Letter from the Interim President: Stay-at-Home Order

GODFREY - First, I want to thank everyone who has been dealing with so much uncertainty during this unprecedented time. I want to assure you that administration is working with state officials as well as college faculty and staff to try to get as many questions answered as possible. We continue to add information to www.lc.edu/coronavirus daily and are communicating our plans with our numerous constituencies directly through LC Alert and lc.edu email as needed.

As you have now heard, Governor J.B. Pritzker has declared a stay-at-home order for the state through at least April 7. Given the current declaration, our physical campuses are now temporarily closed to all non-essential personnel, to students, and to the public. During this time, however, Lewis and Clark will continue to serve students and prospective students virtually. Many of our employees, including advisors and faculty, are available to work remotely via phone, email, or a virtual teleconference.

Our faculty is working to move everything they can into a virtual delivery mode over the next week. All face-to-face instruction including labs, clinicals, and internships that cannot be delivered in a virtual environment will be suspended until a time when the stay-at-home order has been lifted. All online instructions will continue through the remainder of the semester, regardless of when the stay-at-home order is lifted. Faculty are communicating directly with students regarding which courses will be moved online, and which courses will be suspended until further notice.

All academic instruction that can be delivered online will resume Monday, March 30. Additionally, we are migrating the majority of our student services online. A still-growing online database of those services, contacts and frequently asked questions is available at www.lc.edu/coronavirus-FAQ. In the meantime, please continue to forward any questions to your course instructors, program coordinators and/or deans. We will do our best to answer all of your questions with the information we have at this time. We encourage all employees and students to continue to watch their Lewis and Clark email inboxes for further updates. We encourage our community members to continue to watch our website and submit any questions they may have at this time to lewisandclark@lc.edu.

We have not made a decision regarding Commencement at this time but will send a communication to students’ Lewis and Clark email accounts and load information onto our website as soon as plans are finalized.

We thank our community and our students for their ongoing patience and support during these incredible circumstances. We will persevere during this very unique challenge. Please know the college is focused solely at this time on ensuring the continuity of our quality academic programming to our students.