Dear Faculty & Staff,

I hope you are doing well and with any luck had some downtime this summer.  I have been very inspired by all of your efforts to move us forward in the context of the pandemic and enjoyed singing your praises to our external Leadership Council earlier this week during a zoom meeting. They were certainly impressed!

Through our social media sites, we have attempted to highlight some of the more public-facing work you have been doing (including the latest items listed below).   Of course equally important is the diligence you express at making the School and University seamlessly function for the benefit of our students.  A special shout out is important for our experiential office which has weathered an overwhelming degree of rotation changes due to COVID and also dealt with helping manage student exposure-related cases.

I want to remind you of a recent email you received which provides important information on you obtaining a COVID screening test as part of our return to campus process for all who are either full time on campus or hybrid (i.e. remote and on-campus mixed.)  Many additional details are also provided in the recently released return to campus playbook.  (Hopefully, the football team will get to use their playbook this fall too but I will not speculate on such here.)

Staff employees will receive individual emails from their supervisors in the next few days describing the timing of their return to campus, along with specific instructions for such.

Faculty who are teaching in the Fall will receive a letter (hopefully next week) outlining some important points of preparation to consider.  We have defaulted faculty in our database to restart on site August 3rd, however as most of you are considered hybrid, you may continue to work remotely, if appropriate.

Thanks again for all you do.  I look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Sincerely,

Bill