue, information is shared on a need-to-know basis. We will follow guidance from the Minnesota Department of Health in the event others need to be notified of a suspected or positive COVID-19 test result.
I also want to remind everyone that each individual’s health status is a private matter, and no one should publicly declare someone else as sick. This includes NOT notifying classes, office colleagues, student clubs, teams, etc. unless there is specific guidance to do so. Supervisors and instructors do have the right to ask an employee or student to go home if COVID symptoms are present.
As we continue to prepare for fall 2020 classes, we know that many of you may have already or may soon receive email notifications of changes to your scheduled courses from noreply@mnsu.edu with “Registration Change Notification” as the subject line. These notifications are sent automatically by our Minnesota State system after any change is made to a course to encourage you to review your class schedule. We recognize that these emails have caused some confusion, so we want to be clear about why you may have received such a notification:
- Your class time may have changed
- Your classroom location may have changed
- A change may have been made to the instructor of the course
- The course delivery method may have changed. This happened when the system adopted the code of “HyFlex” as its generic term for what we are calling FlexSync classes. We will provide additional information about what your FlexSync classes will look like in the coming weeks.
There are other reasons changes to classes happen prior to the start of a semester. If you have questions on your class schedule and want us to assist, please email provost@mnsu.edu.
We always appreciate hearing from you with questions. Please keep submitting your questions here. We will get back to you with answers as soon as possible. In the meantime, I will continue to send you email updates every week. You can also find more information by visiting www.mnsu.edu/returntolearn.
I look forward to seeing you again in August!
Sincerely,
Richard Davenport,
President
