Jordan Plowman
Lantern Staff
Many students are wondering what is going to happen this summer. Everyday students, and Kansas, get scary numbers and information from the news about COVID-19. At the first signs of trouble, Gov. Laura Kelly enacted Kansas’ stay at home order, which closed Butler Community Colleges campuses after the extended spring break.
Now the question is: will campuses be open for the summer? President Kim Krull rolled out a press release on Thursday, April 23 announcing that classes will be online for the summer semester.
“Butler is announcing its new SummerPlus initiative as a way to give back and encourage students to not let these unprecedented times derail their educational goals and to offer some assistance to those who find they may need to retool for industry,” Rodney Dimick, communications specialist, said. “SummerPlus provides students taking six or more credit hours in the summer 2020 semester with three free credit hours of tuition for the following fall semester.”
The plan is to follow a close format to the regular summer school schedule. Online classes will run as usual with no interruption. Face-to-face and blended classes will be conducted online with the face-to-face interactions conducted through Zoom at the scheduled original scheduled times of interaction.
“We were wanting faculty to have more time to prepare for teaching remotely,” Vice President of Academics Lori Winningham said. “That is one of the reasons we made the decision in early April. The better prepared faculty are, the greater success students should have. We also wanted students to have that information well ahead of the summer.
These last seven weeks have been a sort of a trial run for students who are usually in face-to-face classes. If you have to take a class this summer, Butler Libraries and Archives have also converted to an online platform to help struggling students.
“…a majority of our study materials are online, so look here for journal articles, ebooks, streaming video and tutorials on how to do research: https://www.butlercc.edu/libraries,” Miceala Ayers, director of Library Services, said. “If you want someone to walk you through everything, I suggest either office hours (no waiting on Zoom with our librarians) or one of our tutorials done by Judy (Bastin), our lead instruction librarian here: https://butlercc.libguides.com/jud.”
Gov. Kelly announced that the state would reopen gradually in three phases, the first of which began on Monday, May 4. Winningham said, in an email sent to faculty, administration and staff, that students who are in “Career and Technical area(s)” returned in small numbers “to finish their required face to face learning.” The second phase of Gov. Kelly’s plan will begin on Monday, May 18 and the third phase on Monday, June 1.
