With colleges closing classrooms and dormitories, high schools suspended for the foreseeable future, SAT testing cancelled, and college admissions decisions delayed on top of the overarching health and safety concerns, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on LGR students is enormous.

Moments like this can make even more stark the inequities in our communities. For students coming from low-income backgrounds and with fewer resources, educational institutions often offer stability, sustenance, and hopeful visions of the future and so the impacts of this crisis may be even greater for them.

We have worked quickly to ensure that all of our students continue to receive services that reflect our traditional content, as well as new resources supporting urgent concerns. Our program is more critical now than ever, as we can offer information, encouragement, and consistency to our 13,000+ students with speed, accuracy and personalization. 

We have a system in place that provides all of the Let’s Get Ready teams – both full-time staff and college student coaches – with the flexibility and tools they need to work from home and ensure students are supported in this critical time:

  • Continuity: 
    • All programs are fully operational on virtual platforms and students will continue to hear from their near-peer coaches with the same depth and frequency.
    • Our Access SAT Prep program is running virtually this summer and student recruitment has already begun. 
  • Information: New resources, responsive to the needs of the moment, are being developed and housed in accessible online resource libraries. Some topics include:
    • mentoring in a time of anxiety 
    • adjusting to online learning 
    • maps to resources related to housing and food insecurity 
    • the latest on updates related to the higher education landscape
  • Expanding real-time support: As always, through our college student coaches, we offer real-time, high-quality, student-centered support, and have taken this to the next level:
    • Adding students to our virtual success program, and ensuring this summer’s virtual support reflects new and dynamic content related to the impact of this city on higher ed decisions
    • Text: we’re expanding our two-way texting platform so all students can ask questions and get real-time answers
    • Phone/video appointments (“office hours”): students can sign up for time slots to work through their questions in real-time with someone at LGR

We know that many of you are dealing with challenges as well. This crisis has touched us all and it will be a truly shared effort to get us through. As a critical member of the Let’s Get Ready community, we hope that YOU are getting all the support and resources you need in this time as well. Please let us know if there is anything we can do.