Celebrating our Shenandoah Successes

As schools across the country continue to go all-online, Shenandoah celebrates nearly two months of in-person education. Through the commitment of our students, faculty and staff to uphold the SU Pledge to keep our community safe, along with our strong campus pride and personal responsibility, Shenandoah has experienced so many successes — and we hope to keep this trend going!

When the pandemic hit, Shenandoah was ready. For years, we had a pandemic plan in place. In addition, beginning in January 2020, our Incident Command System Committee composed of administrators and staff met weekly to discuss the virus. Our iMLearning program, which just celebrated 10 years, assured that everyone had the Apple technology they needed as we transferred — quickly and seamlessly — to a virtual learning model in March. Also, nearly 50% of our faculty members already had distance education training prior to 2020. We made no COVID-19-related cuts to benefited faculty and staff in the spring/summer, which translated to a can-do spirit to make the fall semester work. On top of all of this, our strong relationships and our meetings this spring and summer with Valley Health and the Virginia Department of Health helped us plan for potential COVID-19-related scenarios for the fall semester.

And here we are today — surviving and thriving!

If you walk around campus, you might see our Shenandoah Conservatory students and faculty practicing outside, perhaps using our large outdoor tents set up to provide additional classroom spaces or places to hang out and study. Our hybrid learning model, ShenFlex, allows Shenandoah students to learn both in a classroom and over Zoom, and our new Shenandoah Go app keeps our community vigilant, safe, and well-informed with its daily symptom tracker and its ability to distribute information quickly through push notifications, videos, infographics, chats and texts.

Although we are a social campus, we cultivate a culture of care over a party culture. This, in addition to our strict mask and social distancing policy, our SU Pledge, our color-coded Shenandoah Go passes for campus access, and the diligence of our campus health officials, has kept us healthy, safe and able to maintain our in-person operations.

But we didn’t stop there. Shenandoah also:

• Expanded residential student housing by 200+ rooms in as little as six weeks
• Lowered the density in the residential halls, increased the number of single-occupancy rooms with a private bath, and added a new dining space called Buzzins
• Expanded classroom spaces while reducing individual classroom capacity
• Conducted pre-entry testing of more than 1,400 students, including all residential students and a large population of commuter students, upon return to Winchester
• Is performing weekly surveillance testing of 10% of the student population, allowing the university to quickly identify students needing a diagnostic COVID-19 test and then move them to isolation/quarantine rooms that are equipped with food delivery
• Continued to train our student-athletes in a safer manner and began practice for all 22 sports
• Created an extensive set of on-campus signage reinforcing our Pledge To Keep Shenandoah Safe

And most importantly, with the help of everyone at SU, we’ve created a strong culture across the university that takes pride in being a Hornet!

Testimonials

Jonathan Noyalas ’01, M.A. | Director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute

Cade Watts ’21 | Exercise Science, Pre-Athletic training major, public health minor

Amy Sarch, Ph.D. | Associate Provost

Langston McCatty ’21 | Media & Communication major, professional & popular writing minor

Karrin Lukacs | Director of Transformative Teaching & Learning and professor of curriculum & instruction