Keeping you informed

Dear Beach Community:

As we continue navigating through the semester, I want to share important information that I hope will answer certain questions and provide reassurance that our campus is following public health protocols.

Since March 2020 – just prior to CSULB’s move to remote learning – the campus community has been kept informed via comprehensive communications that have included a dedicated website, the ongoing series of OneBeach email messages and videos, articles in Beach Bulletin, and frequent updates provided to student and community news. Throughout it all, our teams have tried to disseminate accurate information in a timely manner.

I am pleased to see that our on-campus student vaccination rate is a remarkable 97%. That means more than 36,000 Beach students have received a COVID-19 vaccine. By any measure, that is a phenomenal number. Of the more than 4,000 faculty and staff at The Beach, close to 75% (more than 3,200) have been vaccinated. Thanks to everyone who has been vaccinated!  I encourage everyone else to get their COVID-19 vaccinations as soon as possible.  

Our vaccination campaign efforts, together with the protocols we established, have helped us avoid transmission in our learning spaces – there have been no classroom clusters on our campus. People who do test positive are not catching the virus from each other in our classrooms, even when someone in their class turns out to be positive. This is the direct result of having a highly vaccinated campus, masking indoors, and catching cases early. 

The university will continue to communicate news related to COVID-19 impacts at The Beach, as well as any information concerning further reunification of the campus. While we continue working closely with public health authorities and are carrying through on established plans, it is important that we acknowledge the uncertainty that we are all dealing with when it comes to this pandemic. No one in campus leadership has ever encountered a situation like this, and our teams have frequently been called upon to make necessary adjustments in real time, improvise where appropriate, and implement “lessons learned” along the way.

All of us are hoping that vaccines and medical-scientific findings will bring the pandemic to an end – soon – but virus mutations/variants, vaccination rates, and shifting public health guidance are difficult to predict. We will continue to experience uncertainty through the run of the pandemic, but I am confident that resilience – a hallmark of our Beach family – will see us through the challenges ahead.  

In closing, I want to urge you again to get vaccinated, to wear a mask wherever required or requested, and to check CSULB’s COVID-19 website for updates and information. Please continue to help each other by doing these things and staying informed.

Thank you. We are OneBeach.

Jane Close Conoley, Ph.D.
President